The "Green" Chewing Gum?

I recently read an article on Slate about chewing gum. The author is concerned about the low biodegradability of the gum, and that city administrations such as London are spending huge money to remove gums from the streets, using things like steam or chemicals. Therefore, he seems to advocate recycling chewing gum, which would imply convincing people to dispose of the gum in a separate garbage bin. Or, even better, we could buy green (magic word) tropical chewing gum from friendly gum farmers in Yucatán.

It really sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? This would create jobs in areas where people would otherwise emigrate from and "invade" civilized countries (and, in the case of Europe, become parasites of the welfare state). It is a much used argument, invoked as a panacea for all problems of modern society, from global warming and garbage disposal, to poverty and immigration, and it is the core of the new green attitude and policies gaining ground in Western society. But in reality, this is only another of those delusions of modern society, according to the principle "change everything so that everything remains the same".

Luckily, the article also reminded the reader that chewing a gum is a totally useless activity. Thank Goodness. It is funny that we need someone to remind us that. So many everyday actions, or products we shop, have become so typical and so deeply embedded in our modern lifestyle that we dare not question them. But it is far worse than this, unfortunately. Chewing licorice twig is also mostly useless, or at least the reason why most people would chew it as I do sometimes would probably be just the fact that it tastes good. The difference is that while licorice is a real thing (natural and readily available, without factories needed for processing) and has interesting medicinal properties, chewing gum is exactly the opposite.

Chewing gum is a symbol of the dominant culture: a totally useless, pointless act, that involves massive destruction of the natural environment (through the construction of factory to process the raw materials, and dams and all sorts of power stations needed to power them). There is something far worse than failing to throw a chewed gum in the bin: it's the act of chewing it in the first place. Or, even worse, the act of buying it in the first place. Chewing gum is a non-food without any purpose at all - in fact, through the massive production of saliva it induces, it fools the digestive system into thinking that food is being ingested, so we are the whole time on "digestive mode" while in fact we are not taking any food whatsoever. Its flavours are fake, like eating a pizza made of plastic (who would do that? oh, it's coming, I'm sure of it, and then, we'll all buy it!), and if not directly dangerous or noticeable, they do have an effect on our metabolism, and they certainly do have an effect on the environment, because of the technology and the energy needed to manufacture them. Do we really need all this?

Oh, I almost forgot: we even spend money for this! And, given the amounts, a lot: "Worldwide, humans chew about 560,000 tons of gum each year", the article says. Do your maths, and please include the costs for cleaning up the streets. Chewing gum is a powerful symbol of modern society and its attitude towards money: we make money by 1) destroying the natural environment, 2) forcing animals and traditional peoples out of their traditional environments (yes, dams count too), and ultimately, 3) we rob these poor brown people of their own culture until they start desiring the white man's way of living, and eventually start participating in the wage economy, at conditions usually extremely unfavourable for them. And what do we do with this money? We throw it away buying fake food.

But it's not all. Now, we are green, remember? So it's time to do something about our environment! So after we have destroyed their habitat, impoverished and enslaved them (it's modern slavery, not old-style, mind you), we even force them to work for us to produce our green chewing gum, that of course will be organic-certified and fair-trade and sold with a nice surcharge, just so that you'll remember that you're actively helping the environment and the poor farmers (not like those commoners who buy cheap stuff). So they will be basically forced to cut down their own rainforest, that for millennia provided all they needed to sustain their traditional lifestyle, to grow (certified) chicle trees for our green chewing gums. Which we don't need, like we don't need to cut down tropical forests, exploit "third world people", and neither us or the environment will have to pay the toll for the factories, power plants, the processing, packaging and transport of the products. Great idea, indeed.

Christmas 2010 - An On The Road Story

Summer 2010 is over, but the memory of it is still so vivid, that this Christmas, Denise and I could not resist, and decided to make a little experiment: hitching from Amsterdam to Italy, passing through her mum's place in Saxony, and Austria. And since it's on the way, we crammed in Czech Republic as well.

It already sounded like a very bad idea. Especially because we left with freezing temperatures, lots of snow, motorway queues, and except Vienna, we had not arranged any place to stay along the road. In fact, the first day (Sunday 19th) we didn't even have the guts to leave, and preferred to wait one more day and see what would happen. You never know how these Sundays are - there might be a lot of traffic towards your destination, but rather consisting of happy families with full cars that never saw a hitchhiker before. And that was the case, unfortunately, of not only Monday 20th, but of most of our trip.

Leaving Amsterdam was as hard as it was on that hot summer day I left it for Portugal. We walked at a decent time (around 9 a.m.) to the official Liftplaats Prins Bernhardplein, close to Amstel Station. In case you never tried it, you should know that nearly anywhere in A'dam is a better place than that one. I know, it looks so nice, with all that place to pull over with your car, and the sign with the thumb. But maybe next time the city administration should ask some real hitchhikers or check Hitchwiki for the right place... Anyway, this time there was a lot of snow, and since nobody knows that that is a place where people are supposed to pick up hitchhikers, they didn't clear the snow from the lane where cars can normally stop. We tried for an hour or so with a sign A1 - Duitsland, and then moved to the gas station further on the way. After freezing a little more and jogging around the gas station to warm up, we got a ride to a gas station in Amstelfort. From there, a Swiss guy saw our sign while we were having breakfast, and invited us into his car, bound for Hengelo. In the early afternoon, we were near the border. A long way to go, since we were not going straight to Berlin, but only until Magdeburg, because from there we had to reach Leipzig and Denise's mum place, Oschatz.

After too much time, I spotted a German car with a B plate, = Berlin. The driver was exactly my type: hippyish, long hair and beard, 30-something, probably a hitchhiker himself in the old days, and driving alone. He was in the back of the gas station, so thank Goodness I found him, cause I knew he was our ride. And he was, and we soon set off towards the Hauptstadt.

George was not German, although he had a German car: he was a Yugoslavian kid who came to Holland in his teens, and recently moved to Berlin to work on some "projects", i.e. he rented old buildings and turned them into multifunctional spaces where people made art during the day and danced and got wasted at night (or something like that). Cool. He really was our ride. He also almost bought us dinner, but I couldn't even look at that food, so we had some peanuts instead. Unlike him, we were happy even if there were monstrous queues on the motorway (A'dam-Berlin is the most trafficked motorway portion in Europe), some even 30km long, because at least we were warm in the car with him! He wasn't in a hurry, so he left us at Magdeburg train station at around 9 p.m., from where we continued with a local train, and arrived in Oschatz at 1:30 in the night (!).

