October 20. Flying over Europe.

Up Early. The bus to Heathrow operates timely, in the huge terminal five there are no complications. The flight is comfortable and comes with a lot of smiles and a 187,5 ml bottle of Ceyraz. I read the in-flight magazine, the featured article about a Brit riding his bike across the Netherlands and reporting his adventures in a smooth and eloquent word soup, the vermicelli of which I have to look up in a dictionary. I gaze out of the window (there is no child this time whom I can offer my window seat to) my head pressed against the warm plastic and recorded a moment of happiness as French pastures, winding rivers, a soft blanket of clouds and Swiss Alpine peaks pass underneath me.
The steel bird lands, an hour later I walk out of the airport with a visa and a stamp, take a commuter train into the city and find my way to the internet, that digital nipple I so insatiably and incessantly suck. The sky is already dark when I finally find a nice café with a friendly staff and a wireless connection. The Istanbul night begins and my most important life lesson is to take. An emergency couch request works out and Mehmet comes to pick me up. He is one of the friendliest guys I've ever met.

August 25. Owl to Athens.

On the road again. You know I have a tendency to overdo things, and so when I say I am flying to a place where it is hot I really mean it - I fly to Athens, where wildfires sadly devour large areas and have reached suburbs. Prime minister Karamanlis has declared the state of emergency. The feeling of being a traveler comes back to me as soon as I get on the plane and I'm heading somewhere. Saved I am for now, from the depressing context that my Berlin situation imposes on me. Saved and aware of a weakness I need to get rid of. At the airport they find the pocket knife and the bottle of sunscreen I had forgotten to take out of my hand luggage, and those things are of course confiscated. I protest and insist that they put them on display with a little note "zum verschenken" (to give away) attached to it. That way I don't feel bad about it. I do feel bad however about the way I reacted, telling the woman to "take everything she wants" because I am pissed off. Where is the Buddhist calmness I want to command (I'm not saying that calmness is the ultimate wisdom, I am just saying it is a pretty asset to have it at our command). But there is always a next time to put more of the white clay of wisdom on your face.

The flight is good, as is seeing my friend again after a few perhaps defining years. We celebrate and smile and say goodnight to Athens.

February 20. Rio

That day, Jack decides to go to Rio de Janeiro for the Carnival. It's very famous down there. He comes to me in the morning, all excited about it, says he would dance all night and drink juicy beverages and make love to the Brazilian women. I say Jack you know what? I'm coming with you.

I'm on an airplane typing with all comforts a human being could possibly want. Except for shaving foam, perhaps. In the in-flight magazine I read an interview with Penelope Cruz who enjoyed working with Woody Allen, and saw some ads for hair implants. Dubai, New York. Honolulu. If you're rich enough, you can implant 9000 hairs at once on your semi-bald skull. 9000 hairs on that head or 9000 kilos of rice during a famine, you choose. It's marvelous, our freedom to choose. I sit between a Greek manager with yellow-white hair and a Brazilian drummer, I stretch my legs. The taste of coffee, red wine and chicken remain on my palate. The engines roaring steadily, 3625 miles from the destination. People walk around, they do their exercises, go to the lavatory which is almost constantly occupied. If you fly business class, you can choose from three lavatories. You probably get wet towels too. I don't care. 528 miles per hour, above the Atlantic, heading southwest. Time difference to Madrid: four hours. The stewardesses are riding the carts through the aisle and ask: pasta o pollo? It has to go fast, but not everybody understands. Portuguese and Spanish seem to have some understanding difficulties. The stewardess, miss Garcia, explained eloquently what was for lunch: "toktoktok". Pollo o pasta. They say the Brazilian women whistle at gringos, that they love white blonde boys. The pharmacologist warned me for them, said I should use you know what. I've never been in Brazil before. I'm excited about it. I take pollo.

