….7:00 am - we woke up, took quick shower. My brother-in-low gave us
a lift to the gates on a highway in Dopiewiec. It’s really good option because all cars slow
down there and they have place to stop for the moment. All information like this: how to get out
from the city, where is a good place and legal to hitchhike you can find on http://hitchwiki.org/, it’s better to use English version
because there is much more information than in polish hitchwiki. We were
waiting for 5 minutes when the first car stop. It was a polish truck (about
truck drivers I will write more because their peculiar culture can be really
interesting some how). He gave us a lift to gas station near to the
border. Then we started to ask people if
they were going the same direction – Berlin. It was obvious that 80% were going
this direction because it was a highway but I think it sounds more polite if we
ask people where do they go. Some hitchhikers say that asking people is not
really educate that it’s better to just stay in some place with cartoon and waiting. Ofc it works in some places (on the
local road or roundabout) but we prefer
to just ask in really polite way without impose on anybody, first asking if
they speak English or Spanish etc. The thing is to do it with smile, be
easy-going …. We have a situation when somebody said “no” but then when he/she
went to pay and observed us a little bit and he/she said “Ok, I will take you”.
Then we heard that it’s because they had never gave a lift to anybody but we
seemed to be nice and not dangerous. So sometimes people need a time. I guess I will come back to the topic of
asking people on the gas station because their answers sometimes are really
really funny :D Coming back to “How did
we get to Amsterdam?”. We were asking
maybe 5 minutes in gas station and then
one polish businessman took us about 30 kilometers from Magdeburg. There
we ate our lunch and had some nice conversation with two retired Dutch. Then we
asked people if they could take us: we found polish track-driver. He took us to gas station near to Hannover
and there we met really extraordinary Scottish named Luke…
