DAY 2: THE SUN WILL NOT WAIT FOR US
The sentence in the title is not supposed to sound passive aggressive, it is just supposed to be a reminder of why it is important to follow schedules.
Our group is surprisingly punctual – not only we appear at the meeting point on time, but we are all always there even earlier. That is what, among other things, I love about us.
When you live in such a small space, as a boat is, with seven other people schedule is everything! Of course, a good schedule wouldn’t exist if there is not a good communication in the group – just imagine going to toilet, or preparing a breakfast, or washing the dishes in just a couple of square meters.
So, following our schedule, this morning we sailed from Rhodes port at 9 sharp. We all put our life vests on, our sunscreen, our sunglasses and sat in a cockpit of Marleen. Even though the trip to island Symi lasts for hours and you think you have a lot time to spare, it is hard to do anything on the sailing boat but looking at the horizon, (over)thinking and wondering was that really a baby dolphin jumping somewhere overthere. When we didn’t (over)think, we used that time to practice doing different knots with Angelika. Not much time passed when we were put on our first test – tide a knot that you learned (spoiler alert: we all successfully did it!) and actually became useful!
Symi is quite a small island of just three thousand inhabitants, very close to the border with Turkey, that’s why a lot of refugees very often arrive here. And while we are on our way from the boat to the beach to have a swim and our daily discussion round, from the windows of a local police station migrants are looking onto the street. And then you start thinking of how a citizenship and nationality, those arbitrarily given, but immutable characteristics, can often lead your life in a certain direction you might not even chose – to think of how a citizenship is actually a discrimination for the freedom of movement. That was a starting point for our first discussion round which led us (maybe some other time we will explain exactly how) to think of what can we do to fight the climate change? Just so you know – on the island Symi ships won’t come to pick up all the trash (that mostly us, tourists, make) because it is too expensive for them to sail all that way just to pick a couple of thousand of plastic bottles – instead, they have to burn their trash. That was quite depressing, but led us to the conclusion that if we can’t fix things globally, we can at least start from ourselves and our local communities.
Following our daily schedule, we went for a dinner to an amazing place, high enough to have a great look at the island and wait for the Sun to set.
So, if you want to see the sunset, you have to be there on time, because the Sun will not wait for you. But also – keep in mind that if you ruin the place from which you can look at the sunset (read: Earth), the sunset isn’t really a thing anymore.
