It was an unusual travel company, for sure. There was a guy from one of those desert countries that has, by now it seems, been eternally stricken by misfortune. War, terrorism and corruption seem to be everyday occurrences there. The guy himself seemed to be very calm; a strange juxtaposition you see very often with people from those environments. The other guy came from the total opposite side of the world, from a country filled with jungles. Those jungles in turn were filled with statues of meditating people. In his country, peace seemed to be eternal. Maybe religion did play a role in how peaceful countries were, after all. He himself came from one of the Nordic countries, quite similar to the one they now found themselves in, although that would be something he would never admit to. In any case, he probably felt best at ease in this country. His friends still required some adaptation.

            The reason they went travelling was simple, but strange, in his eyes. A virus had shown up, and at the moment it appeared to be nothing more than a stronger variant of the flu. Public life was being disrupted everywhere, however. Universities had stopped their work, museums were closed, all public events were cancelled and even cinemas were not going to work for at least a month. The three of them had received an email that told them that all activities that they were supposed to take part in were cancelled for that month. They were told not to treat this as a holiday, which is why they did exactly that.

They boarded a train north, to the sea. It was a six-hour train ride, and they had a compartment all to their own. It took more than six hours in the end, of course. The trains in this country wait for other trains in small villages, giving the traveller an opportunity to look at the real side of this constructed thing called a nation, even if it’s just through the train window at the platform of a station.

            In those waiting stations, time seemed to pass differently than when the train was moving. It felt differently. Maybe it was because he saw other people waiting at the station.

            During the train ride, he listened to music and he tried to read. His friends were on their phones the whole time, missing out on the train ride itself, which for him was part of the experience. More than that, it’s six hours of your life. You don’t want to waste them watching a screen, do you? It seemed to him that nowadays, most people do, however. True, he also used his phone a lot. He also got tired of the ride at times and then he just really wanted to be distracted. And that’s where those addictive phones were really good at, distracting people from the real world.

            The landscape that passed by through the windows was similar the whole journey through. Flatlands filled with an occasional village flashed by, containing houses that seemed to be an exact copy of the houses found in the country’s big western neighbour. At moments like this he didn’t really understand why different countries existed in the first place. Don’t we all want the same? Whether you’re from one place or whether you were born 500 kilometres to the right or left of that place, what’s the difference? The train didn’t wait for his ponderings, it kept going until the landscape started to change ever so slightly. He wasn’t sure, but he always had the idea that you could feel you were getting closer to the sea.

Their hostel was chaotic. There was one guy taking care of all new arriving guests, and it was clear he couldn’t cope with it all. While guests stood at the reception desk, the doorbell would ring, and he wouldn’t care about the person standing outside until the ringing became incessant.

Observing the hostel was an activity he did with pleasure. Every new guest that arrived, had a reservation, as is usual in some hostels. When he and his friends arrived, they told the guy at the reception that, indeed, they had a reservation, and they were let in and shown around. That is, until the doorbell rang and the receptionist had to run off again. The other guests that arrived also had reservations. At least that’s what they told the guy at the reception desk. He however, couldn’t for the love of it find their reservations. Only after a lot of talking, with the guests slowly raising their volume and indignation, and after some phone calls by the receptionist with his boss, things seemed to be settled. This process he had witnessed about three, four times. In the meantime, the dog of the hostel owner happily sniffed around the legs of the new guests, some of them frighteningly shuffling away, some of them playing with the dog, happy with this distraction from administrative issues. He sat and watched, like he always did.

He felt at home, at sea. His country and his people were defined by their eternal fight with the sea. It was their natural environment, they had used it to grow rich, after which that same sea had also showed them how destructive its forces could be. It was a lesson in dignity and they had come to respect the sea. So far, the sea appeared to be content.

The city they had travelled to was located at the sea. Its past was difficult, it changed ownership more than a couple of times and it had been completely destroyed in the all-encompassing war that had destroyed almost everything in this country. It was completely rebuilt, so that it looked new, almost too new, and it attracted hordes of tourists every year. The virus, set to disrupt society again in this country, gave the city an eerie atmosphere. Streets were empty, and the weather was cruel this time of the year. A sharp cold wind pierced the empty streets, battering the few tourists that still dared to go out.

