All week, I've been preparing to leave to go to Sweden. Lisa and I are going to WWOOF on an organic farm in Enkoping, and I wanted to make sure I had all the bits and pieces. In addition, it's harvest season, so Lisa has been working at the Lagerhaus and I had been helping on the field.
Last minute, I decided to stop in Thüringen on the way, to hang out with some old friends for a couple of weeks. I wanted to leave on Friday, so on Thursday, I went back to Vienna to get the stuff from Lisa's apartment that I wanted to take to Sweden. Because Lisa was at the Lagerhaus, her brother took me to Leopoldsforf train station to get the train to Vienna. Leopoldsdorf doesn't have a ticket service of any sort, you must buy the tickets on the train. The conductor was in my carriage but she seemed too lazy to get out and check any tickets, so I didn't end up buying one, and just got off on the first station in Vienna. When I got off, however, I realised that I had forgotten to bring the keys to the apartment, so I had to Whatsapp everyone and let them know that I had, very typically for me, forgotten the keys and had to return to Kopfstetten. I had to buy a ticket from the machine and luckily, Lisa's brother would meet me at the Leopoldsdorf, drop off the key and I would take the next train to Vienna.
We did that, wasting almost a whole hour in total, and on the way back to Vienna, the conductor walked past me, looked me in the eye but didn't ask for a ticket and I never brought it up, so I got to Vienna free again.
I got the stuff from the apartment, and a new case for my phone, and headed back. I packed my stuff, and got ready to leave. I wanted to hitchhike, and I'd planned for it to take two days, I planned to arrive on Saturday evening. Lisa dropped me off at the Schönfeld-Lassee train station, I took a train to Vienna, and then made my way to the Hütteldorf, as suggested by hitchwiki.org.
It didn't take long for me to get my first ride and get on the way! My sign said "Kiwi going to Germany", because I felt like it would be beneficial for my sign to say that I was
- From New Zealand
- An English-speaker
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| My "Kiwi going to Germany" and my stuff |
However, the guy that picked me up didn't really read my sign, he just stopped to pick me up, he did, however, think it was cool I was from New Zealand. A pretty interesting guy, from Südtirol, in Italy (but the Austrian-German-speaking part), he lived in Vienna but worked near St Valentin as a tour guide at an old concentration camp. He dropped me off at a rest-stop, not too close to St Valentin, but that got lots of traffic.
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| At my first drop-off, in Oed |
The next guy was one of the more interesting rides I've ever had. Again, not sure that he read and comprehended my sign in it's full entirety, we definitely got along right from the start. He was a Kurdish guy from Turkey, but had grown up in Romania. As he told me, the Turkish population in Romania is not particularly sizeable.
He could take me to Nürnberg, which was amazing, that was about half my journey complete right there! However, just after Passau, there was a border control, and they pulled us aside and checked our passports, his car and quickly interviewed us. We didn't have anything illegal and weren't doing anything wrong, and once they understood I was a hitchhiker, they were less confused about why a New Zealand with a Swedish working holiday visa and residency card was travelling with a Turkish Romanian who was going to Paris.
We stopped at a rest stop to get some lunch, and it turned out to be quite a nice little stop. I got one of my favourite Austrian comfort foods, Leberkäse, and I have to say, it was definitely one of the more generous slices I've ever had and accompanied it with a Radler, with dark beer (which I don't recommend). My new friend got an egg sandwich type thing, but when we sat down outside to eat, he decided he would get some potato salad as well (he was a vegetarian), so went back inside. He came out with nothing, and I asked him about it, and he said the chef had told him he would make him something special. He went inside after a few minutes, and came out with a massive plate of pasta, mixed with scrambled eggs, with large helpings of various salads on the side. He had brought two forks with him, because it was too much for one, and the chef had only charged him €5!
After we were done, we went in and said our thanks for the fantastic food, and headed out again. Unfortunately, it turns out on the motorway, there wasn't really a good stop close to Nürnberg, so he dropped me off a bit west of Nürnberg. Now that I was in Germany, I thought that having a sign that said "Kiwi going to Germany" was a bit pointless, as I was already in Germany, so I wrote a new sign on the back that simply said "North/Nord" on it, as I was going pretty much just heading North.
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| Just in front of the Fun World Casino |
After only about 15 minutes or so, a fancy newish Audi stopped, and a sort of business-type stopped and asked me about where I was going, in German. We discussed it, decided it would work and put my bags in the back. I introduced myself and he asked where I was from. As soon as I said I was from New Zealand, he switched to speaking in English and turns out, he liked the fact that I was from New Zealand. He had spent some time in Australia and really enjoyed it and as a consequence, he really wanted to go back to that part of the world.
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| Arrived safely in Jena |
He was heading to Leipzig, but in the end, he made a special effort to drop me off in Jena, which was my goal. I had made, what I planned to be a 2 day journey, in a single day, in less than 12 hours. I found what seemed to be the only hostel in Jena, and luckily, got there just before reception closed.
The guy who checked me in seriously thought I was the coolest person ever. He loved that I was from New Zealand, that I speak German and that I was hitchhiking. He offered to help me with my stuff after checking me in, but he only took me sign and showed it to other people. The only other guy in the dorm was a young Russian kid, very shy because his English was not particularly strong, but a really nice kid nonetheless. He offered me a beer after an hour or so of us sitting in near-silence on our respective electronic devices, and we had a small chat. He was in town for a science conference, and had an extra weekend just to look around a little bit.
In the morning, I checked out and went to get a breakfast at a cool cafe called "Stilbruch", where a good friend of mine had formerly worked in the kitchen. I just went there on her recommendation, and it was super-busy, but the food was great. Afterwards, I went to the supermarket, as I'd forgotten my shower gel in Vienna, and I also bought a bottle of wine. I took the train to the small town where I was meeting my friends, but they couldn't pick me up until the early afternoon, so I sat at the small town train station and drank a whole bottle of wine to myself.
Needless to say, when they came to get me, I was pretty drunk.
We had some more drinks, had a barbeque, had a nice time, and I had a sleep. We had some stuff to do on Sunday, luckily I didn't feel too worse for wear, and so I've been busy and only really found time to write this update at the very arse-end of the weekend. Hopefully I'll be better organised next week and get up a couple of posts about the UK as well.
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