After 3 days in Oschatz, we slowly had to move forward to Italy. We weren't sure which was the best way, whether via Munich or Czech, given that we had planned to visit some macrobiotic friends in Vienna anyway. So eventually at the last minute we decided to go through Czech, although we didn't know any Czech and the motorway Berlin-Munich is very easy (and fast). But first we had to go to Leipzig to finish some things, and ended up starting hitchhiking at 2 p.m. towards Prague. Still very much possible, if it weren't for that guy that wanted to bring us to a "better spot", and we ended up in the middle of nowhere at a gas station used only by people going shopping to the nearby mall. Shit. It got dark, and we were still there, freezing. I wanted to give up. We went to a bus stop, where we found out that we had to wait ages for the bus. Then suddenly, a young fellow that had seen our sign before, collected us from the bus stop and brought us to probably the nicest gas station I've seen for a long time: full of couches where people where relaxing without having to buy anything at the bistro or shop! Our driver had just come back after 6 months in the army in Afghanistan. Amazing stories told in just a few minutes. We had a break and drank tea out of our thermos flask. It was pitch dark outside, but good traffic. I am mostly very selective while asking people, and it happened again that a guy that we didn't ask invited us into his car, direction Dresden. The guy was indeed a bit weird and drove like in a videogame: 160 km/h with such a fog that you couldn't see half a metre from your nose. We didn't talk during all the time we sat in the car, over an hour. When I got off, I thought I had got white hair or even bold... but we were there, and in a few minutes, I asked in my broken hitchhikers' Czech that I had learned in the summer, for a ride to Prague. We very soon got one, and the guy (that played great music) drove us directly into Wenceslas Square, in the very middle of Prague (although he was not going into the city). It was 10 p.m., and we couldn't believe that we were there, when at around 4 p.m. we had almost frozen to death and wanted to give up! We had no idea what to do in Prague, only that we wanted to reach Vienna and our friends ASAP. But we had to celebrate. So we found a pub and had a great beer. Then we took the last metro to the outskirts (Chodov, to be precise), from where we were going to hitch to Brno in the morning. I felt something, that we would have found something there. Well, originally the idea was to find a pub that was open all night and stay inside there until the early hours, drinking or pretending to drink. But apparently there was nothing in the surroundings. We found some cardboard and tried to lie down somewhere, but the cold was very bitter. After some time in one spot close to the metro station, we decided to try something very daring: We went into the ATM room of a bank, one of those cabins where you need a card to get through the sliding doors. Of course there was a security camera inside, but let them come, we thought, if they come, then we move, but otherwise we stay here. And that was the winning strategy. The room was warm enough (it was heated!), and the floor was obviously neither wet nor cold. There was almost nobody around, and even those that walked past, didn't care too much about us.

So we survived in there until 6-7 in the morning, sleeping or something like that. And we set off to our hitching spot towards Brno. Hitching is great in Czech Republic, and also in the summer I never had problems with the language (people spoke excellent English or German). We indeed found a ride to Brno very soon, with a nice German-speakinh Slovak lady driving home for Christmas (it was the 24th). Because of a misunderstanding, she left us basically in the middle of the highway, but we soon found out that there was a big mall, TESCO and a gas station very close. We walked there, had food and a long break. We got there at 10:30 in the morning or so, so we were more than confident that we would have found a ride to Vienna before nightfall. But that didn't happen. It was very frustrating. Somehow the place didn't feel so right, although I checked later on Hitchwiki, and that was exactly the right spot, recommended by other users. Nobody helped us get further to the next gas station on the way, so after wasting the whole day trying the impossible, we took a train to Vienna, that was only 130km away. It was very expensive (600kr, 25€), at least for Czech standards and our budget, but we were very tired and cold from the day before.

Nevertheless, we spent a very nice Christmas in Vienna. The next day (25th), our friends drove us directly to a gas station on the way to Graz, where we got stuck for a while, until a nice lady drove us a bit further South, until the point the road splits into two, close to Wiener Neustadt. It soon became clear that Austria is not a good place for hitchhikers, that gas stations are too often on the wrong side of the road, and that for this reason most of the people are always going in the wrong direction. Or at least this is what they told us, since nobody wanted to give us a lift. Until we decided to go with the flow. Since everyone was going to Semmering, we decided to go there, just to get out of that place. I was really afraid that it was a bad idea, that we would get even more stuck than before. Luckily, the gas station was very good, although of course it was on the wrong side of the road (it was in the middle of a crossing, so cars could go in 4 different directions from there). The cold was really biting. And unique case of all gas stations I've ever seen, there was a heated smoking room inside (or at least something like that, since it was also used by the staff members as a garderobe)! The room was equipped with all things that someone who lives on the road can ever need: a table and bench to eat his lunch box, ashtrays, slot machines with naked ladies, and a TV showing several movies with Bud Spencer & co. Later in the day, it got less crowded, and we settled down in there, as we couldn't find any rides. Denise lay down on the bench and slept for something like 8 hours without pause. I have no idea how she did. I myself read a whole book till the end, wrote letters, and could not get any sleep in there.

This is how we spent the night, until the morning of December, 26th. I started to get very pissed at Austria. Everyone we talked to seemed to be bothered by us, and almost nobody showed any sympathy for us. I never ever had this feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the morning we tried a bit more, and then left that horrible place (that however had saved us from freezing) and walked to the train station. We had no idea about Austrian train tickets and passes, and there was little info around. So we got from the vending machine an Einfach Raus Ticket. Sounds good, let's get the hell out of here. At 3 p.m. we reached Villach, at the border with Italy. I didn't want to hitchhike anymore. I hadn't slept at all during the night, and I was pissed off at all those people. But I couldn't find any train going to Tarvisio or anywhere in that direction from Villach that day. Wtf? Even the bus to Udine/Venezia was not going that day. This was one of those signs, about whose existence I found out last summer (see my previous post)! It could only mean that we had to hitchhike to Italy, whether we wanted it or not. And we had to want it very badly, if we didn't want to get stuck again there.

There weren't even any buses or trams to the south of the city that afternoon, so we followed the signs and walked. We showed our sign Italia to everyone. But I saw many Italian cars carrying visibly uninterested people. I thought about how many people said that hitchhiking in Italy sucks. I hope they are wrong, at least up here, I thought. And an Austrian car with a visibly Southern guy inside pulled over, and gave us a great ride until Padua, from where we took a cheap train. And we reached my parents' house just in time for dinner.

And this was how we spent this Christmas...

The irony of fate

Until some days ago, Tamara and I were vagabonding around Galicia, with no clear plans but to go somewhere East one day soon. After "rescuing" Robin in Oporto and leaving him with Valentina, direction South, we decided to follow Robin's steps backwards into Viana do Castelo and Galicia, and let us inspire by the wonderful people that took such good care of him in the previous days.

