to arrive - ankommen - arriver

26 june 2008: I am sitting in a small room in a cheap hostel at Tanguiéta. It is raining cats and dogs (or better lions and hyenas) and I am thinking about arriving... Here my first hypothesis: To arrive in whatever place is much more a psychological question as it is physical.

To arrive physically seams to be easy in Benin: You sweat as if you were in a hot country. When it rains you get wet as if you were in the tropics and your digestion tells you - more or less gently - that you are not eating the same things than in Europe. When the electricity shuts down you have to look for your torch or wait for it to came back. The body doesn´t ask the question if you accept all this. he tells you very explicitly if he likes what you are experiencing or not.

To arrive psychologically seams much more complex: You do not understand why people answer "yes" when you ask if it is "A" or "B". You are curious about the way things work and you try to compare with what you know in order to understand. When you want to buy something you still expect a fix price indicated on the merchandise. At 3 pm you still say "bonjour" and people answer "bonsoir". When people shake hands they have a special manner to snap their fingers mutually when they leave the hand of the other. If you can´t do like they do you feel like a stranger (although everybody tries to let you feel very welcome).

Especially this last example shows that my hypothesis is somewhat mistaken. What you do with your body influences what you perceive with your mind. Every movement I do is a movement in a new and unknown environment. My steps are like walking on eggs because I do not (not yet) know how to move. Both parts, body and mind, are connected, are part of one unit. To arrive, both have to walk hand in hand: The mind has to accept and the body has to accustom, then you can feel having arrived and start to understand better how things work.