I'd caught the European equivalent of a
Craigslist ride from Berlin to Brussels to meet the effervescent
Heather Vescent who was in town on business from Los Angeles. She'd just
been hired by a large Belgian firm to help predict the future of tech
and the economy (yes, that's right, she's a professional Futurist!).
It was fun to watch her leave for the day in her sassy tailored suits
and purple hair*. After a few days touring Brussels – go see the
Atomium when you're there! – it was time to hitchhike back to
Berlin.
In delightful contrast to our posh
hotel in the suburb of Waterloo**, I hefted my beat-up backpack over
my shoulder around check-out time and hoofed it a mile to the
highway. Soon I hopped in the car with an elven middle-aged lady on
her way to work in Brussels. She listened to Europop with English
lyrics on the radio and at a stoplight handed a bag of cookies to an
old Turkish beggar woman on the side of the road, as was her daily
custom. She took me to the fancy organic food store she worked at and
set me up with a care package of granola and trail mix, as well as a
reusable black laminated card with an erasable white marker. On it
she wrote: “Berlin – Merci! Dank U! Thank You!” and drew a
smiley face giving a thumbs up. I used the back side of that card many times on my
European hitchhiking journeys. It still travels with me in the trunk of my car, her happy
message emblazoned upon it.
It was shift change at her shop, and my
second ride was from her co-worker, a sweet gentleman in his late 20s
from Côte d'Ivoire. He spoke no English, and I speak very little
French, so communication was tricky. Fortunately the
international language of reggae pumped through the stereo. This fellow
must have driven 20 minutes out of his way to get me to a serviceable
service station outside of the city.
The next ride was from a Moroccan
chauffeur-by-day, rockstar-by-night. He explained to me a number of
times in excited, broken English that his Moroccan reggae-funk band
features the guitarist from Blondie, and he invited me to stay with
him in Liege if I wanted to come back in September for their next
show. We exchanged albums, and when he dropped me off he told me to
give him a call if I had trouble catching another ride.
I was stuck at that service station in
Liege for a couple of hours, eating a sandwich made from ingredients
pilfered from the hotel's buffet and wrapped up in a bag
from the room provided for “sanitary reasons." My last ride for
the day finally came from a Congolese fellow who taught
underprivileged Belgian youth to rap in French. He'd just dropped his Rwandan-Canadian girlfriend
off at the airport after her two-month visit and had picked me up on his way to Cologne to
take his mind off the fact that he wouldn't see her again until
December.
I'd never been to Cologne, and the
weather that day was so nice that I was loathe to spend it wasting
away in automobiles. When I said I might spend the night there, the
Congolese fellow was nice enough to drop me in the city center. A lot
of my rides have gone out of their way for me, and I sincerely
appreciated it every time, especially while toting 40+ lbs of gear.
Boots back on the ground, I got a bead on a couple of hostels from a
hotel concierge. Before I checked in I sat gazing at
an ancient cathedral from a pub patio in the old town, soaking up
the sunshine over a Kolsch, listening to an Irishman speak German
with an Irish accent and a German speak English with an Irish accent,
too.
The next day, with a raging hangover, I
successfully – if painfully – hitched the remaining 350 miles
back to Berlin in twelve hours with five trucks, two cars and one hell
of a headache. I holed up in my spartan Kreuzberg room the day after that,
listening to the din of Goelitzer Park that wafted through my open
window as I recovered.
*The crazy loon then flew into Reno for
the last two days of Burning Man. Jet-setters, us.
**Yes, that Waterloo. And yes, I did
have Abba stuck in my head for the duration of our stay.
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