We were students, we were at a student party. First arrived the transversal waves, fast, high frequency and low amplitudes, terrifying by the deep feeling of telluric un-usuality, saying with dark indifference that our creations are derisory. Then the longitudinal waves arrived, disastrously violent and explicitly suggesting that the end of the world is not a legend. The electricity is down, the sound of the rock friction in the buildings and in the earth is deep and unknown, the ionised air alerts to madness the instinct. I catch the hand of a girl and run down, to get out of the building. My hand was helpful, the girl was another, what does-it matter? we are now all outside, under the sky. We watch with deep fear the nature, one minute ago we haven’t noticed its presence. Somewhere is a spectacular fire, some students are badly bleeding due to the broken glasses. In Bucharest the disaster is huge. What I remember is the slow raise of our reaction: a strong coherency surged modestly but firmly, a naïve-young but irrepressible force to control this situation. Actually we are also part of the nature, and if nature is so tough, - we can do the same.

The next days a big number of international teams came to make measurements of replica, such an earthquake usually yields hundreds of articles and several PhD theses. We are far from this articulate endeavour but we offer immediately our services, for whatever is needed. They need people to survey the seismographs that will be placed around the epicentre. I will say yes to anything. One of us is left by a helicopter in the Danube Delta, another at the great TV antenna of Bacau, another in the mountains.

I am honoured to get the place closest to the epicentre, decided by a German team. We go to Buzau, near the terrifying epicentre Vrancea, from where the back door of the Hell can straightly be seen. The only place that corresponds to the requirements is a far and isolated place known as Magura or Ciolanu. There, it is a very old Orthodox Monastery and I will spend the next three weeks with my seismograph in this monastery.

It was a beautiful experience but Army will seem a holiday, later. At five o’clock in the morning the bells of the monastery (not of the church) begin to ring and no question to stay indifferent, they are just above my room. The water is extremely cold, the room is almost empty, and there is scarce heating. The breakfast consists of a tea of subtle perfume, from plants that can be seen in the yard. The food is for the fasting days preceding the Orthodox Easter, is almost transparent. (I remember I felt great at the end, however). During the lunch one of the monks reads loudly fragments of the Scriptures and consents not to eat at all. The deep overall idea is the naturalness of an elegant independence relative to materialistic thinking. I owe much to this earthquake.

I have with me Landau and Lifshitz, the theory of fields. My friend is a cat, atheist. There are monks that call each other brother and there are priests. The monks were convinced that no other earthquake will come, since a scientist (me) has come to them with a mysterious device (the seismograph). This was not more than friendly irony. We place the seismograph in a small room in the underground. It catches immediately the time-basis from Frankfurt and a small red LED begins to blink. This LED will be the absolute confirmation for all brothers that the planet movements are now controlled, another friendly ironical emphasis put on our electromechanical investigation of God's intentions. Although I have warned them to not disturb the apparatus, they come at night to the window to see the fascinating red LED. Next day I can tell them (reading from the paper record of small oscillations) at what hours and for how long they came to see the apparatus. They do not seem surprised, finally one that can control the Earth can also control the past. However I cannot send to Bucharest the records with a number of earthquakes equal to the number of night visits and I decide to move the apparatus. The new place is a small construction, isolated and almost invisible in the middle of a garden with trees and corn, far from the buildings. It actually is the clandestine plum-brandy fabric of the monastery. It is not for the brothers, it is to fight against the Devil with its own weapons: people from the local nomenclatura come to spend weekends here and the brandy is a must . The device is archaic (I will see a similar one, exposed in a beer restaurant in Copenhagen, twenty five years later), the residuum of plums, still sweet and with some alcohol is thrown in a valley. This happens late in autumn. For a period of several months after that, animals from the entire region around are coming here to look for the mysterious evasion offered by this residuum. Any trace of residuum disappears before Christmas, but the animals still continue to come until spring. This is not good for seismology, but the measurements are clean.

I am a reference here: an old monk comes to ask me how the sun can stay, like that, in the air. I explain him the basis of the Ptolemaic and Copernicus visions, with elements of contemporary astrophysics. He gives me an apple: it is the first pay for science I honestly earned (the last too?).

This place is also a campus for summer gathering of artists, they come to make here sculptures. The massive blocs of stones are left here, around the monastery, a strange illustration of the self-intersection of the social material extending into cultural superstructure. Sheep are around. I leave for Bucharest with all my paper rolls.

In 1981 me, Madi and two friends have made a long trip in the west side of the Accessible World. This happened so far in time that the whole story is not greater than a point when I look back. The longest trip is therefore not the one of the story, it is my trip back, looking to what still persists in that point of my memory, i.e. few kilobytes, few Jpegs.

First I find the fifth character, a Trabant, a small car made from plastic and paper. That time the East Germans were kept like in an aquarium whose limits were the post-war decision that Germany will not make four-time engines for at least fifty years and preferably never. Then they did several two-time, much wanted in East. Cheap, simple and with a difficult-to-break motor, it was the car that could be parked on the balcony (some said: also most silent, because being so small, the knees of the passengers cover their ears). It worked with a mixture of gas and oil and ejected more smoke than the Pinatubo volcano eruption. The inside was small and even reduced by the large number of spark-plugs taken as reserve, just in case. First we decided to go to the Caucasus.