Viana was not as nice as we expected though, the festivity was loud and full of gross churrascos. A huge line of stands occupied the whole coastline at the docks, with people selling all sort of crap. A caravan bearing the header Pop Musik was playing loud, fake music while a surreal crowd of people of all ages and sexes stared stupefied in the blinding spotlights at two screens that showed scenes of drunk girls at some mass concert showing their breasts on camera. Tamara asked for leftovers and we dined on free rice, chicken and olives. That night, I left my phone in the car that brought us there from Oporto, but I didn't care. Exceptionally, it was legal to camp inside the city, so we found a nice park next to the river beach and crashed there. When we woke up he next morning, we were hungry. Suddenly, a huge bus with dozens of passengers all wearing the same t-shirt arrived, and they set up a huge camp kitchen, a beer tap, and started eating copiously. While I was staring at them, Tamara got up and introduced herself to them with a big smile. They looked at her with suspicion, but eventually she came back with a plate full of deep-fried crab claws and other things. We still had some bread we got for free the previous night, and olives. That was probably the best breakfast we'd had in a long time.

We hadn't really clicked with Viana and its people, and the beach was too windy, rocky and cold. Leftover fruit and greens at the market were not great. So the next day we set off shortly before sunset. We hadn't really agreed on a destination, but it was clear that eventually we would have had to cross the border somehow, so I just wrote Vigo on the sign and my loyal companion didn't complain. We walked up the hill into the setting sun, wondering if we'd have ever get anywhere that night. I caught up speed, reached the designated gas station, and put down my sailor sack to wait for Tamara to reach me. The sack was leaning against a street light pole, and the sign with it, so Vigo was basically almost completely hidden by the pole... I then started jumping like a monkey, with my t-shirt over my head, to cheer up my travel buddy, when suddenly a car pulls over, and stopped right next to my sack, without driving further into the gas station. A guy came out, smiling, saying, in Spanish with a French accent, something like I have to move some things to the trunk, you guys can sit in the back. I stared at him astonished, and Tamara, that was still many meters away, probably too. It was very unlikely that anyone would ever read the sign, since it was half hidden, but not only did they see it, they also stopped while we were not hitchhiking (and I was jumping like a drunk monkey)! We jumped in. His Galician girlfriend was driving, and they met while he was hitchhiking to a festival in Andalucia; I always pick up hitchhikers, she said proudly, and he said that that was the first time he picked up people rather than being picked up himself, and passed us a joint. I love this kind of rides, karma, connection. They knew exactly where we could spend the night in Vigo, and dropped us off at a huge park in the centre.

Still, we were hungry. So we walked into town looking for fresh dumpsters. We checked some, and a pizzeria for mistake pizzas and such, but we could find nothing. It was 11 p.m., cold and the city was desert. We sat around for a while around the entrance of an underground mall, until we heard some voices. A couple with dreadlocks and a dog were working on a dumpster just down the huge stairway, where we hadn't been. I went down and went like hola! hay algo de interesante aquí?, that was immediately counteracted by the girl with a stupefying sei italiano?, which sounded a lot more like a statement than a question. She told me she had a van and was going to drive to Italy soon. I started fantasizing about getting a 2000km ride from there to Milan, and parted from them with a bag full of packaged tuna sandwiches fresh from the day, perfect apples, and orange juice. We ate, made supplies, and crashed in a corner of the park that looked like a huge bed of fallen leaves, where we slept like babies.

The next day, we ate some more sandwiches and hitched to the beach with a guy that lived most of his life in Argentina, Calabria and India. He was a fisherman there, a boat mechanic here, and a drummer in India. One of those short encounters that can inspire you for weeks. The sea was as clear as spring water, the sand was white. A lady from a frutería gave us a big bag of ripen fruit. We ate some more tuna sandwiches, met the rasta couple again, I was not going to get a ride to Italy, alas. We crashed again in the park.

Some days later, after mixing with pilgrims in Santiago de Compostela, getting introduced to a whole village during a Queimada in the middle of nowhere, and meeting with Ana, my former flatmate in Reykjavík, and her Icelandic boyfriend Óttar, and receiving outstanding hospitality from her and her family, we ended up at a road restaurant outside Foz. Hitching was slow and boring, and it was already quite late in the day, after long time waiting in the morning to get out of the middle of nowhere where we were. We found a ride for one on a truck to Oviedo, Tamara went. I was alone, somewhere in Northern Spain, and little traffic. I walked to the highway and found another hitchhiker, a local, that was going to Basque Country to look for a job. He offered me to hitch with him, which would have been fun, but I decided to go back to the restaurant and ask more people. Almost immediately, I asked a couple for a ride to Oviedo. The lady threw me a friendly glance that I really liked - she then threw the same glance to her husband, who consented. She crawled in the back seat and fell asleep, while I was condemned to an endless conversation spacing from travelling, cold vs. hot countries, politics, health, psychedelic mushrooms, alternative agriculture and ethnobotany, all the way to Bilbao. I got off the car that I was completely exhausted, but also happy about the 400km ride. I tried to hitch a ride to Vitoria-Gasteiz, without success, then tried to find a place to sleep in a thorny orchard where there was no flat ground, and eventually fell asleep somewhere quiet, until the rain woke me up at maybe 5 am.

The plan was to find a ride to Barcelona, and either spend there one night or take the ferry to Italy, that was leaving that same day at midnight. The ferry was expensive though (50€), impossible to hitch, and I knew quite well that I would've never made it to be back on time in Amsterdam if I had gone via Italy. I tried from 7 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon, from multiple spots, always with a sign and my thumb, to hitch a ride to Miranda de Ebro. I could find none. I grew very tired and demotivated. When I reached my last hitching spot, a gas station in Etxebarri, I realized I had to accept my fate, instead of fighting it, and give up my plans about Italy. After 20 min from this realization, I asked a car that was indeed going to Catalunya. It was 3 in the afternoon, I could have made it to the ferry. That was a big temptation, but I didn't betray what I had just realized, so I turned down the ride. The next people I asked were a nice old French couple and they gave me a stupendous 150km ride into France, until the perfect service area. It was there that, while I was looking around, my ride arrived and parked right in front of me. It was a Belgian van bearing the weird xerography L'origine du prénom du nom de familie. I walked to meet the driver. He was alone, the van was really full, but I saw there was some space in the front. I opened my arms wide, with my last forces I exhibited the best trustworthy smile I was able of, and said bonsoir monsieur! vous allez en diréction de Bordeaux?

