On my way back from Amsterdam on a beautiful spring morning two weeks ago I first encountered the total control over the motorways around the city by the police. I didn’t even finish drawing my sign when already a police motorbike stopped right in front of me and sent me back a few kilometres towards the city. There I tried a petrol station with little luck, walked on a few hundred metres and found one of the shrouded in legends “Liftplaats” – a stopping area for hitchhikers created by Dutch city planners at the roads leading out of the cities. It has a big traffic sign with a thumb on it, a place to lock your bike, a bin and enough room for the cars to stop and accelerate (Google maps liftplats Amsterdam). Great! Ten minutes an I was on my way towards Germany with a cigar smoking bronze sculpture artist and art trader. At a petrol station I asked someone heading further towards to Germany. He told me his wife and him adopted three kids from Columbia whose parents had been killed in a fight over drugs. Like on my way into Holland I got a lift by an African person in a delivery van over the border. He was delivering goods for the afro shop in Osnabrück. It was afternoon already when I first walked to the wrong exit of town, and dusk when I got to the right one. I got a short lift by an (ex?) junkie couple towards the motorway. While she left the car to buy something he told me that his military service in the Kosovo war, with seeing how brutally people slaughtered each other left him no escape but drugs. They said they will come back in two hours and take me to Bremen. I decided to turn down their offer and after almost 2 hours waiting for lifts in the dark I jumped over a fence into a small forest and pitched my tent. The road was roaring all night and I could not resist to unpack my laptop to watch an episode of Futurama. Silly, I know..
The next morning it lasted about 10 minutes until a young driver on business travels took me to a petrol station outside Bremen, two hours further north. There I asked a young couple if they could give me a lift to Hamburg. They dropped me in the centre, I got the bus to the exit towards Berlin. Hamburg city planners decided to erase the favourite hitchhiking spot “Horner Kreisel” (a roundabout before the motorway to the East) from the map by building another car lane and high curbs in its place. Great! But fuck you (excuse me), city un-planners, after 15 minutes my female co-hitchhiker and me got a lift by a nice big caravan with a friendly driver at the bus stop just before the roundabout. She got off at a petrol station on the way and I went on with the caravan driver, a motor pilot and catamaran owner, right to the heart of Schwerin. Juicy smells of fresh green parfumed me on my walk through the castle’s garden to the Mandarin office, my current shared office. A nice trip. :o)