Back... home?

So we're there! Finally in Poland, we managed to survive the trip! Yuppie! :) Granada is probably not a place for us, we couldn't get there neither two years ago nor this year... We spent a whole day trying to hitchhike there, but without any positive result... Finally we decided to take a bus to Cordoba, maybe it's good to leave something for next trips, I hope the third time we'll get there, but for sure we won't try hitch-hiking... ;)

It's funny, but when we were going to Portugal, we developed an idea about some kind of destiny... You know, if we hadn't waited for so long in Aix-en-Provence, we wouldn't have met all the nice drivers, who took us to Carcassonne, to Foix and then to San Sebastian... Maybe we wouldn't have been hosted by Basques and then we wouldn't have met our great Brazilian and Portuguese drivers! We were so lucky all the time that it seemed to be a kind of system, definitely not a coincidence....

The way back seemed just the opposite ;) We imagined a perfect driver - an owner of a chain of Indian restaurants traveling through Europe to check the quality of food and staying for 1-2 days in Sevilla, Granada, Barcelona, Paris, Wroclaw and Copenhagen...And of course inviting us to all those places, especially to his flat in Copenhagen where we could live for 4 months :)) nice, huh?

Unfortunately after waiting for a long long time on the Spanish roads, we realised that our driver has a Porsche and he can't take us with him... :( So we waited and waited all the time hoping that somebody nice would stop and take us somewhere... After two days of waiting in Cordoba (which is btw probably a very nice place if only the heat doesn't make you stay in the shade for the whole day preventing you from any sightseeing...), we took a bus to Bailen. Not for the place itself but because it's where the routes from Cordoba and Granada cross.

The next day one old Spanish soldier took us to a very big gas station around, so that we can find a car going North. It's hard to describe our state of mind at this time, maybe it's enough to say that we didn't really notice the 9 hours that passed while we waited at the entrance of the station... In Sevilla and Cordoba we really believed that somebody would stop "right now" and take us far away, but in Bailen we were nearly getting close to nirvana, we were relaxed and didn't really care where we were... When we were sitting there, we read a Polish ecological magazine that we got from a friend when we were leaving Ecotopia - and there we read an article about hitchhiking - you know, that it's an ecological way of travelling, making friends, getting to know people and places....

Well, yeah, it usually works, at least outside Spain. Here, one of the most important things you learn is patience... And dealing with stereotypes that you start creating.... It's difficult not to do that, if almost only foreigners are helpful here... And especially if you compare the experiences from Portugal, where people speak 2-3 languages, they are friendly and eager to help, with exactly opposite experiences in Spain (excluding Basque Country which was a very positive surprise)... And at the same time we're the people who are against stereotyping and believe in dialogue between cultures... So we had a lot of things to think about both at the station and finally in the truck that took us out of there. Our saviours were two Welsh truck drivers, who decided to make a test - if we speak English, they'll take us :) We did, so we had a chance to talk with two middle-aged Welsh guys, one of them being a Gypsy, which was also interesting, the other speaking with such an accent, that we had problems to understand it... Anyway, they were really really nice and helpful and they took us all the way to the station close to Burgos, the same, were we met the Brasilian guy 3 weeks earlier.

From there, a nice though not very talkative Polish driver took us all the way to the Dutch-German border, stopping for a night in France and Belgium. Talking with him and other drivers that we met on the stations, we found out that our country has been completely turned upside down in just 2 months... The government doesn't really exist, everything has changed... Wow, they didn't waste their time...

So we were at the border, in Venlo, almost home, but it was Saturday and our driver had to make a break till Monday. Staying there for the whole weekend didn't seem good, we were so close... Fortunately we convinced a Polish couple driving in a caravan to take us home. It was a really nice experience and they gave us so much tea and coffee that we almost pissed our pants on the motorway... After some time we felt like friends and the girl told us the story of her life, it was really heart-breaking, but I don't think I can write it here...

They took us to a gas station in Poland just over the border and they had to go to sleep. We didn't know what to do, but we saw that there were a lot of cars stopping there all the time so we asked people if they can take us to Wroclaw or Poznan. One guy agreed but unfortunately it turned out that he was just passing Poznan and he left us on the motorway close to the city. It was 6 a.m. and we didn't know what to do, so we walked 7 km trying to get anywhere. Finally a guy from the motorway service stopped to tell us that we can't walk on the motorway and he was so nice that he took us to the next bus station and told us how to get to the centre. There we took a train and around 11 a.m. we were in Wroclaw....

We spent the last week meeting friends and visiting all our three homes - Piotrek's family home in Wroclaw, University Campus in Gdansk (where we don't have any room now but being in the same local shop and the same library as before really felt like home...) and now we're in my hometown in Ustka...

Still the travel is not finished, cause on Sunday we're going to Copenhagen for our 4-month studies... We hope we can find a new home there, but as far as now we don't have any place to stay there...

One guy contacted us and for three days we were so happy that we were going to have a nice and affordable room in the centre of Copenhagen, but yesterday it turned out that the flat doesn't exist and he just wanted us to send him money... We didn't do it and that's the only positive thing in the whole situation, but now we're a bit depressed and can't really enjoy being at home...........