We should never give up on each other. If you are unable to see a spark of human hope behind our masks, a blinking spark of the most vital of our drifts, then it's your blindness, not the other's failure.

Jack has fallen asleep. He probably forgot about Rio, so I can surprise him when we arrive. I'll just wake him up and tell him where he is. He'll be excited again. It's a very comforting thought that you can always surprise Jack. His naive excitement is the best veil you will get to temporarily envelop your loneliness.

Flushing a toilet in the Airbus 340 is loud like hell. I check and double-check that I didn't throw my belongings in there. Have to keep everything on you. With my faits accomplis, my hands washed, and the sweat wiped from my long elvenhair, I push the blue button. A little hole opens and something sucks in my excrements with a load growling noise, like a rusty sledgehammer paired with a pre-war vacuum cleaner. The brusque noise lasts for about five seconds, then everything is silent again. It's not loud enough to make your ears hurt. The contents of the toilet bowl are sucked into the unknown interiors of the jet or are they flying through the air, making their way down towards the wild ocean that will swallow them like anonymous clumps of dry sand.

Tonight, I shall dance.

***

And I did dance that night. But it took me a couple of hours to get from the airport to the place I was staying. Arrival in Rio was all good. In the airport I saw a few tourists, British I guess, waiting for their bags next to the transport belt. The man said to his wife
"This is always the worst part of traveling."
These twenty minutes of waiting in an air-conditioned hall with tax-free luxury shopping and toilets with as much handsoap as you want right next to it? These twenty minutes they wait, then they get their bags and off to the hotel they go. This is the worst part? I can cope with that. But to be honest, I don't want to. I want the worst part to be eaten alive by musquitos, getting robbed, falling from a cliff and breaking your legs, getting seriously ill and spend three weeks in a hospital bed without tv, those kind of things. It has something to do with feeling alive and stuff, but everybody has its own taste when it comes to feeling alive.

I shared a taxi ride with a British woman who was very friendly but the hotel she stayed in was not at all near the place of Mr. Modeste, the name of the couch surfer I would be staying with as the taxi driver said, so I asked and they said I had to take bus 497 and a bunch of carnival people with a green and a blue wig came running after me and gave me some money for the bus and I walked down the street to the bus stop on my way there was a bar where some people danced Samba and I gazed at it and it made me happy I still had my big backpack on my back and my thick orange jacket I wore also on my visit to the Arctic Circle, and the sweat was squeezed through my epidermis, so I walked on to the bus stop but there was no bus 497 a police officer helped me and asked some bus driver who let me on for no fee I had to switch the bus in Gloria. Gloria! The policeman didn't speak English but some party people helped me because I am a very funny appearance. So the bus took me to Gloria and I waited for another bus that took me to Largo machado again some bus company operator let me in for free, so I still had my three Reais I felt like god wanted to confront me with my frugality, with a dark side of me that can't stop thinking about money. I don't buy new socks I turn them around so the hole is on my ankles instead of on my heel; what would Jack thing of that? I don't care what Jack things. From the square that was crowded with people I had to walk another mile and finally I arrived at the casa of Mr. Modeste, who lives with a cat and is a very friendly host, so I could take of my clothes and take a shower and get rid of my clothes that were all wet from perspiration. I transformed into someone else, I was tranquillo and less ego-centered again. Perhaps the Redeemer helped me out. It doesn't have all the bravura to match Jack's genius of self-transformation, but I can still be proud of it.

All new I introduced myself to the traveler girls who were also staying with Mr. Modeste. We went out together, it was crowded everywhere and we drank and danced all night long. Rio is almost on the Tropic of Capricorn. It gets dark very early and the sun rises very early this time of the year.

See this Flickr-page for photos of Rio.

