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Two Sure enough, two hours later, the same cops woke us up, pretty pissed-off to have to repeat the same thing. It looked like all the French speakers were somewhere else so I negotiated again.
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{{888}}
'''Préface''': I wrote it to be read by non-hitch-hikers too. You might find some superfluous explications.
=A NOMADIC DATE IN PARIS=
My name is Julien; I'm 27 years old; I come from Reunion Island, in the Indian Ocean; I'm of French nationality; I live in Hamburg, Germany and I started hitch-hiking to Paris from Poland on the 4th of August 2008.
==Kostrzin Kostrzyn - Berlin / the basics of hitch-hiking==
There is no need to explain here why I'm from the Indian Ocean, living in Germany with a French passport. But I can tell you that I was in Poland (city of KostrzinKostrzyn, right at the German border) for a three days long rock festival that saw a 200 000 people attendance. Three days living between a tent and a stage, with a very fluctuating weather that left me and most of my stuff covered with a thick crust of dust; far away from the nearest shower.
But the reason why I was heading to Paris hitch-hiking it makes sense to present to you: A small group of enthusiast travelers had decided to organize the first European Hitch-hiking Week. Or was it the first "International ..." I'm not sure, and I suspect that the organizers don't know for sure as well, and actually don't care. The aim was to give one location and one time for a rally, and broadcast it to all the hitch-hikers of the world. The place was decided to be the "Champs de Mars" in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France; and the time 10pm on the 08/08/08, hence the name of "Project 888".
The homeless 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 coordinate in my back-pocket-notebook, in case I would come back to Kostjin 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 KostjinKostrzyn, 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 sometimes think it is.
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 too so I was quite busy there. I think I left with more sleep lack than after the festival.
==Berlin - Hamburg / The luck factor==
Going out of a big city takes a bit more than a map. It takes the advices of someone else that have been hitch-hiking out of the city every few days in the past five years. Such a person certainly exists, but I don't know him/her, so the next best thing is called "hitchwiki.org". It's a wiki web page where anyone can go and write about some good spots to go from A to B and that's where I found out how to get out of Berlin in the direction of Hamburg. I wrote down the instructions on my back-pocket-notebook (definitely one of my most precious items) and said goodbye to my friends. On the road again.
The spot I was heading to turned out to be impracticable because of road works. I had been inspired enough to write down the instructions to an alternative point of departure so I went back into the S-bahn and lost 1h of precious hitch-hiking time.
I had a problem: For the 888 project, I had decided that Hamburg would be a stopover city for those coming from Scandinavia. I had organized a little gathering in a local pub, invited the Hamburg people to meet them and set the rally time at 9pm. I got picked up in Berlin at twenty to nine. And it's a 3h drive. The fault was mine, I had not planned enough margins and there was no way I would have been on time. When I arrived at midnight, I went straight home and started sleeping before my head hit the pillow.
==Hamburg - Utrecht / The reason why we do it==
Utrecht was the last stopover for anyone coming from anywhere north-east of Paris. There was also a little meeting organized there and I really wanted to get there before 10pm. Last time I had gone there hitch-hiking it had taken me eleven hours. But I had so much stuff to do that I left home at 12. Tight margins again!
When I got there there were already four hitch-hikers waiting.
The common sense philosophy when you reach an already occupied spot is to walk to the holder of the grounds and introduce yourself and see if your going the same way. If yes, the two (or more) would then join their effort and try to get a ride together. If the driver would take only one person, the one that had been waiting the longest would get it. But it has happened often to me that the other person would see me as an invader (if he was there first) or as a parasite (if I was) and try to compete with me. Which I find truly stupid and I hope you do too.
Three of the ones that were there were on their way to Utrecht as well, for the same reason as me; one was going to Hanover; so we were not interested in the same drivers.
The girl I had brought with me (and that goes by the interesting name of "Selma") found the atmosphere to her taste and hang around for a while. The contrary would have surprised me. There is nothing more cheerful than a traveling crowd of travelers. I had no idea where I was going to spend the night but there was some interested local people so I was figuring that one of them would offer me hospitality. I ended up going with Robin to his home in Amsterdam by train, from where we would leave together the next morning.
