While 30 Polish, Russian and German people spend three sunny days on deck, three of us have to get the fully packed bus from Gdansk to Kaliningrad. For a few hours, we cross beautiful wide landscapes with waving old farmers and storks nests; an eastern European idyll. At late afternoon, we drop in the Nomans Land at the Polish-Russian Border.

The first thing two quite friendly Russian frontier guards tell us: we´ll probably have to spend the night on the bus, because the only official to sign our ninety pages of custom declaration already left. Nothing to eat, and the small Duty Free Shop is closed. We´re lucky that Suza speaks some words of Russian, and we´re also lucky that she caught the eye of a custom official: she enters the Duty Free, and our dinner consists of lots of chocolate and fish cans. Even more important: we get access to the pale custom offices, socialist left-overs. We wonder what feels romantic about the whole setting, and probably it´s the fact that the times of waiting hours at any border within the European Union have already passed.

We enter the custom building with no idea what to do. After a while we realise that the small sheet of paper we received from the custom guards in the beginning is our entry pass for the custom jungle game.

The aim of the game: collecting enough stamps to cross the border. The setting of the game: an endless line of trucks with our tiny bright-coloured bus in the middle, corridors with neon lights and innumerable counters with Cyrillic letters. The other players in the game: female officials with lots of make-up and the magic stamp power, truck drivers with big beer bellies standing outside smoking and giving valuable advices where to go, and the chief official, who shows up and disappears once in a while. After four or five hours, the excitement about the new game gradually decreases.

To all the truck drivers and officials, we must look like some run-down hippies, Janosch and two women in this male world, without no shower the last days, wearing flip flops and playing frisbee on the grassland within the border area. The officials on their side don´t really know what to do with us (“Are you a Circus group? Did you bring Marihuana?”), and shortly after midnight they decide to only issue a transit document. To be allowed to get out of Russia, we have to continue the game at the custom office in Kaliningrad. For now, we´re in.

Suza and Patricia