Being in Romania! We are still driven.

The nights continue to be cold, the tent is always wet in the morning and also otherwise the lack of hygiene takes some getting used to. The skin sticks from sweat, salt and dust. The clothes hardly dry and we wear our click shoes for what feels like 14 hours a day. No perfume or any good-smelling creams are of any use. The worry that we won’t be able to cope with this kind of dirt any more is growing. And yet, in the evening, stretching out our limbs in our cosy tent on the sleeping mats and fluffy sleeping bags makes us forget all that.

We wake up with the smell of grass in our nostrils, hear deer communicating with each other around us, see the blue sky in the morning and the rising sun… the first steaming coffee or tea before we get down to work… dry the tent, pack the sleeping mats and sleeping bags. Air the sleeping clothes, go to the „bathroom“, have a little muesli, pack everything back on the bikes and off we go. One last check and the place we leave looks as if we had never been there.

We only pass Hungary for 2 days on our way from Slovakia to Romania.

We notice no change, except that in Slovakia the Euro is the means of payment, whereas in Poland it was the Zloty was and in Hungary it is now the Forint.

We are glad that it is so easy to cross borders that are made, regulated and constantly changed by people. What a luxury.

A utopian intention to negotiate a world without borders? Close to the border, perhaps, the inhabitants have their roots in the other country? In the 19th century, most borders could be crossed freely and without papers. Progress was pushed back by national sentiments and 2 world wars. Closed borders one of the greatest moral failures of our world?

Through digitalization we are globally connected, have friends in the countries we travel to and are happy to share in their lives and views of the world.

Spreading our sleeping places around our planet is one of the most beautiful things we can do. Sleeping places mean rest, safety, a lifeline and an oasis of well-being, no matter where we are in the world.

Our blood pressure drops, the body has time to recover, the mind processes things we have experienced or builds new stories. For which people beyond which country borders should this be different?

We see the world as an entity of clearly demarcated countries. But if we look at the infrastructure, we would hardly notice the borders. Infrastructure connects people, their resources and ideas, financial resources and capital. How is a “border” supposed to stop that?

How we can get used to a borderless world may take time, but we can work on it by, for example, no longer imagining the world as a construct of state lines but as a network. A networked world instead of a divided one.

Can you recognize which green meadow or forest was in Germany, Hungary, Slovakia or Romania?

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