TRAVEL BÜRO FRISE!
Orientation on the equator / crossing the equator
...Artists today also travel to experience something. Only the circumstances have changed. Today, a journey to Japan from Europe takes less than 12 hours and, compared to Gaugin's travels, it is highly likely that the course of the journey will also correspond to the planning. Anyone setting out to cross the equator in the 19th century had to spend several weeks at sea. It was not only the duration of the crossing that was uncertain, but also its happy outcome. Crossing the equator was therefore always an extraordinary moment of the journey. First crossings were celebrated with intense rituals. This initiation brought the first crosser into an exclusive society. In German, the word equator was synonymous with the word "Gleicher". In other words, the marker that divides the globe into two halves. This equator is not only to be understood geographically, but also as an image that describes a symbolic distance between two facts.
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