This morning we left Ruse. After the bustling city and its many ships, we quickly returned to the calm and vastness of the Danube. I sometimes feel like these entries start to repeat themselves—but to us, the river never becomes boring. Watching it, observing it, thinking about it—there’s always something new, something quietly profound.
Today we talked about what the Danube means to us. How we perceive it. We are attributing qualities to it—as if it were a subject, not an object. I’ve written before that the Danube feels like a long, stretched-out village, functioning in its own rhythm, with its own rules. A place where languages and borders dissolve into irrelevance. Or perhaps the Danube is a language itself—one we are slowly learning to understand, day by day. A fluid syntax we are still deciphering. A voice we are learning to listen to.
Looking at the river can be addictive. You don’t want to look away. There’s a strange fear of missing something—some silent shift, some hidden message in the current. It draws your gaze back, again and again.
At the end of the day, we found it – our anchor point: a sand island in the middle of the river, quiet and perfect – like paradise.
