Friendship

Friendship, a word we use daily and we all probably know the meaning but how do we define it? Puh, that`s a tough question. During this blog I`m going to try to find an answer, what friendship means and especially what friendship on board means.

On board it´s quite special. It´s more than a relationship between two friends who like each other. Your best friends on board are more like your brothers. But why?

I know my friends here just for 5 months, but it seems to me, like I spent years with them. We went through tough and good times, got to know each other through bad times. I experienced so many unbelievable memories with these crazy people I call my friends. On the Thor you spend all your time with the same people, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You go to school with the same people, you eat with the same people, you sleep with the same people in the same room, you sail across the Atlantic with the same people and you are going to cry with the same people at the farewell at Kiel. And sometimes it´s kind of hard to spend time with exactly these guys, if you are annoyed by them, if you just want to spend time on your own. But you can´t get away and sometimes this is hard to realize, but most of the time I just feel blessed to be here and to have these people around me. Especially through times you aren´t alright, it´s important to have someone you can talk to and somebody you can rely on. At home I was often wondering what friendship means and I couldn’t find an answer, because friendships as I got to know them here, just don`t exist at home at all.

It is a really intense type of friendship. You have no break from each other, you´re always around one another, but still you don´t know necessarily a lot about them. The whole surroundings of a person, their family, their school, their home, everything you connect with a person at home, suddenly has no importance at all. You have no idea about their family, you never met their parents and you only know about their life at home from stories they told you. And still you feel like you know them maybe better than some of your friends at home. You don´t know their background, but you know their character. And I think it´s more important to know a person`s character than to know a person´s background. During this blog, I have been writing about, how hard it is to stay with the same people on a 50m long ship for months. If you are in trouble with someone, there is no possibility to get away, like I used to know it from home. You can easily get away by going home or meeting other friends. On the Thor it`s completely different. There are no other friends, but another kind of home, the only issue is the people you are in trouble with are living with you at your home. And your new home is their new home. You have to deal with your problems and often it isn´t that hard to figure them out.

Another thing I`m wondering about during the last months is, how it will be after the journey`s end. Are we going to stay connected? Are we going to visit each other, even though we are living all over Germany? But after thinking about these questions for a while, I knew that we are going to stay in touch, that we are going to see and visit each other, because the connection between us is just so strong, because of all the stuff we went through together. This connection will stay, maybe it won`t be as strong as it is right now, but it will stay for our whole life. In the beginning of KUS I was wondering how and if I would become friends with all of these people and now I know they became real friends who will stay for life.