During the festival, I had been careful to keep one clean T-shirt separated from the rest of my clothes in a plastic bag. Once the music stopped, I packed all my (wet) stuff in my backpack, put on the "nice t-shirt" and walked to the main road where I was planning to hitch-hike to Berlin.

Anyone can improvise himself a hitch-hiker. All it takes is a road, a thumb, and mercy in the heart of drivers. But some tricks make you more likely to reach your destination. The first one being : "go to the right road". A hitch-hiker without a map will need a lot of luck.

I had a map so I found it, the right road, and went there. The second rule would be: "get the right spot". A good spot is: "where the drivers will see you well" and "where the drivers will have somewhere to stop if they want to". A good addition is : "where the drivers won't be driving too fast past you". I found a place like that, dropped the bag and put up my sign.

Hitch-hiking with a sign can be very useful. You can use a piece of cardboard box, a sheet of A4 white paper... some really organized travelers carry a white board with markers. You write the nearest big city in your direction and show it to the drivers passing by. My sign said "Berlin", since I believed it was pretty likely one of the drivers of that road would be going there straight.

I had been standing there with my thumb out for 10 minutes when an old corrugated van pulled over.
It is my own little personal philosophy to never refuse a ride that goes my way. On the presumption that maybe the one nicest guy on Earth kind of looks like a serial killer, and I would be missing on him if I decided to be picky. I believe that even if you're a girl, blond-haired and with... hem... harmonious features, it is still the way to go. All you'd need for protection is some self-confidence.

Inside the van, there was already two people. Both of them Polish so I had to use body language a lot (I speak "only" French, English, Spanish and German). But they were going to Berlin. I threw my bag in the back and jumped on the "middle seat" and off we went.

It turned out that the seats were not fastened to the frame of the vehicle, that the seatbelts were missing and that the man seating right against me was strongly smelling of that very particular scent of a homeless person. I, myself, hadn't taken a hot shower in days (not counting the rainstorm at the festival) so I could hardly complain. The homeless guy turned out to be very silent, the driver very talkative. He spoke to me in Polish (where I still know some words), a bit of German and English and a lot of arm movements.

We talked very much about how the German cars were good and fast, how the weather was finally back to nice (after 3 days of rain, right onspot for my outdoor festival) about his German colleague that leaves on the other side of the border, about how the Polish food is much better than the German (I argued that point)...

And as we were devising about all that, he pulled over in an industrial area and started looking for something in the neighborhood at low speed. He explained to me why he was doing that but I didn't get it.

In the early days of my hitch-hiker's life, it would have made me highly suspicious; but after 7 years of experience with not a bad one, my trust in the genuinely kind nature of the people that were nice enough to take me in is as hard as rock. Though I do recommend the harmonious blond girl to stay on her guards when that happens to her.

He finally stopped on the parking lot of one of the companies, walked out with a sign that meant : "I'll be right back". The homeless guy followed, I hanged around the truck. My backpack was in the trunk and I'm not that naive. The homeless guy came back after three minutes with a fridge on a trolley. I helped him to unload it near the van and he went back with the trolley... only to come back with another fridge. I figured that some help might be needed over there so I followed him this time.

Total, we loaded eight fridges in the van before taking off again. I had no idea why and I didn't really care to know. Their business.

We arrived in Berlin before 3pm. He dropped me near a S-bahn station (the "tube" of Berlin) and wrote down all his contact details in my back-pocket-notebook, in case I would come back to Kostrzyn one day. I warmly thanked him and his homeless friend and took off feeling a bit shitty because even if I would eventually go back to Kostrzyn, Calling him is pretty unlikely to be on top of my list.

People call me names very often for buying into stereotypes all the time. But I do believe that there are, sadly. About this type of guy, my friend Paul that is even more outrageous than me said: "Those types, they would give away their life for a complete stranger like you. They have no culture, no education, just a big heart". Then I started calling him names. But of course he's right and the world is far from that cool place of liberty, equality and fraternity that I wish it would be.

Anyway, back to the road novel. I had so many dirty things that needed to be washed, including my own body, that I stayed two days in Berlin, at a friend's place. Anyway, I had a lot of friends to pay a visit to so I was quite busy there. I think I left more sleep-deprived than I was after the festival.