Mind Your Elephant

First things first: FRANCE IS A HITCH-HIKER’S HELL! At least the Paris region really sucks and at least for lonely guys with bandannas. It’s been amazingly difficult to hitch rides, even at the toll road booths called péage which are supposedly the best possible places for hitch-hikers… yeah, maybe 30 years ago. But because of these perceived hardships I’ve managed to see more of the country and end up in places which I couldn’t assume seeing. So far Tours is my favorite city in France! I’ve also got a chance to meet up with a lot of CouchSurfers and I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s going to be one of the mega-trends that shape the way how we behave. Through initiatives like CouchSurfing start trusting each other more. Maybe sometime in the future we can drop the concept of strangers and just talk about friends who haven’t met yet.

Anyways, I’m struggling to find time to write my book. Maybe these few days in Lyon before the Hitch-gathering pre-meeting on Friday allow me to get started. I’m staying in a nomadbase called Casa Bonita. The interesting thing about this place is that you don’t feel like a guest, but more like a peer-host. It’s fairly recent and was started only in May. I kind of like the owner’s straightforward honesty. He says: “I’m not laid back, nor open-minded. I have a problem with most of the population of this world: I support ecology, transparency (in individuals and institutions), constitutional freedoms, social equality and I feel that anyone that does not is an outright asshole. This list gets longer as I’m getting less and less tolerant of the surrounding stupidity. It doesn’t get better since I moved to France (from Germany). If you’re content with the way human affairs are conducted around the world and think that it should not change then… then just fuck off seriously.”

Oh yeah, for those who wonder if I visited Paris, yes I did. But I didn’t do any of those ordinary touristic stuff, so I have no idea how the city center actually looks like. Fine, I did momentarily pass that big artsy-fartsy thingy and the glass pyramid next to it, and I did see the top of that one tower in the distance, but apart from that I just concentrated on the lovely people surrounding me. And here I’m speaking of CouchSurfers again, ‘cos you can’t really say the same of the stressed, bored, scared Parisiennes.

This is part thirteen of Tomi Astikainen’s travel diary on his journey to the European Hitchhikers’ Meeting in Portugal on 6 August 2010… and on a journey to himself. Current location: Lyon. Current mood: relaxed.