Leap, and the net will appear.

John Burroughs

The dark lager felt a bit too much on the light side and the soup’s flavor was missing one of its basic attributes – flavor. But it didn’t matter. The waitress was cute, with curly hair and sharp, brown eyes, the interior of the bar was emitting a nice buzz, a lovely, bassy hum, as it slowly began to fill up with customers, and I had plenty of space and time to jot down my thoughts.

My body felt tired and cold as I spent the whole afternoon walking around the city. With approximately -15 degrees Centigrade, the whole city felt like a place made to walk – including its rivers and ponds. With everything frozen up, the city felt extremely calm. Old couples were taking strolls. Kids were playing in the snow. The rest of the city was sporadically filled with random residents, shopping for groceries, walking around, and just doing “their stuff”.

One part of the city that left the largest impression on me was the Angara river. Only few steps and 3 groups of Chinese tourists away from the Memorial Lenin Order of the Irkutsk region, the river was flowing slowly, calmly, not caring much about anyone or anything.

The water was extremely cold and the water moved in a lazy, oozy way, simulating how vodka flows if put into a freezer. Huge ice shards were occasionally sticking out their heads from the icy water, as if looking up for a second, saying “Cheers mate”, and then sinking back into their worlds (of half-frozen vodka, as I vividly imagined).

After freezing to the core of my bones, I ended up in this bar – one of many fancy places in the 130 Kvartal, a recently developed area of the city. I finished the beer and the lukewarm soup and went straight back to the hostel.

Tomorrow I wanted to go to the Baikal lake and the local bus was leaving early in the morning. A cute girl, working as a receptionist at the hostel, gave me some tips on how to get there, what to see there, and what to eat there.

I was looking forward to spend some time at the lake, doing nothing but eating omuls (local fish) and reading my trusty Dostoyevsky.

I arrived at my room and said hi to my new Russian roommate (who responded with a quiet “Hmm”, without looking up from his smartphone). I packed my things into a medium-sized tote bag I stole from my friend back in Genève the other day, and laid down on the bed – just in time with ~6 hours of sleep in front of me.

I tried to sleep, but the piercing lights of the extremely strong halogen lights kept piercing through my eyelids, right into the brain. I got up and tried to find a switch without any success. I asked my new Russian friend about the light and he replied with one word, without even looking up from his phone:

“Automatično“.

Right.

I laid down and curled to the darkest corner of my bed.

After lying still for maybe 15 minutes, the light was still turned on.

I asked my roommate again: “Automatično?”

He, too, seemed like he wanted to go to sleep. Obviously being the more cold-resistant inhabitant of the room, he stood up without saying a word. He, too, couldn’t find the switch inside of the room. But he took a more resolute approach to the solution – he went to the corridor, and after maybe 2 minutes, I heard a distant “KATCHICK” sound. Just that sound that could be produced by a main light switch.

Just that sound that turns off the lights on the whole floor.

The roommate returned back to his bed and almost immediately fell asleep.

I was grateful. With the room completely encompassed in darkness, all I could now hear was my breath and three extremely drunk men that started to vigorously talk in the the next room.

Their voices were piercing through the walls and wouldn’t stop. I contemplated the possibility of waking up and kindly asking them to keep their voices down, but I decided to take up the Chinese wu-wei – the principle of gaining enhanced control of human affairs by non-doing, letting the world have its own way. Yeah, that’s just a different way of saying that I was a lazy piece of shit that didn’t want to harass and be harassed by three drunk men and therefore decided to do nothing.

Nevertheless, the three voices in the next room slowly started to build up on intensity, having a degrading effect on my wu-weiness.

I decided to turn non-doing into doing and it felt strangely good. In my life so far I always behaved like a chicken – constantly running away from conflicts, always trying to evade any potential encounters like this. Yet now I almost wanted something to happen. The righteous rage inside of me started to burn with a warm, pleasant flame.

I stood up, went to the corridor (lit weakly by an emergency light) and banged three times on the door of the 3 voices.

For a second, everything went silent.

Juicy expressions, prepared in my head, were hoping to be dumped on whoever would open the door.

And there the person came – I heard steps, approaching the door.

I heard a hand, touching the door handle.

I heard the hinges, squeaking as the door slowly opened.

And then I saw a small Mongolian guy. He stepped out carefully to the dimly lit corridor, looked up into my eyes, smiled shyly, took my hand into his, and started to shake it with a cheerful:

“здравствуйте.” (Hello)

He must have seen my eyebrows raising to the top of my forehead, because he stopped shaking my hand. I opened my mouth, but all I could do is to produce a soft “Shhh.” sound with a finger on my lips.

The Mongolian man bowed a few times, and smiled at me again with a weak “Sorry”.

I turned around and went back to my bed. With complete silence and darkness encompassing my puzzled mind, I couldn’t help but fall but contemplate about the absurdity of this lovely world.