We talked and drove for long hours, in my broken French, and then in English, until we stopped at a cold service area before Paris, and slept until 7:30 the next morning. I didn't want to cross France again, that's why I preferred going to Italy instead, but fate provided me with an amazing ride across all of it. The driver and I connected very well, and the next afternoon I was in Bruxelles. Two more rides, the last one with a crazy Indian driver that checked my passport and asked what was in my bag before taking me, and I was in Amsterdam. I still couldn't believe it. My crazy driver drove me to a coffieshop to celebrate with me my fortunate and unexpected comeback, and got me incredibly stoned. All this had to be.

Na República

I am still in Portugal, so this blog's title is getting increasingly more inappropriate. Wondering if I should change it into something else, wondering who is really reading it.
The Hitchgathering was a complete success for me. I met stupendous drivers, took the right routes, met randomly with amazing people at random gas stations in the middle of nowhere. Crossing France was a success, hitching in Spain was not so bad after all, and Portugal is really beautiful. We managed to gather around 80 people in Sines, all with amazing stories to tell. The locals were great, we went to the market to dumpster dive and people started giving us boxes full of stuff. We fed everyone with nearly no money, and with very poor facilities, Amilyn, I and other volunteers cooked food for the masses in a big pot on a barbeque grill. But the best part was the post-gathering, when a group of 15-20 people got together and continued South along the Alentejo coast and reached a cave on a beach near Porto Covo. We stayed there 3 days, partying, swimming, exchanging stories, cooking on a bonfire. I didn't want to leave, but now I am in beautiful Coimbra, in a "república", i.e. a students' commune where people pay almost no rent, and being CouchSurfing in the summer so hard, here you can just knock on a door to experience the renowned Portuguese hospitality. Heading somewhere North tomorrow looking for Robin, who didn't make it to Sines, and then somewhere East across Spain, maybe to Italy. Valentina and I will probably have to drop the idea to go to Serbia for the Guca festival, due to lack of time.

Everything is ready

It's not over yet: I am packing my stuff again, for this summer's last trip. From the extreme North this spring (Iceland) to the extreme South (Portugal). I have a schedule to go, info and phrasebooks written down from Hitchwiki, and a somewhat precise (but purely referential) plan:

Saturday 31/7: to Paris (meeting with Brillo)
Sunday 1/8: to Bordeaux
Monday 2/8: around the Basque Country
Tuesday 3/8: Pre-gathering in San Sebastián
Wednesday 4/8: Salamanca
Thursday 5/8: Lisbon
Friday 6/8: Sines

I have absolutely no plan for the way back, and finally, I can do without one. I know there is a big truck stop on the border between Portugal and Spain, I will go wherever I get a ride to. I cannot exclude a quick surprise stop in Italy, or even a visit to the Guca festival in Serbia, where Bregovic will be playing for free...

I will probably die of heat, a heat that I always try to flee, but this summer, when I will meet it face to face. So see you maybe end of August, when I'll be back in Amsterdam.

No longer Lost, no longer in the North

I have finally reached my macrobiotic corner of Amsterdam, and apart from a parenthesis for the hitchgathering in August, it seems that I am gonna stay here for a while (a year or so?), because everything worked quite well with university application and such. Besides, Denise makes amazing food (both at work and at home), and every day at the market there seems to be plenty of fruit and veggies to harvest for free. What more would I need?

Hitching this summer was ridiculously easy, by the way, and lots of fun (except for a Bosnian driver, with whom Steffi and I had so much fun that he wouldn't want to leave us, and it took a while to explain to him that we had to go further, from Prague to Dresden). From Zajezova ecovillage, just after walking down the road we got 2 rides into Budapest, stayed there 3 days, and then hitched in about 10h to Steffi's mum close to the beautiful national park of Saxon Switzerland. We never waited longer than 10-15 minutes, even when asking cars at gas stations, and it took only 3 rides from Budapest to Prague. Also hitching to Berlin was so fast, but never as fast as yesterday, when I reached Amsterdam from Raststätte Grunewald in about 6h. When I got there by S-Bahn, at around 9:30, it was already full of hitchhikers waiting for their ride, and all going to Amsterdam! They had been waiting for over an hour, but after 2 minutes two guys found a Belgian couple willing to take them to Hannover. I joined them in the car, where they told me that a friend of theirs was waiting with the car at a gas station in Hannover, and they were all bound to Amsterdam. They took me with them, so basically I got a straight ride...

Unfortunately the memory card of my camera somehow broke down and I don't have any pics from Budapest on, but I will soon have some from Portugal. Sines, yes we come!

Paradise found

I am in Paradise. Nothing more, nothing less. After talking for over a year about my project to visit Zaježová ecovillage, now I am finally here. There is no way I can describe what I feel now with words, only that I feel I have been here for ages, because I have known this place in my mind. Although it is not so terribly isolated (we even have internet), it is like living a dream, and therefore almost unreal. The sun is shining (in fact I am quite heavily sunburnt, in spite of the litres of suncream), the birds are singing, we make hey for the winter. We milk the goats, we make yoghurt and cheese, we water and harvest in the garden. We make a fire and spend an evening around it. It's like I've been waiting all my life to be here, and I can't picture the moment I'll have to leave, return to the "real world" out there. I am wondering whether I'll be a different person after one month, and whether I'll spend the next months longing for this amazing time here.

Getting here was the first part of the adventure. I left Berlin on Monday, May 31st, a bit too late for the 500km I wanted to cover. I spent some time looking for a decent spot toward Cottbus and Poland, and eventually stood next to the airport Schönefeld. It didn't go too well: I waited for over 3 hours and then decided to take a bus to a place called Bestensee, and then walk to the highway service station nearby. It took me 1h bus transfer to go there, plus 1 extra hour walking, of which 1/2h in the woods. At around 5 p.m. I got to the service station, somewhat wet because of the bushes I had to go through. No luck there either; no Polish cars, very few truck drivers, mostly already asleep. I saw there were some covered benches where I could have spent the night, and wondered whether I should stay there or try my luck at the next Rastplatz. Eventually, I decided to go and asked for a ride to Cottbus. I reached the gas station and found indeed a lot of trucks, but no covered benches, and the weather was not too promising. I asked around, until one Rumanian truck driver replied he was indeed going to Krakow, but of course the next morning. He spoke good English, probably Italian too and looked nice enough (he had a big sign in English with a golden cross saying "God is my co-pilot"), so I decided to go back to him the next morning. Nobody else was around, and I prepared to spend the night at the gas station. In fact, it was the first time that I ever did something like this, since I always camped or stayed at some couchsurfers while hitchhiking; it was cold and I didn't have a tent, so as early as 8:30 pm, I took out my sleeping bag and life saving alluminium blanket, wore all my clothes and lied down on one of the benches. During the night, I had to get up 2 times because of the pouring rain, and eventually, at 3 am, I gave up my plan to sleep, wrapped my sleeping bag around my shoulders, and started reading a book waiting for the first trucks to start the engine.

