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Showing posts with label Ufa. Show all posts.

July 28. Hitchhiking #3.

Back in Europe. We try to catch a ride to Samara, Kazan, or all the way to Moscow. It has been enough for me. The 23-year old I am hitching with naturally takes the lead and decides what we do without asking me. I like him, but there is something missing. Why do I care? It is not power that I want, it is not respect that I want. I care because what I want is being perceived as...? No, that's not it. I have other things to do and I'd love to find out what. I need to go on, my road leads to harsh places. I feel it now. I feel who I need to be. How does that sound? Pretty decisive, huh? But in life sometimes people are disappointed and decisiveness melt like snow on an overheated planet. It can be just a short conversation like:
"I want to breath my last breath between your breasts"
-"Your last breath ain't worth shit."
and the meter falls to zero. I must stop now: even the virtually infinite amount of space the internet offers doesn't justify this. It goes on and on, and you read a sentence like How friends form strong knots in the cloth of meaning we drape around our world. Is that what you are waiting for? Impotent metaphores, language that wants to be strong but instead drags itself like a lame donkey from comma to comma. Meaning gets lost before that donkey can reach a period or even a semicolon. I like that picture of the crippled old donkey marching along on the trail of sentences, I mean it's kind of lively don't you think. You can almost hear and smell the donkey dung. But that imagination cannot be too lively, or we would be facing a contradiction right here. You might think whatever at this point. And I did it, I did make you yawn didn't I?

Long story short. We get stuck in Ufa for seven hours, it seems impossible to get a ride. I take the train from Ufa to Moscow after having tea with a young father who is studying in a nearby city.

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.
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