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.