At around 5 am, after 2 long hours, the first drivers woke up. Since they were already sleeping at 7-8 pm, I thought they would wake up even earlier, but none of them did. I approached some Polish trucks, without success, until one called to me in Polish. Without knowing what he asked, I replied "Krakow", and with his hands, he showed me to the passenger seat. I jumped in smiling profusely. He was indeed a great driver. He spoke nothing but Polish, and I knew some 15 Polish words, but he was clever enough to speak in a way we could understand each other pretty well. I soon learned new words, and at some point, we crossed the border. At that point, he pulled up his seat belt, lifted his hands from the wheel and grabbed the handles over the doors, and cried Polska, kurvaaaa!! while the truck started bouncing up and down on the badly kept Polish motorway. All sort of stuff started falling down from the shelves of the truck, and the driver's eyes were lid up in a kind of ecstasy. At 9 am, he dropped me at a gas station in the commercial area of Wrocław.

At the gas station, I started looking out for cars. I soon realized that the biggest difference with Germany and Western Europe was not the quality of the roads, but who is inside the cars: a great number of cars that I intended to ask were stuffed with people and all sorts of stuff. I was considering to give up and go to the city to meet my Polish friend Piotr, with whom I had originally planned to travel to Krakow from Wrocław, when I heard a voice calling. Of course I couldn't understand what it said, so I ignored it. But at some point, it got closer, until I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and met the gaze of a reddish-bearded man, around 30 years of age, with an old-style backpack with metal bars in it, smiling to me and holding two big plastic bottles. Nie rozumię po polsku, I replied to his gasping smile. Luckily, he replied in English that he was calling to me from the other gas station on the other side of the highway, because he had seen me and as a sign of comradery, he wanted to give me half a liter of mineral water. I understood that he had found it somewhere, and thought I had no money. He also said I'm sorry, but I don't have any money to give you, and then asked me where I was going and started asking people in Polish and Ukrainian on my behalf. That random encounter was pretty impressive. After half an hour of asking without success, I looked into my pockets and gave him 5€, because he was going to Germany and obviously had no money (he said he had been sleeping on the concrete in the tent expo in Decathlon for days). Besides, he had done all that asking for me, and I am sure that if he had had any money, he would have given it to me. He stared at the tiny banknote, speechless. You're gonna need it in Germany, buddy, I said, and he just couldn't believe that I had just given him the equivalent of 20 złoty.

Eventually I met my friend Piotr and we decided to take a train to Krakow in the afternoon. The train was just 35 złoty and the journey quite pleasant. We couchsurfed there together, and the following day he flew to Iceland, I stayed a bit longer in Krakow, and then took a cheap bus to Zakopane, a very popular resort in the Tatras. I wanted to cross the border into Slovakia from there, heading for Rysy, crossing Poland's highest peak, 2500m. The most ridiculous thing that I encountered in Poland was indeed Zakopane. There, you have to pay for everything. I paid for using the hiking trails, for using toilets (rare in the rest of Poland), and as soon as I got there, everyone started trying to sell me some kind of accommodation, using all sort of signs that could be seen from the bus. I was looking for a cheap hostel and the tourist information office was already closed, so asking these people was no use. With the help of some English-speaking locals and a taxi driver I didn't buy a ride from, I walked one hour into the national park and to the beautiful hostel, which was hidden in the forest. The next day I packed my stuff and set off into the mountains. The weather was threatening, but it was not raining much. After a while I started worrying though, because I hadn't check the weather, I was alone and nobody knew I was going there, and almost nobody I saw was going in the same direction as me. I finally reached mount Zawrat, and there I found 3 hikers who told me they couldn't find the path from there because of the snow. They also told me that a tourist had died along my route a few days earlier. The weather was then very bad, and a lot of water was coming down from the mountains. Reluctantly, I headed back to the refuge, where I met a guy that was half Polish-half Venezuelan and his Polish girlfriend. They spoke Spanish to me and decided to offer me their company for the rest of the evening, until they had drunk a fair bit. Eventually there was a fight over a lost jacket, at the end of which my jacket was gone, because as I found out the next morning, they had taken it by mistake. They also left their camera in the hut, so the next day after a long search, I managed to find them again and swapped the lost goods. Everybody at the hut was telling me they were crazy.

I finally spent another night at the Goodbye Lenin hostel, and decided to hitch to Trstená and then down to Zvolen again. I was afraid hitchhiking in Slovakia was as bad or even illegal as reported on hitchwiki, but I found it to be actually very easy and fun. My other fear was the language but I managed quite well. I got six rides from Zakopane to my final destination, and in two of them the drivers spoke very good English, one German, and with the other ones I had to be creative. After my first ride, I was dropped in front of the bus station, where the lady pointed to the bus to Chochołów. I said thanks, but then hitched further, because I had no złoty left, and I wasn't sure where the bus would have taken me. It was a bit harder than I thought, because Zakopane was full of tourists that obviously didn't know where the tiny border village of Chochołów was, and in Slovakia I had the impression people looked down at me from their cars. My idea of the country was very different. I expected a developing, post-communist rural country not far from Poland in appearance, while what I saw was much better roads than in Poland, beautiful and well-kept villages, huge supermarkets and malls, nice cars, lots of people going shopping.

It got me fairly long to get all my rides, but they all came within a couple of hours. My main concern was the last bus from Zvolen to Kralová, that I needed to take to get to Zaježová, was at 3:50 pm, and of course I got there too late. But I started walking those 10km to Kralová showing my thumb and my big backpack at every car, until finally someone who was not going there (nobody was in fact going there, because I saw no cars) took me. From Kralová, I walked until the end of the road, until a dog came running at me.

I cuddled the dog and greeted a bunch of people sitting at something I later found out was the bus stop I intended to reach. I asked them if they spoke English, and if they knew where Zaježová was. One of them said: you're almost there. You must be Diego. We've been waiting for you. Now we can go. And they led me to the path through the meadows, to paradise Sekier.