Caucasus has never known that we wanted to visit its crests, that would have certainly made it laugh. It is a chain of mountains of more than 5000 meters above any sea and even higher above any of our ambition to go there. The first target was a small town, Orjonikidze, where the known world ended and the vast space of the upper world begins (made of rarefied air, snow and non-corporal intense desire of returning safe). At about four thousand meters it was “Priiut odinatsiati” , the “refuge of the eleven”, the last human’s creation. From this last shelter, supposing we can live without air, we should have to go on the top, at 5633 meters, for an unknown reason. Our preceding exceptional achievement was to go up on stairs, to the sixth floor of a building without elevator.

It didn’t work. The Soviets carefully examined our request of reservation at the only hotel of Orjonikidze, found it fantasmatic and offered in exchange five years of Siberia to each of us, new feelings guaranteed.

Lucky replay from the Soviets, since the Caucaz Mountains are not tolerant. We looked again on the World Map and took the correct decision to go to the left, somewhere. So the trip started from Bucharest, for Prague and more, if possible. The govern was engaged in a vast attempt to escape the control of the International Monetary Fond (we smile when we remember) and sold our oil to any client that came with an oil-tank ship. What was left in the country was just some vapour. Trabants need gas and we decided to visit URSS before anything, to buy gas, good and cheap. Now, the interior of the car was even smaller, a large number of empty jars were placed inside, between the passengers. Another large number of small and non-empty jars, bottles of cognac, were placed inside in an (incredibly!) unknown part of the smallest car in the world. This actually was strong currency for occasional local exchanges of goods and services across East, for example mechanical interventions on small cars. The possession of money of another kind than the national one was seen by authorities as a sign of madness. The Romanian cognac was a delicatessen, it worked anywhere. The friend who owned the Trabant, wise and prospective, hid the bottles from me, Madi and his wife, of weaker ability of being aware of the constraints and exigencies of the future. This didn’t work either, we found them. We crossed the frontier in the north of Suceava and after few hours we arrived in Cernautsi. This was a Romanian town left behind a brutal territorial engineering done by Molotov and Ribbentrop just before beginning to fight one against the other. We recognized our famous University (our national reserve of differential geometry) and an old man came to us to speak Romanian, a classic and perfumed style, preserved only here. Our travel included Ternopol (with a sharp interdiction of going inside the town) and Lvov, an old Polish town, another gift that Stalin has offered to himself, with a statue of Mickiewicz in the centre. The Soviet roads were slowly converging to Uzhgorod, a town where three countries (not counting the sky) touch each other: URSS, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Updating for now: Ukraine, Hungary and Slovakia, the sky remaining the same. The Trabant was now full of gas, a small bomb, and the passengers were accessorial. We approached the frontier at Uzhgorod at about seven o’clock and found the frontier closed, the transit between countries worked only until six. Then we went a little further and put our tent, but instinctively we did not raised it (which would make it visible) but used it as a discrete cover of our tired bodies. The place was a flat surface close to a monument reminding the world that the Soviet tanks have pushed the enemy (any enemy) to the west. So we slept under the pedestal of a tank T34, but with a rather ambiguous feelling of being protected. The small gray Trabant has certainly dreamed that night that one day it will have a monument like this one. It's painful to say that indeed it had, much later, but rised on a pedestal of poor-quality irony. Early in the cold morning, a small animal (un ecureuil) ran above us and traversed the tent which only vaguely protected us. We asked to be allowed to go to Hungary. The Russian officer showed us that on the passports Czechoslovakia was written before Hungary and told us that he cannot tolerate that such nice young people like us to do something foolish, which means to not respect the specified order of the countries. Deep in our soul we expressed our surprise on the large diversity of forms that Devil can take these days, and went to Czechoslovakia.

Everything changed. The air was different (rain was never far), the churches too, and the fact that people did not care of our presence: they simply expected that we behave as them, which we did, naturally. No need to show the passport, no restriction to take photos, but life was visibly faster. (This was a warning, we probably recorded that somewhere). We went to Olomouc, Brno and traversed the country from east to west, to finally arrive in Prague. It was a time when you could not google Prague, you had to go there personally. Today I still believe that one should not google Prague, but go there personally. It was a time when the European ancient tradition that young people must travel in order to achieve the maturity of their mind was still fully respected so we could easily loose ourselves in the shiny dust of young tourists that invaded this town, taking the beer as a common ground, in view of a future united Europe.

We put our tent in the gigantic camping at the periphery of Prague, on Boulevard Lenin. At night huge motobikes, which intimidated our Trabant, were coming from both Germanies (there were two at that time) and on them it was written the tonic message: "Atomkraft? Nein Danke". They did not seem to need one. We used to take the tramway for the centre, and visit the Charles's bridge, Staryie Mesto, the Saint-Nicolas church, the Zjeik tavern, but of course you know them all.

The results of this part of the travel were (1) the confirmation of the previous diffuse conviction that things may look differently being however the same (non idem est si duo dicunt idem) and (2) a dream generated around a yellow inflatable plastic boat for two persons, of less than 160 kilos together. To explain: selling space shuttles (incl. Saturn V launcher) and plastic inflatable, children-oriented, boats was forbidden in our country that time, since they could suggest to escape by sky or by sea. Escaping by memory was less restrictive: one could remember anything he wanted until back to 1947, the frontier. By derogation one could remember isolated civil facts, like weddings, back before 1947, without being accompanied.

The plastic inflatable boat problem, it may seem strange, I am still sure that it can be isomorphically mapped onto any radical sea adventure that we will ever have, including the discovery of a new continent, if available.