July 27. Hitchhiking #2.

Victor has been robbed. They took 2000 dollar from him, he tells us. Now he is on his way to Novosibirsk and beyond to see his family. He travels with an electric guitar and "on the road" is a nice book if you travel by thumb and I pay for his coffee that is cheap anyway. Lot of information in a sentence like that, some ironic distance, some genuine experience, hopefully some of the marches and the sloughs of being too. So, we share a coffee with him. He is a nice guy. But he travels in the opposite direction. We managed to catch a ride quickly, a man with bad teeth and a small calender with barebreasted girls on his dashboard takes us some 200 kilometers further. When we reach his village we say goodbye and have a cup of coffee in another service station. If you think this is gonna be boring, you're wrong. Next thing that happens when we install ourselves thumbs-up on the road again:

A black Audi quattro stops and we get a ride all the way to Ufa. Driver's name is Yuri and he grew up in Siberia. Because of his German ancestry, he was looked down upon and decided to move to Essen. When he comes over with his formidable vehicle, he now gets a lot of respect. The Geman, as he was called in his childhood, has been successful. A black Audi quattro means success, I guess.

A police car pulls us over and asks for a license.

I am sleeping on the backseat, but here's a reconstruction of the conversation.

"A real license please."

-"This is a valid international drivers license."

"No, we need a real license."

-"This is a real one. You can have it."

"Then you have to come to the police station, sir. And pay like 2500 rubles..."

-"...and mention one of you has been drinking?"

"How do you know?"

-"I can smell, I can tell."

"Well, in that case we don't have a problem. Have a nice day sir."

The same policemen are drinking beer at a gas station when we pass later. I am back in Europe, by the way.

July 25. Stalked!

A day in Novosibirsk. We hang out in the park, take photographs of this far-out metropole, and I retreat in the travelers café again to write I don't remember what. As long as what you do is spirited, there are some gods that want you to do it, they say. They? No, alright, I say it.

At night, I get a little lost and walk into a group of people sharing a beer on a bench. A woman with an overdone décolleté decides to show me where I live and buys me a beer. She doesn't know English so my idiomatic poverty in Russian decides the narrowness of our conversational interaction. We talk bullshit. She manages to bring me home and I am grateful. Our host lets her in for a moment, and then we go to the supermarket together where she advises me to buy new socks and a beer or two. I return home with the food and tell the anonymous helper that she can't come over for dinner. She doesn't seem to understand since she keeps inviting me to her place with an ever more pathetic "paschalsta". She rings the doorbell a few hundred times and then we eat in silence. Silence referring not only to the absence of noise but also to my conscience. The night that follows is good; Ralf and I are all excited about the hitchhiking we'll to tomorrow.

July 24. "Labouring" in Siberia.

The train rolled in the Novosibirsk railway station at five am Moscow time. It's three hours later here and the day has definitely started. A short busride takes me to what is designated as the answer to my repeated "centr?" where I hit a coffee place and get organized. I talk to the owner who is from San Francisco and tell him about my traveling. He seems interested and tells me about his faith: Bahia. It sounds nice and he did reduce only some of my aspirations to the matrix of his believe system. To me that is a good sign. Define openness. So, I can work in the "travelers coffee" as the place is called, and manage to contact my couchsurfer Vera. She turns out to be such a nice host, and we have wine at the balcony, overlooking the Soviet housing blocks against a Siberian sunset and listening to Beatles songs we alternately pick. C'est bon.

Movie of the day: Changeling. Another Clint Eastwood-masterpiece, based on the true story of a woman in Los Angeles whose young boy is kidnapped in the 1920s. It was the time of the Death Squads and the LAPD had a bad reputation. The kidnapping case was considered a good means to brush that up and so, when a lookalike child appears, they turn that child over to the mother, posing in front of the press. Of course, the mother immediately recognizes it is not her child, but they simply refuse to believe her. Even the facts that the boy is 3 inches shorter and circumcised don't seem to affect the careerist policeman in charge of the investigation. The mother doesn't give up and eventually is put silent in a mental clinic by decree of a medic who is evidently on police payroll. She is drugged, but the Father of her parish, who has made it a mission to bring the police department to justice, gets her out. I think I have a natural appetite for justice (and I think that is a common human sentiment). So I cry when the movie culminates in the removal of the chief of police and punishment of the corrupt officers. It's a real story, (so) the child is officially never found. The mother has kept hoping for the rest of her life.

July 23. Irkutsk > Novosibirsk

The train from Irkutsk to Novosibirsk. I watch a movie and still my appetite with instant noodles just like all the other passengers I can see since I can't look into the first class waggons where caviar feasts and wodka deliria would shorten subjective travel time for upper class Russians. It is nice though to imagine it. Big cigars, caviar scooped out of emerald inlaid glistering Fabergé eggs, Russian newspapers unread on the beech table, a full ashtray making a rattling sound as it jumps to the rhythm of the train. They are telling each other stories, they are drinking good wine. All this tickles our imagination and behold! in our dreams the Fabergé eggs are greener and bigger and the sturgeon eggs are tastier and everything is brighter in the dreams we dream on the berches. Philosophical aspect of which is that our train needs to drag along a closed waggon with an imaginative upper-class brasserie with some more equal pigs. It provides some weight, prevents derailment, keeps the blood of the ordinary passengers flowing towards hope and hoist their spirits.

A STORY OF HIGH SCIENCE FICTION, CHEESY TO SOME, THRILLING TO MOST

It is the year 4976 and mankind is still stuck on planet earth. We are nearly 3000 years in the Cryocene but we are still waiting for our major breakthrough. It seems that it will take a lot more millenia before we can develop the technology to leave this solar system and colonize another one. We just have to wait. That's what wise men have told us over and over again, but many brave youngsters have acted with vigorous decisiveness - and failed. Most of them died in space as near as Saturn. It was such a waste. You know that dying has been abolished in the Cryocene. Risking your life was supposed to be something typically human, and many still find something appealing about it. I couldn't tell. Not that I'm not human, I just don't risk my life because I know. I know what will be the only possible way for mankind to survive.

We have 15 billion minds now, about as much as at the beginning of the Cryocene. Most people freeze when they turn forty. The body is still healthy then and relatively easy to preserve. There are discounts for it if you freeze with forty. Anyway, the problem I see is that the waiting is going to be hard. How can we preserve our humantiy, not only our flesh? Boredom has attacked some three centuries ago and it ressembled the black death, spreading rapidly and driving many towards suicide. You know who I am, don't you? The great-great-etcetera grandson of Aldous Huxley. I am working on a special program to tackle the problem of boredom. We will create some kind of garden and raise two human beings there, Edam and Gouda. When they have reached the reproductive age we will try to seduce them with cryotechnology and eternal life. I am very interested in what their reaction might be. Will they reject it out of some sort of reverence of their garden lifes? Will they happily accept it? And above all: will they develop a sense of "sin" when they do accept it? O god, this is so exciting...