"A fresh married couple has to eat 16 kg of salt together"

This is a russian saying and the last two weeks we were feeling like that. Emotions go up and down. The number of problems sometimes increased to 5 in parallel. Some of these problems had to be solved simultaneously. Most of the time I was concentrated on "trying" to solve these problems, while writing the Blog had lowest priority. Without the group of people of around 20 people all of this would have been impossible. Some are translating, some ask friends for information about the problems, and others invite us to a weekend at the Dascha of their grandmother to relax. All in all I have to say that most people we met are really nice and kindly. I would always do this journey again and there is no reason of not coming to Russia. Since we are "famous" now due to the TV reports, which we used to contact the "Mafia" guys, a lot of people recognise us at the street. They feel sorry for us and wish we can find the car back. They always ask if we got it back and say sorry even it is not their fault. One day Kotomi got a toy dog just from a guy at the market, just to cheer her up. He even called later asking if everything is fine and to say sorry again even it is not his fault. He gave us the advice that we also could go to church because it can not make it worse but maybe it helps.


Some people thinking/saying now: "I told him before that Russia is a dangerous place". But I feel it is non sense. You could go nowhere with this opinion. In our case there were some circumstances which let it happen that the car was stolen. But this can happen in Germany, in Italy, in Spain .... too. I know a lot of people which had the same problem in Europe too. The main problem is that status symbols are very important in our world. It is important to have a big shiny car including the cool half naked shiny girl. If you drive a Niva or other Russian car, you are a Nobody. Of course this is one of the reasons our car was stolen because it fits in the category big and luxury! For me the Land Cruiser was just the thing with the 4 wheels which make it possible for me to cross especially Mongolia or other remote regions. Here also every 3rd car is a Land Cruiser but they look like as they were never used in Offroad. Open window, techno music, young, dynamic, beautiful is the motto. At my everyday morning run or walk to the police to get one more paper for the immigration office or the custom office or.... I had to walk through the busy shopping street of Irkutsk. Every shop puts loudspeaker at the street and attacking you with that music. For me that culture which is imported is the embodiment of aspiring towards this fu*** status symbols. I know this is a world wide phenomenon but still I really starting to get pissed off when running through these streets. Thousands of mobile and clothing shops; you get the feeling that this world is build on mobiles, cars and naked girls. Fortunately this are "only" 80 % of the people, where the other 20% we meet in the country side and are the people from Irkutsk which are helping us.

The problems we had and still partially have I do not want to discuss now here at this public place since it may made things more complicated. I will explain it later. For now it seems we buy soon another car. It will be a 4WD Russian UAZ bus. But the ping pong game between the different offices, with different opinions between offices or even betweens the today’s and tomorrow’s opinion of a person will finally decide if we can go on or not. Coming back to the 16 kg of salt, I feel it makes us stronger and both of us are feeling that we do not want to finish this journey with this last impression of the stolen car. So keep in touch with the Blog to see if we can overcome this unfortunate happening.