What happened since Breakpoint? First see some pictures of the decoration team and the Inca statue that I helped building. On Tuesday morning after easter I started hitchhiking from the road to the motorway just outside the Breakpoint hall. After half an hour I started walking on a bit towards the motorway, because it was nice and sunny. After a few kilometer a courier driver in his private car stopped and took me to Frankfurt airport, doing his deliveries on the way. I went by metro to the main train station to pick up my tent which Miruna was so kind to send it to me from Romania by bus. Thanks, Miruna! 🙂 Around the Atlassib office it felt like being back in Bucharest – Romanian language and customs amongst the people loading there many bags into the bus, the interior of the office, the dry and warm (polluted) air. I went out to a petrol station right before the motorway crossing towards south, after a while a friendly young man stopped and took me one hour south to Mannheim. His girlfriend had just quit with him after six years of relationship. Right before he got on the car! He was very calm, saying that it had not sunk in yet.. A while ago he started this cocktail bar – make sure to check it out, when you are around. 🙂 In Mannheim I stood beside the main road towards Heidelberg when a Malaysian woman with her parents visiting stopped. I felt the urge to visit south-east Asia again when chatting to the parents. Such an exciting part of the world. In Heidelberg they were so kind to give me a lift right to the address that I was heading for. I met Cristina, a good friend from Bucharest that is studying in Heidelberg for a while. She was an excellent host, accomodated, fed and showed me around town.
Two mornings later I went to the drive-up of the motorway, where after one hour another hitchhiker joined me while waiting. Another hour or so later an Iraqi man who already had a carsharing passenger on board took me a few hours up to some motorway service area near Collogne. Phew, he had quite some style of driving, not keeping lanes, breaking way too late and so on. From the service area I got picked up after almost two hours by two young Arab people in a brand new fast car. There was something fishy about those two, the driver, a very smart guy, constantly talking into his headset, speeding like there’s no tomorrow, and his co-driver something like an assistent. Probably there is no real tomorrow for them, they told me they were driving up and down Germany non-stop since four days without sleep, living of energy drinks and a few hundred Euros for petrol. The co-driver told me that the driver is being searched for by the police. I asked no further questions and was happy to get off at some petrol station an hour further north. Phew. After two hours (it really wasn’t my day, I didn’t care anymore which way people were going) a friendly man stopped, went a bit the wrong direction and dropped me off again at some road towards the motorway to Holland. At a bus stop I watched the sun going lower and lower, thinking about what my options were and how good chances to get to Amsterdam the same day are. Suddenly a black convertible of the latest and biggest kind with a star on the hood stopped. I squeezed my bag somewhere where there was naturally no room for it and we flew off with Genesis’ “No son of mine” in repeat mode and a lot of fresh country air, some 400 horses pulling us down the empty motorway away from the sun. His mission was to pick up some cans of Dutch beer from a petrol station near the border and then to return to the Ruhr area to attend some football match “auf Schalke”. Although he wasn’t feeling well about it he took me right to the border. His feeling was right, there was a large scale police operation going on checking every car going in and out Holland. He forgot to pay a few fines in Holland some time ago, so he had to spend some extra time explaining things to the guards. I asked the driver of the car next to us if he is going towards Amsterdam, so he was and off I went. Bayo from Nigeria with his electronic gadgets took me to a town outside Amsterdam where I got the train to the station near the EYFA office. Dunja picked me up and we went to get food in a squat nearby, where I met some old and new friends. 🙂