When I arrived again pretty exhausted after a night drive, I was more than welcomed into my hostel and enjoyed my more or less cool shower. I've never been to a hostel where I felt as comfortable as I did there. The employees were just messing around and when we realized our shared love for Pink Floyd, other old rock classics, but also so many other styles of music, we could actually have opened an air band, as often as we did, like crazy people, Syd Barrett on the guitar imitated. They helped you with everything and were just so correct. But so do most other backpackers.
Before, I always associated North Goa with partying and beaches and nothing else and that may be true to some extent, but it is so much more. The place simply exudes a relaxation that is unique and led to me staying three nights longer than planned.
I then met two Germans that I had previously met about 300km south and we fell into each other's arms, laughing. I then spent most of my time with them and many more. When I sewed Jana's backpack because a strap had broken, she was as grateful and happy as a child who gets a voucher for Phantasialand. You actually spend the day lying on the beach or in the hostel. Then you go out for something to eat and play table tennis and chess until you can't do it anymore and that's it. And yet no one got bored and I don't know how.
One evening we actually went out to party to experience a legendary Goarave for once in our lives. Unfortunately, since we were there two weeks before the season, we more or less had to abandon it and went to another club that was recommended to us. The music was Bollywood pop and I've never been to such a bad party :D the DJ asked the crowd to follow him with an enthusiastic "put your motherf*cking hands up" every 30 seconds and always stopped each song every 40 seconds , so you're probably supposed to sing along to karaoke. But since it was so frequent, I had the feeling that his internet was giving up or that he didn't have a license to play the songs and therefore only played parts. The white girls were being out-danced like bananas by the primate-like men and my urge to vomit, caused by toxic masculinity, was threatening to begin. How can you be so desperate to misinterpret the mood of your counterpart or ignore it? I still made the best of it and danced as hard as I could until a cover of Justin Bieber's "Baby" came on. Then it was finally over for me and I longed for the good techno on the dance floors of Cologne and Berlin. What would I have given at that moment to be in Sisyphus or Odonia with my friends. By the way, entry for women who didn't have to follow a dress code cost the equivalent of €4, while men had to follow thousands of dress code components and pay a stunned €40. That was such a bad club. Luckily the people I was there with were very correct and then made up for it.
On the beach we played Frisbee and ran back and forth, totally exhausted, while Indians running past filmed these raging travelers. In the evening we watched the Cricket World Cup, in which the political tensions between India and Pakistan were played out, and played city, country, river, reason for separation, food and place to have sex for a long time.
The last evening was probably the craziest. Quite spontaneously we decided to go to a casino on a luxury ship... Just to do it once. As we went through two security checkpoints, we boarded a boat which then took us to the actual boat and when we arrived I experienced an India that was the opposite of the India I had gotten to know in the last three weeks. Abundance, megalomania, nudity, capitalism, greed for money despite (or through) financial prosperity and loss of reality. It was an absolutely fun evening and I'm super happy I did it, but from second one I noticed that I didn't feel comfortable there. While the half-naked women dressed in frilly costumes danced artfully and sensually, rich Indians played €500 on the red 3, lost and immediately continued without moving. We all played with €25 worth of chips and I lost mine pretty quickly at roulette. However, since I was already prepared to spend €25 on this experience and I didn't think in any way about the fact that I could keep any of it or even get more out of it, I was as indifferent to the loss as it could have been . Maybe it even made me happy because I associate the casino more with loss than with profit and so my expectations were met even more. That evening I also ate more than I had in a long time at the all you can eat buffet and drank more virgin piña coladas than a normal person should drink. I left North Goa with sadness. The coming Mumbai scares me a little with its 26 million inhabitants and I believe that my battery, which I charged in Goa, will discharge very quickly there.