...and finally, Germany

I am finally back in Germany. The transfer was not easy though, since I spent most of my time in Iceland working on my thesis, that I finally finished not long before I left. Last Saturday afternoon, after I had the last meeting with my supervisor, and spent all my day working on it, my word processor miserably broke down. I closed it and went home, thinking that I had lost only the last 10min of work; but I had the bad idea to click on "repair", which brought the status of the document back to what it was the day before, so basically deleting all I had done on that day. There was probably a way to undo the repairing, but instead of wasting time on finding the way, I just did all the work again, which I remembered quite well. I even went out to get some fresh air and see the crazy Reykjavík night life still blooming as dawn was approaching at around 3 a.m.. Then I went home, i.e. to the "hole in the wall", made a pdf of my work, and packed my stuff. My flight (yes, I flew this time, unfortunately - the ship was too expensive this time, because the cheapest couchettes were already fully booked) had been moved to Akureyri, because eventually, after over 1 month of volcanic ash trouble, the airport in Keflavík was closed. After a tiresome bus ride started at 7 a.m., I reached Akureyri again, and in the evening, Copenhagen. On the train to Hvidovre I fell asleep for 3 minutes or so, which made me miss my stop in Nørreport. So it took me 2 hours to finally reach my dear Icelandic-Greek friends, at whose place I spent an awesome night.

No need to say that the following day, when I was supposed to make it to Berlin, I overslept. I really needed a good sleep, but the delay seriously jeopardized my trip. I stuck out my thumb at a crossroad in Hvidovre at around 11:30, where I waited for a good two hours. The first ride was good, as I covered almost half of the way to Gedser, and I was dropped at a lovely service area with German cars. While I was looking for the right one, a nice Danish guy approached me and offered me a ride south. I told him that I was looking for Germans, but he insisted, so knowing that most Germans drive cars filled with kids and stuff, I accepted. He dropped me in the countryside close to Nykøbing (Falster) at a toll area with a lot of trucks, that looked good. But always the same story here: German truck drivers are not allowed to take people on board. And the other ones, they weren't going to Germany. So I tried a couple of rounds, with no success. Then I walked up the road (a good 2km or so) and stood next to a sign saying "Rødby - Gedser". I stood for hours with my sign to Gedser, but everyone either played tricks on me, or ignored me. Eventually I went back to the truck spot, for another round with the trucks. No success. So after wasting all my afternoon like this, I walked up the road in the other direction, to the next village. I tried to hitch a ride anywhere, with no success. Just one car stopped to tell me that the highway to Gedser was closed... So eventually, at around 6 p.m., I took a train to Nykøbing (I was only 2 stops away), and took the cheap bus to Gedser (the railway was not working either!). At around 7 I was at the ferry terminal, where I saw that the next ship, the last of the day, was leaving at 9.

I had heard that the ferries to Germany are free after 9 p.m.. It's not really like that. It's just that the ticket sale is closed, and nobody really checks your ticket, so it's easy to sneak in. Also, the ticket is actually valid for a round trip, so at that time of the day it's clear that most of the passengers are going back and don't need a ticket. I was with a German guy that was asking around how he could buy a ticket, so eventually I had to buy one too, because the ticket counter opened just for us. The ship was nearly empty, so I didn't find any cars to take me on board. The price is great though, 7€ for a 2h ride, that you can take both ways. At around 11 p.m. we arrived in Rostock, where I started to look for a suitable place to crash at the harbour, but couldn't really find one. I decided to go downtown then, because it would take some time and just in case, I could easily stay awake until 5 or so, when I could have started looking for early birds driving to Berlin. Meanwhile, I had called my girlfriend to ask her if she could find me a place to stay in town. I stood for half an hour waiting for a bus that didn't come, unlike the shuttle bus driver had told us. Eventually, I realized it was not a bus that was supposed to come, but an "Abruftaxi", a taxi-bus that you need to call at least half an hour in advance. It was too late to call for the last one, so we were stuck at the harbour, 10km away from the city centre. My girlfriend told me that, incredibly, she had found a last-minute couch. I texted the guy that there was no bus and I was going to walk downtown. He replied that it would take me 2h to walk downtown, and that he was going to bed, but I could just call him and wake him up any time I'd be there. So me and the German guy started walking somewhere. We first got to the main road, which is in fact a motorway, and a nice sign was standing on it warning that it's forbidden to walk on it. I proposed that we should walk anyway, because the spotlights were good and the few cars driving by could have stopped for us. If the cops would come, they would have given us a ride, I said, and probably keep us busy for the rest of the night, which wouldn't have been as bad as sleeping in the cold. But the other guy didn't like this option, and since he kind of knew the area, I followed him. We ended up at a house were rail workers were staying. We asked a guy watching TV in there how we could walk downtown "legally". He said we couldn't, so ganz unoffiziell, unofficially, he showed us the way along the rail tracks (that were obviously forbidden too). We walked on there and ended up in another place, where we were supposed to go over a fence. In that moment, a car came and opened it. We asked for the way, and then for a ride, which we got, after the man had had a shower. He drove us to the tram stop, where the very last one came after 5 minutes, at 00:30.

At 1 I had finally reached my couch, and woken up the guy, of course. He welcomed me with a big, sleepy smile, and introduced me to his cat and to the fragrant, ready-made guest bed. I slept like a baby until 10:00 the next morning, when my host and his girlfriend greeted me with a Na, mister CouchSurfer? I had breakfast with them, and within half an our, I hitched a ride to Berlin. If there were a golden couch or some prize like that, these people would have won it, if it were up to me!

Berlin was cold. It was colder than Reykjavík and colder than Denmark, don't ask me how. When I arrived in Lichenberg, where my girlfriend was waiting for me at a friend's, she told me that the next day we would have had to leave with her at 5:30. It was like a curse then, I thought. The "friend" had decided to go away for 4 days straight after work, and didn't even think of letting us take care of the apartment. At first, I was baffled; then I calmed down, and realized that although I spend most of my time with perfect strangers that welcome me into their homes in the middle of the night, feed me, give me rides, and in many cases left me the house keys for several days without even knowing me, there is still a great deal of the world around me and these people that is not like that. My lifestyle isn't "normal", although when one lives deep into it, you may come to believe that it is, and than out there it's just a minority of people that are paranoid and ideologically refuse to be nice. We still have a long way to go.

On my bookshelf: The Vegetarian Myth

One of the reasons why I loved living in Iceland was that I always had some great books in my hands. It happened this time again, since I was given The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith, who spent 20 years of her life as a vegan.