Katowice to the Netherlands

Finally, a bus picked us up and drove to the Polish border. Border control took about two hours, they really took their time. But I didn't care, because they played a movie on the in-bus television screen. It was a Russian remake of the action movie "commando" (1985), called "День Д"(Day D), brainless entertainment.
It took only a few more hours to Katowice, where I arrived at 3am Polish time. A very unfriendly man sent me away when I asked to stay in the small bus station's waiting room. Shame on him, one week before Christmas. So I walked to the "Katowice" hotel, an ugly highrise near a roundabout, and the concierge let me stay in the lobby. I sat down on the decent yellow sofa and almost fell asleep. As my dozing was noticed, he tickled my shoulder and told me that I could stay there, but not sleep. I didn't want to torture myself trying to stay awake, and at about 7:30 I left the building. In a cafe, after a roll and a cup of coffee, I woke up and started my day. They let me leave my backpack there until noon, and I walked the city of Katowice, which was, as my host later affirmed, quite uninteresting. Streets, a cemetery, concrete buildings from the eighties. After picking up my backpack I spotted a man with a violin under a viaduct. His awful howling (he really couldn't play) mixed with the traffic tumult and I decided to ask him if I couldn't play a little. So he gave me his violin, and old instrument which wasn't bad at all, and I started playing Beatles, Bach, Vivaldi, Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Smetana, and some Christmas carols (he had some scores written on paper). I enjoyed it a lot, and played for about two hours. Many people donated and a little dream had come through for me: helping an unable vagabond musician with making money. He liked to give me something, though, and I walked away with 10 sloties and a bar of chocolate.
I had a simple meal in the centre and met my couchsurfing host, Maja, whom I could connect to immediately, and we got involved in a good conversation that lasted until very late that night, and cheered us up, to the extent that Maja thought she would die laughing, and I replied "Well, than I write on my blog: Since my host had passed away the next morning, I had to find my way to the station all by myself, which was not easy." We had the same macabre sense of humor.

The next morning I got up at six and went to the airport. There was nothing to worry about, it was all too easy, and I wrote a few lines over a good cup of coffee in the departure building. The flight to Eindhoven was two hours. I decided to hitchhike to Tilburg, where my dad lives, and believe me, that was very, very easy. The first driver who stopped at entrance road of the highway A2 took me with her, and I arrived eary afternoon. I started to walk home and by coincidence saw my dad in his SUV - I was just in time to go buying a Christmas tree together...

Kiev to Lviv

After visiting the beautiful Crimea, I took the night train back to Kiev, where I spent a few more days writing and hanging out with very kind Ukraineans. My plan was to go hitchhiking to the Netherlands to celebrate Christmas with my family. Since I had good experiences fetching a ride up north, I thought it would be easy to get back west. But it was cold and rainy, and Bratislava, Vienna, and the other potential cities on my way wouldn't be so attractive this time of the year, and neither would the Carpatian and Tatra mountains. So I checked the internet and found a cheap flight from Katowice to Eindhoven (40 km from my family), with Wizz air, Hungary's cheap airline, and decided to go.

I had to take an overnight train to Lviv first, which left at 23:58 and arrived there at 10:30 in the morning. It cost me about 8 €. That night was the first time that I met no other people on the train, and just took the provided linen out of the plastic and laid my head down on the upper bunk bed, as always. Couldn't sleep though, and was quite tired when I arrived in Lviv.

Lviv (Lvov in Russian) is an interesting city. It used to be Polish, but

I walked around; the center was near the classicist train station, and I had the impression that a Russian town was blended with and a Polish settlement. Some houses reminded me of Krakow and Gdansk, the parks and boulevards (the main Prospekt) were just like their counterparts in Russia's metropoles. I didn't have much time though, to explore this interesting city, because I had to take the Mashrutka to the avtoboksal (autobus station). Fellow travelers: it takes about 40 minutes and you might have to wait for a less crowded bus, so take your time. The bus to Katowice was late, and I had a conversation about the family of an older Ukrainean couple, that could have been taken right from my Russian coursebook. They went to visit their daughter who was a medic in Edinburgh. Yes we share the same world.