Germany < --------------------- > FranceI don’t think I would ever have gotten the experience of walking over the border river between France and Germany If we’d not been in search of a better hitch-hiking spot that morning. At 8 am early Sunday, any Alaskan town (or Scottish village in fact) would have been more busy than Strasbourg, a large town in France, situated a few kilometers away from the German border. No joke. French people seem to have quite a strict understanding about when businesses should be open and/or traffic can occur, and it’s certainly not a Sunday morning (or any evening or early afternoon really..). I guess they only ever come out on weekday mornings to buy croissants and pain au chocolate-s and then wrap up their scarves more tightly and hurry to their art schools or music academies or back home to write a book or an article or paint something in their studios.
Anyway, we walked out of France to this little German village, Kehl, which seemed wonderfully more inhabited, and got a lift straight away to a German autobahn; towards Geneva, Switzerland (around 450 km away), with this great guy who drove 30 kilometers to the opposite way from where he wanted to go, just to help us out. Another beautiful day!
We were happily sitting on that rock in this random German petrol station when a nice young man, who had just finished pouring water into his radiator, approached us, preventing us from approaching him. He wasn’t that fluent in English nor did we understand any German, so the conversation went something like: “do you have a car?” – “no” – “I have a car!”. Later we also found out that his dad has a steel company and a helicopter with a landing spot on top of the roof of his house and stuff. Anyway, on the way to the next service area he taught us some essential hitch-hiking expressions such as “are you going to Basel” and “We’re hitch-hiking” and “I don’t speak much German”; which I have to say, was definitely a useful addition to my previous German phrasebook consisting of sentences like “I want a drink” and “I love you” and “I don’t have any underwear”.
I had already practiced my German on several people in the next petrol station when a nice Swiss man with a nice Alfa Romeo and wonderful English agreed to take us to Bern. As we were proceeding through the numerous tunnels (Swiss people like to build their roads through anything on the way, in an unusual contrast to the Scottish way of lenghtening 100 miles as the crow flies to 250 miles by the road), we learned quite a lot about Swiss vineyards and guns; oh and about the latter - apparently every Swiss man who has been to the army has one, which some of them use when they are drunk and fallen out with their girlfriends...
The petrol station just before Bern was just as nice and sunny as the two previous ones, with an exception of one disturbing figure in it – a nervous-looking Czech hitch-hiker Martin *see footnote*, whose main activity seemed to be smoking, in preference of asking people for a lift. He was going to Geneva as well, and although we felt that waiting after this guy might take a while (he was approaching drivers with a cigarette in his hand and cursing heavily every time he got declined), unwritten hitchhikers’ etiquette still says that if you’re there first, you go first. So we decided to get aquainted to Swiss currency instead, meaning taking some cash Franks out of the ATM, and have some lunch consisting of cheese, sausages and chocolate spread, which we applied on a weird swiss toasting bread (aquired from the shop in the petrol station) with an Estonian bank card (washed previously in the nice Swiss toilets).
Meanwhile, Martin was still walking around randomly and smoking his sixty third cigarette of the day. So we asked for a special permission to go around the cars that he wasn’t interested in and soon found this lovely little french guy (with a scarf and everything, also he was a journalist) who had been partying heavily all weekend and needed someone to keep him awake in the car on his way to Nyon, 30 km from Geneva. Surprisingly, he came from Strasbourg as well, I wonder if he had forgotten, having lived several years in Switzerland, that it’s not acceptable to drive in France on Sundays.. To keep the conversation going, the lovely entusiastic hungover french journalist offered to drive the extra kilometers to Geneva for us, and turned back in a minute’s walking distance of where we were staying.
As a conclusion to this exceptionally long introduction, all I really wanted to say is that I’m travelling through Europe now, and getting aquainted to all it’s lovely people on the way:) Hitch-hiking is clearly the best way to travel – in addition to getting where you want to go, free (sometimes with complimentary coffee or cheeseburgers), you also get to know so much more about the people, culture, history, customs of the country that you’re travelling in; as well as yourself (because approaching random people in petrol stations can be a bit scary and keeping up your motivation levels after three hours of no luck might get a bit frustrating.. )
Anyway, by now I have come to a certain belief that you can hitch-hike pretty much anything and anywhere - as long as you ask enough people... men, women, couples, band vans, cars, trucks, buses, boats, ferries, bikes, helicopters, spaceships...
Leiden, Holland
Strasbourg, France
Zürich, Switzerland
Annecy, France
Leukerbad, Valais, Switzerland*footnote* We met this guy again on our way to Zürich to Annecy a week later, and again from Annecy to Valais four days after that; we’re currently working on alternative routes between Valais and Lyon...
No comments:
Post a Comment