Jodhpur - If

This was the first time I was consciously rude to someone. In my defense, several factors contributed to this.

1. The night buses always throw you out in the middle of the night about 5 km before the actual terminus, where TukTuk drivers, with whom the bus drivers have a deal, are already waiting for you and you actually have no other option than the overpriced price to accept.

2. Since I'm currently reading Momo and I was more than taken by the situation of the little orphans when she loses all her friends and wished that her time would be taken away from her. On the long bus ride, more than 4,000 km away from my family and friends, I was able to imagine myself in their situation and wished that I had a turtle with me too. Wait a minute, my backpack is my shell and my home, which I always carry with me and is even called Cassiopeia, like Momo's turtle. But he just can't look into the future

3. And last but not least, I heard melancholic film music by Hanz Zimmer while reading, which made me perceive the already strong emotions even more intensely.

So when the bus driver kicked me out early, he asked me if everything was okay and I just walked past him without even looking at him. I've become a real naughty person here. Ok, it wasn't really that bad, but I took away his respect by not paying attention to him! But then an Indian man named Jasper, who at that moment appeared to me as an angel and savior, drove past me on his motorcycle and took me with him to the hostel.

Jodhpur is best known for its Meherangarh Fort and rightly so. This sandstone monster towers over the 500-year-old city and casts a huge shadow on the traditionally indigo-colored houses. With the multiple city walls, city gates, market squares and a huge stepwell, you feel like you are in the 4th century during the heyday of the Persian Empire. The fortress fulfilled every childhood fantasy in which I and my best friend Malte imagined adventurous stories about assassins in Arabia who spectacularly defeated all kinds of dangers and enemies. As I zipped through the fortress, over its ponds and lakes and over the city walls on six different zip lines, I felt the Persian assassin blood flowing in my arteries.

At some point I came out of my fantasy back into reality and marveled at the incredibly detailed decorations of the inner courtyards and asked myself, intimidated, how it was possible that people could build something like that back then, or at all. I wish and still wish that today's architecture would manage to combine functionality and aesthetics more often. The focus on functionality and cost savings doesn't make it easier to view your house as your home. So people prefer to rely on the simplest geometric shapes and place one right angle after the other without ever even considering drawing an arch, engraving plant-like ornaments, letting bay windows protrude, spiral staircases sprouting upwards in a spiral or prefer uneven paving stones to monotonous asphalt. This type of house building forces all of us as individuals to use the interior design skills we possess to compensate for the cold exterior architecture. If only we had slaves like back then, who worked themselves to death on just a building for a small family that ruled with a reign of terror, and used any money that could have been used for the education system or health care of the citizens to build one private swimming pond. Everything used to be better.

Afterwards I walked through a canyon-like rock garden in the blazing midday heat, tried not to let myself be impaled by the huge cacti, admired a palace that was built entirely out of marble and fell unbelievably flat on the couch in the hostel. After a little rest, I went on a city tour with about 10 other backpackers, which ended with a chai on a rooftop at sunset.

The next morning my alarm went off at 6:30 a.m. because I had arranged to meet a Brit to go for a run and he had a great pace! I've never jogged with anyone faster than me, but this northern European was running like lightning. I could barely keep up with him and was gasping for air when we arrived, as if it were my first breath after birth. After exhausting ourselves, we took a short power nap and then we went to a huge stepwell and jumped from a height of 8 meters into the 60 meter deep water reservoir, while Indians filmed us and uploaded them to all social media platforms. Afterwards we went back to the hostel tired and everyone split up.

It was the first day in the last two months that I was bored. Now that I'm writing this, I'm actually thinking to myself that that's a damn good statistic and yet doing nothing at that moment felt so depressing, as if no one had ever been more bored. Since I finished reading Momo the night before, I took a short break from books, my tiredness from the previous day prevented me from philosophizing or studying, the midday heat prevented me from going out, and my sole presence in the hostel prevented me from socially interacting. So I started reading “The Café on the Edge of the World” and after a quick game of chess with the Brit, I hitchhiked to the last place I wanted to see. A very beautiful temple complex where I continued reading and enjoyed the sunset. It was a very quiet day that taught me patience above all and ended on a night train that will hopefully take me to the Thar Desert of India.