Their desert friend wasn’t fond of this type of weather and decided to stay put in the hostel. They couldn’t judge him for this. He and his other friend did dare to take the streets, and he enjoyed it. At one point during their explorations of the city, it started raining, and literal showers of rain and wind poured down on them. It reminded him of home, a place he didn’t see so often. Probably everyone in his country hated those rainshowers and wind, but he loved them, especially at moments like this. Boats lined the river that ended up in the sea, and although the sea was actually still quite far away, he felt its presence. Somehow, sea meant movement, setting out into the world. A river that ended up in a sea stood in connection with that movement.

Another reason he felt connected to the city was the architecture. It so happened to be that a lot of his fellow countrymen decided to move into this city during the late middle ages, bringing with them their characteristic architecture. At times, he felt he actually was in his home country, so similar were some of the buildings. Walking around the city, he felt that his people brought in parts of their spirit alongside the architecture.

            His jungle friend came from a country that was surrounded by sea as well, which was why he probably also enjoyed the city. Together, they explored the depths of the city. Their desert friend spent most of his time in the hostel, only coming out to eat with them every once in a while.

They made a trip to a different city, located more directly at sea. This city was special on its own, again for architectural reasons. It consisted of big buildings in pastel colours, reminiscent of gray communist buildings, but these were built before that force took over and presented a modernist style. The city was built in the rare time when the country was free of foreign occupation, which meant that its architecture represented more than just a building style: it showed the country’s independence. The whole inner city was protected because of this reason. It was in this city that they saw the gray sea directly, and where they looked out over its vastness. While standing on a platform overlooking the sea, he heard the wind singing through sailboats. He started thinking about the differences between sea towns across the world. When most people thought about a sea town, they probably had hot towns with nice white beaches in mind, where cocktails were for grabs. A palm tree wouldn’t be an anomaly in this picture. The town they were in at that moment most likely didn’t come to the mind of people. He liked sun, and he liked warm water, but strangely enough he liked the town they were in better than one of those tourist-crammed cities at the southern seas. The atmosphere was different. The sea was different. The weather was tough here, rough, probably the days where cold wind was blowing vastly outnumbered the days when the sun broke through the broken clouds. The people were different. Everything was interconnected in this regard, and he felt he was too. This city was smaller than their previous destination, and it had less tourists. It was probably boring, but it was real. Here, the sea could be felt in every street. There wasn’t just a river connecting the city to the sea, the sea was right there. Movement was right there.

They were standing on a beach, in the distance the city they came from was visible. A cold wind started to pull up, and dark clouds were approaching. They knew rain was coming, but they set off towards the sea anyway. Their desert friend waited under a roof, protected from the elements. They touched the sea, a sea they never touched before. The water was cold, but it felt good. They started to walk back to their friend and took up shelter with him. Slowly, the rain took away their view of the bay.

On the beach, a girl was walking along the shore. When the rain and wind increased in force, she put her hands up in the air. It seemed like she was dancing with the elements. The seagulls that floated around her joined in. She walked on in the rain. Only after the rain slowly started to fade, did she also walk away from the beach. He admired her freedom. He wondered who she was and how she had felt at that moment when she had put her hands up. Why was she alone out here, dancing in the rain on the beach? He had felt similar once before: once, in another northern city located at the same sea, he had seen a girl dance to music in her earphones, completely oblivious to the outside world. She had been completely absorbed in her own world, and she smiled while she danced, her eyes closed. To him, it looked as if she felt completely free. From that moment, he decided that he wanted to be like that girl, striving to feel as free and happy as she did in that moment. This girl had seemed similar to him, and he was incredibly happy to see that in this world, people could still throw their hands up in the air at a rainy beach. The wind battered their clothes, small waves crashed at the shore and sand flew across the wooden walkway. It was incredibly cold, but he felt good. He was at sea.