germany
Am I Brave Enough?
My thumb was up but my knees were shaking in anticipation of what could possibly happen. It was exciting, like a first date with a girl who I admired for a long time. Today was my first time long distance hitchhiking.
I had thought about hitchhiking a lot, before I actually hit the road. The idea appeared in 2005 when I spotted a couple of hitchhikers at a service station in Germany and spoke with them. They were friendly and inspired me. What a nice way of traveling, I thought. I had done some hitchhiking from school to home in 1999 but this was something else. Am I brave enough for a long trip?
On The Way to Odessa: The Road Is Life
The road caught us, flexible and free like a cat. Its yellow, silently smiling eyes followed us. Sooner than I realized, we were guided by the flow of the events.
Again and again the magic of things revealed itself in any rides and in the simple beauty of our encounters. Angels and savers, monks and royals arrived to us. Speaking without language, skipping the barriers of words and indifference. The embarrassment of the hugs at the end of each ride and the laughs of the non-understood are an exercise of mimic: training for gesture and instinct.
Un-pre-dic-ta-ble. The road is life and it is a teacher.
Random Acts of Trust
The sun was going down somewhere behind the rain clouds and we weren't even halfway to our destination. After a series of rides off the beaten path from Amsterdam to Northern Germany, my partner and I ended up in a "not-so-good" place, where nobody seemed to be going anywhere that was even remotely relevant to us.
What seemed like a well-connected central city on the map, ended up feeling bleak and largely disconnected once we arrived. The destination was Munich, the present location Munster. We were still 700 kilometers of highway away. I didn’t really care though. But at the same time I couldn’t deny it was rainy, becoming colder and that my mind was wandering to the question of where we would sleep.
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