6 January 2008 - The soldier, the sailor and me.

After yesterday's ponderings on friends for life, I got to thinking about one-time-only friends - those people who walk into your life and, by some twist of circumstance, only stay an afternoon, or a day, or a week. I was looking through some old journals for something and came across my travel journal from the trip to Russia in 2004. By pot luck I ended up in a cabin with a soldier and a sailor, both Russian, and we spent three days travelling between Irkutsk and Khabarovsk playing cards, chatting and generally making an effort to communicate - this was no small feat considering our lack of a common language but we must have spent a lot of time with a dictionary, because I have stacks of information and anecdotes (and all the rules to this particular card game) in my journal. Even though it was only three days, we were friends - laughed, talked, ate together the whole time, had this big emotional parting - and although I'll never see them again I've never forgotten their kindness or the fun we had.

I met a lot of people on that trip, that's the glory of travelling alone I suppose.