By reading it, I wanted to challenge myself and my (political and nutritional) vegetarian beliefs, and sure this book is great for such enterprise. This is the reason why "everyone that eats should read this book", as stated on the cover. But thinking that I was reading about politics and nutrition, in fact the book surprised me as an authentic piece of neo-primitivist theory, ultimately stating that veg(etari)anism vs. meat is not the problem and it is not what will save the planet. The real critique is against our idea of civilization centred on agriculture. While on one hand it shares all vegetarianism's abhorrence of animal factory farming, on the other it is our diet and ultimately our society built on the cultivation of annual grains that is the problem, and the facts speak for themselves. After 3 years of vegetarianism and several thoughts about going vegan, I am now prompted to become an adult vegetarian, meaning that there is so much more that I, as a vegetarian, need to consider, first of all the destruction of huge ecosystems for supporting a grain-based diet - this being a common issue for everyone who eats grain and products of modern farming techniques, regardless of the meat intake.

Here are pluses and minuses about the book. Comments are welcome... :)

+ the true problem of modern, "civilized" diet is not meat eating, but grain production, especially in monocrops. Large parts of such grain is fed to animals, but even if nobody ate meat, this huge portion of the earth destined to annual crops would in any case imply topsoil destruction and the disappearance of pastures, forests and complex ecosystems for human exploitation. Even a plant-based diet can imply mass killing.

- true, soil needs animals, their manure and the corpses of dead animals, too, in order to be fertile. But not all soils are pastures: there are ecosystems that thrive without being fertilized by faeces of animals domesticated and/or hunted by humans. Animal farming is not so easy to justify in such terms. Plus, saying that the earth needs the corpses of dead animals doesn't really imply that it is our duty to kill and grind up cows or chickens (and why not dead humans?) and spray our fields with their blood and bones, or using manure from domesticated cattle and that that is the only alternative to fertilizers from fossil fuels. Permaculture (the cultivation of perennial, interacting plants) and especially the Fukuoka method proved that green manure and permanent mulching work just as fine for keeping the soil healthy and productive, and that even large-scale grain production is possible and productive with little or no human intervention. Masanobu Fukuoka demonstrated that rice fields almost don't need to be flooded, sprayed or weeded, and that a single field can support two different kinds of grain growing side by side, being thus much more productive than monocrops and if the stalks are returned to the field as green manure after harvesting, at the same time it improves the soil. Why is he still ignored?

+ that adulthood starts with acknowledging death as a natural process is for me the most valuable point of the book. Our problem nowadays is that carnivores and many vegetarians alike seldom know where and how food comes from. Regardless of our diet, most of us are ignorant and kept such. Some people embrace vegetarianism like a new religion, others see it as a way to widen their given horizons, in a process that should never end. For me, giving up meat was a way to try something new, question what I held to be unquestionable, learn about food and the world around me. What I ate ceased to be a meaningless, automatic act, and became a meaningful, conscious choice. I discovered new foods, preparations, combinations. Began reading labels, and seeing through a steak or a piece of bread everything that lay behind it. Yes, everything dies and is born again in nature's endless cycle, and for a living being to live and thrive, someone else has to die, either by human hand or not. Like many others I believe, of course I considered this when I turned vegetarian. I am fully aware of this and that is why I would never think lions should eat grass, or that Inuits should eat salad and not whale, or I wouldn't really mind killing (or eating, why not) a swarm of snails threatening my garden. I am not against killing for food, I am against pointless suffering and a sick industrial system of food production that is just morally, environmentally and economically unacceptable.

One needs to draw the right conclusions from the book. I don't think that the ultimate point of the author is that the reader should close the book and start wolfing on meat and diaries, but rather to fully understand how food and nature work, free of whatsoever ideological barriers. Although I mostly agree with the author, I am not going to run to the butcher's shop after reading this book. I will simply keep on thinking that if I ever will live in a successful organic farm, where absolutely no topsoil is destroyed, and where I act as a natural regulator of the animal population on the farm, or if I was living in Greenland or among some semi-nomadic tribes living the life of our ancestors in an unspoilt landscape, I will consider eating meat. But for the time being, I am not in any of such contexts, nor are many other people.

- embracing neo-primitivist philosophy doesn't mean being or acting as a hunter-gatherer. It means acknowledging the validity of (some) hunter-gatherers' societies as an environment-friendly, natural, and fair societal models. Adopting a grain-free diet is a possibility, but a diet largely based on game or even organically farmed meat is less possible for all mankind than a complete plant-based one, because the premises for it are just missing right now. Not everybody lives in the ideal environment for feeding on grass-fed animals.

And even if Mr. Keith does, she misses a big point: what is she going to feed her animals during winter? Domesticated cattle and goats (the main source of milk for human consumption) don't naturally stay in the same spot all year around in a temperate climate, but they either need to be fed hay (from annual crops fields) or, in case you're nomad or semi-nomad, be moved to a winter pasture. Agriculture is not only about grain, it is also about animal farming, and if you criticize or refuse agriculture, you can't leave anything behind. Even assuming that a farmer rotates his fields and lets animals graze in a different one in turns, he'll still need a monoculture of alfalfa on one of them that is not grazed but turned into hay for the winter. He still remains an agriculturalist, with all it implies. I am not sure how this fits into the author's primitivist or anti-agriculture mental scheme, or how much land you'd need to feed how much meat to how many people. In other words, I'd like to know how many people per acre her friend farmers can feed with their grain-free farms, and if they are really self-sufficient and 100% grain-free... but that, she doesn't say.

- milk. The author is a big fan of cow milk (called liquid meat, by extremist vegan propaganda). Too bad that the greatest part of the world population is lactose tolerant, and nobody really was originally. Those who are not can keep fooling their nature by taking diary pills, but is that not even less natural than feeding a complete plant-based diet to an omnivore? The reality is that our bodies neither want nor need milk. Most of the world's human population has made it so far without milk, which is but a recent innovation. In the America she dreams of, there shouldn't be any European-imported cows, and the bison-hunting natives who (or at least whose legacy) should inhabitate the region are naturally 100% lactose-intolerant. Like millions of other people, I grew up without cow milk and I'm perfectly fine.

- the nutritional argument may make a lot of sense in evolutionary terms, but only until the industrial revolution and the advent of modern cities. Except for some pathological cases (such as the author's personal history), experience clearly shows that a vegetarian or even a vegan diet is not necessarily more harmful than eating meat. A wrong veggie-based diet can be as harmful as a wrong meat-based diet. It is just common sense. I suspect that the serious health problems she developed can be ascribed to such cases, plus additional causes that may have been aggravated by a wrong diet. She can blame soya for a cancer, but millions of Asians eating soya in all possible forms (beans, tofu, tempeh, soya sauce, sprouts...) simply prove her wrong. This is a huge controversy that cannot be solved by the personal clinical file of one single individual. 60% of all Indians are vegetarian and have been for centuries, maybe even millennia; some of them suffer from malnutrition, true, but how much of that malnutrition is due to actual poverty and how much to vegetarianism? Just as much as our progenitors changed diet and started hunting big ruminants because their landscape had changed (rainforest shifting to savannah), today our landscape has dramatically changed again and we have to cope with this in terms of nutrition. Vegetarianism may not save the world, but at least to a certain extent, I believe some version of it does make more sense than irresponsible meat-based diets in a time of overpopulation and overexploitment of natural resources. Maybe in some thousands of years, if humans will still be here, the brain mass of vegetarians will have shrunk, just as much as it grew from eating animal fat; but considering how much we use of our brain today, I don't see big dangers upcoming at least for the next few millennnia. Fighting annual monocultures is not on the veggy movent's agenda, true; we can start with reducing that, and doing it differently, more efficiently and less destructively. But by converse, can eating more meat really be a solution? I can concede that in some cases, it may well be (when grain and vegetables have to be imported at high costs from far away and ultimately damage domestic food production). But how much does that apply to those of us living in modern urban conglomerates that produce no food at all?

