My friends took me to the bus station at 6 am. I guess we were all a bit tired:

The smile is fake, I felt sad to leave them.

Besides that, I didn’t really enjoy the idea of having to sit on a bus for the next 15 hours:

I hate bus rides, I hate bus rides, I hate bus rides:

We rumbled along, and Russia just flew by:

There was a stop once, and as I staggered out of the bus, I noticed something terrible:

I hadn’t visited a single one of the great orthodox churches during my month in Russia:

Damn!

…

Then we reached the border:

I was told not to take any pictures, but hey: fuck ‘em, right?

You see, the custom inspection went really smooth for everyone, except for me of course. I figured this was either because they had never seen a German here before, or because I had adopted that certain fuck ‘em attitude.

Will we ever know?

So I ended up staring at this note on the wall for quite a long time, while some important people were looking over my documents:

Mesmerizing.

…

And then suddenly, like a cherry stone being spit into the summer air, I landed in China:

…

I was the last one to get back on the bus, and it was only then that I realized that the bus driver dudes had added a couple of more passengers, so that I didn’t have a seat anymore:

Great.

When we stopped at our next destination, I wandered around for a little while…

…and when I returned, we suddenly decided that almost all passengers were back on board, so we might as well get going again.

ALMOST all passengers.

There had been a Chinese lady and her little child who were missing. We just drove off with their stuff, leaving them there:

That leopard bag sat there for the rest of the way, while I was wondering about what the lady and the child would do when they came back only to realize that the bus was gone. Would they say fuck ‘em, too?

But hey, at least now I had a seat.

…

When I got to 哈尔滨 (Harbin) in the evening, my connecting train to 长春 (Changchun) was already gone. I had missed it by 20 minutes and was pretty mad.

Food usually helps against my bad temper, so I went and got some fries at the KFC:

When I got on the next train a few hours later, I was quite surprised though – there I was, surrounded by some of the nicest people ever! We chatted away for the next three hours, talking about totally meaningful stuff and making ridiculously meaningless jokes, and then we finally gathered for a group picture to immortalize this epic train ride:

It was good, very good.

When I got to 长春, I was pretty exhausted though:

I was going to stay at a friend’s house there, and we had originally made great dinner plans, but since it was already so late we just got a burger at Macky D, I took a half-assed picture of a nameless lake by the road, and then we finally crashed at his apartment:

Do I really remember myself whispering the words fuck ‘em when I finally fell asleep in my friend’s living room that night?

There was more traveling to come in the morning.

Soundtrack: Angry Samoans – “Ballad Of Jerry Curlan”