- so, what should we really do? The last point concerns foodstuffs that has been completely forgotten by the author: so-called superfoods. In these last months, I read a lot about them and I came to believe that it will be neither mainstream veganism nor meat to save us and the planet, but (less known) foodstuffs that are extraordinarily rich in some nutrients. Some of them are very easy to obtain, like spirulina, a seaweed that contains more than 60% complete protein (more than beef), and like all seaweeds, is exceptionally rich in minerals. Also, the way seaweed is farmed does not have anything to do with conventional farming (nor with animal manure): all you need is a water-filled vat or transparent pipes, sunlight and just any plant waste as its "feed". This combination yields the most amazing food on earth, that can provide so much nutrition in exchange of such little effort. Seaweeds can also be used as an easy, cheap and sustaibable source of oils to burn as biofuel. And this is but one example. The benefits of many lesser known seeds, berries, nuts, sprouts, unrefined bee products, raw cacao, and much more (even insects!), many of which are already found locally in many places, are huge, and none of these really requires conventional farming in annual monocultures. But as long as we keep on ignoring them, we'll be stuck in this situation, thinking that either chickpeas or meat alone will save us.

This is what I learned from this book: giving up meat is not enough. There is so much more to it, and nobody holds the truth: there is always more to learn, as many things as there are diets. Mediterranean, Arctic, macrobiotic, vegetarian, vegan, Ayurvedic, raw foodist, "paleodiets", urinotherapy (!!), even fasting and cannibalism... they all make sense to some people and situations. They are all ways humans have found to adapt to some contexts. Many of them are anthropological, i.e. they are indicative of a culture, or a sub-culture, like veg(egetari)anism, plus of a certain time of human history, and environment.

The next post will be on paleodiets and extinctionism.

Velkominn heim

Yesterday, Wednesday, April 14th, at 6:30 p.m. I got off a car at Hlemmur bus terminal. After 10 days on the road and at sea, my thumb had brought me all the way back to Reykjavík.

I really don't feel like writing, I am totally overwhelmed by this weird feeling of being back home without having a home.

On the way from Voss, I dropped more than half of the things I had with me in my bag, trying to be as light as possible. I even gave up my tent and sleeping mat, and as the events soon proved, I didn't really need all that stuff. Of course, hitch-hiking in Iceland means accepting the possibility of getting stuck in the middle of nowhere, maybe overnight. But it didn't happen.

Short before I left Århus, I contacted Eleonora in Tórshavn. She is vegan and I wanted to meet her and her German boyfriend Hannes during the 8 hours I was going to stay in Tórshavn. What she told me was that her boyfriend was in Århus too at that time, and could give me a ride to Esbjerg, because he was going to catch the same ferry. He drove me there, spent a nice time together with him and another French guy on board, and then he invited us over to their place to have an awesome vegan breakfast. His girlfriend made delicious chocolate-coconut waffles, and then we went on a city tour. They also invited me to stay over with them longer and take the ship later, but I really had to go.

Two immediate rides from Seyðisfjörður and Egilstaðir, off I go. The weather was great, the people, fantastic. Although our second ride was all the way to Akureyri, I decided to get off at Mývatn and look for jarðböð, natural baths. This didn't have anything to do with the so-called "Blue Lagoon of the North", which is just a swimming pool with a 2000kr entrance (provided that the water is free, and the building around it costs as much as any other swimming pool, I don't get why it costs more than 360kr). I am talking about caves with hot water inside. My driver had been there as a child, and didn't quite remember (of course, it's free, they don't advertise it), but he managed to find out and drove me all the way to the caves. You have no idea, but you will have as soon as I will upload some pictures...

However, I couldn't really enjoy the bath after I realized that I had left my bag with my laptop on the roadside in Egilstaðir. I grabbed my phone to call the police, but my battery was dead (and my charger was in the bag). Hitchhiking with a laptop is not recommendable, but if you're still pretending to be a student, like me, you're gonna need it. So I walked about 4km to the next town Reykjahlíð and called the police from the post office (why use a payphone when people have at the post office have nothing to do?). They didn't know about it, meaning that nobody had reported the bag yet, so it could have been stolen. I decided to hitch further to Akureyri with my French and Belgian travelmates, and waited 4h in the cold for our ride.

We got to Akureyri at 8:30 p.m. and I was driven to the doorstep at my host's, a nice Polish girl working as a researcher at the university of Northern Iceland. When she welcomed me, she asked me aren't you missing a computer bag? Now, how could you possibly know about it? I said. A Dutch couple hitch-hiking from the ferry had been standing after us at the very same hitch-hiking spot, found my bag, and although we hadn't exchanged names, because of the Italian text on the bag realized it was mine, and remembered that I had said I had a couch in Akureyri at a Polish girl's. They logged in, found her profile, and told her about it. In 1-2 days I'll have my bag back.

Yesterday, the Belgian guy and I got stuck in Varmahlíð, 100km West of Akureyri, after a long wait to get out of the city. It was just in time to meet Caroline, a nice German girl that seems to be everywhere I am or I want to be (she was with Eleonora and Hannes in Tórshavn too). She made food for us and stayed all over her lunch break. If we hadn't had luck, we could have even spent the night there. Now, isn't this awesome. You are in the middle of nowhere in Iceland, and you find out that a friend is temporarily there for a very short-term job. No matter what happens, I know something crazy is going to happen to me, like when I got forced to accept a 50€ banknote by my ridegiver last summer in Germany. Or getting there at exactly the time I need. When you start wandering where you'll spend the night, there comes your ride.

I am staying at a friend's now, but in the house where I was living in a whole in the wall until last October there is a vacant room, so apparently I'm even gonna get a room all for myself, for free, in house full of dear friends of mine.

Welcome home.