==Utrecht - Paris / Broadcast it to the world!==
Robin was one of the most active organizers of the event. We got home at 1:30 but went to bed only at 3:30 after doing some organization related work. Robin is also very active on various hospitality networks and there was a couple of USers already asleep in the attic, one Canadian guy and one German still awake, the German completely stoned.
Robin had written a press release about the event and had sent it to the local media companies. One of them had suggested a TV report on it, to be shown in the news, and they were already waiting for us when we got there at 8:45.
<kaltura-widget size='M' align='R' kwid='Mm4xdXVsamRsZ3w2ODF8NjgxMDB8Um9iaW5vIEhpdGNoaGlraW5nfHgwNmVsbm5hZGN8MzMzODBjY2ViOQ==' /> They fitted Robin with a microphone and filmed him getting his first ride out. The bastard actually stood at the red light, walked to the first car with an open window, exchanged 3 words with the driver and hopped in. I never had anything that fast.
It was planned that he would go off at the nearest gas station, where the TV crew, me, Cliff (the Canadian guy) and Hans (a freelance cameraman filming the making of the TV report) would find him again. So after he left, Cliff and me started doing the same. Cliff actually found a guy in a SUV that clearly didn't want to talk to him but when he heard it was only 'till the next gas station, he said ok. Then I screamed through the street : "Is is ok if I come too?" he nodded in an annoyed way. Hans didn't even ask and jumped in before I closed the door. The poor SUV-owner had been tricked into doing a good deed.
From the moment the TV crew left till we took off: 40 min.
[[File:Julien_exchanging.JPG|thumb|300px|right|[[Sitarane]] exchanging addresses with drivers]] The woman was Dutch, living in France. She was travelling with another french lady, which lead us to an interesting situation. Sure enough the French woman could speak only French, so that language was good for 3 of us (Robin can a little bit too but not fluent). English was good for 3, dutch for 2. No lingua franca. So we were constantly switching, translating, misunderstanding and I love it when it is like that.
I can't remember how it started but we were singing songs most of the way. Dutch, French and Creol (Reunion Island language) songs. Possibly because the radio was broken. A short but very nice ride.
We were hungry by then but, as usual, I was a bit stressed to miss the one perfect ride if we took a break so I started hitch-hiking again straight. Robin started taking pictures.
[[File:Robino_Sitarane.jpg|thumb|240px|left|[[Robino]] & [[Sitarane]] with their drivers while hitching from [[Amsterdam]] to [[Paris]] for the [[project 888|888]]-event.]] After 50 minutes, a Dutch guy with his Dutch mother came up to me and told me he could take us to... yeah, you heard it my friend: PARIS! Ooh yeah!
It was a long but quick ride. Just a small break for food. The guy happened to be working in the same building block Robin was working in. They'll probably meet again often for coffee.
Their destination was "Pont de l'Alma" so they dropped us in front of the Eiffel Tower. It was 5:20pm, 7h20 after the departure of the TV crew, no more than 8h from home. Great score.
==Paris 888==
I thought we would be the first to arrive. Heck! There was already a crowd of around 30 people sitting on the Champs de Mars, half of them playing Ultimate Frisbee. There was nobody I knew from previous travels and travelers-gatherings. I dropped the bag and jumped on the field to join the game.
When the lights started dimming, the alcohol was already flowing. It is my personal opinion that unless we recalibrate strongly the social philosophy of such events, we'll have to choose between stopping to attend or die young from liver disease. I don't have what it takes to go against the social pressure and I doubt many have. How about we make the next one drug-free?
When I went to bed, I noticed that there was 5 tents standing. I stayed there half a minute wondering if I should wake them all up hitlerHitler-style to have them all pulled down before the cops show showed up again. I decided I was too tired, and that my popularity would be too seriously damaged. The hell with them.
"Clean everything, pull down the tents, and if we see you again, you all get fined". I translated to English, folded my stuff, grabbed a plastic bag and started to pick up the trash.
I had been picking stuff garbage alone for a while (mumbling about why nobody was helping) when one of the cops, the one that looked furious, started walking towards me: "Hey you! stop what you're doing and come here!" What again!
"This is unacceptable! You're not going to clean everything on your own! Why are they not helping you! If you clean one minute more, I'm fining everyone! Tell them that." Hmm, they do have some sense of justice after all...
So everyone suddenly found themselves on the lawn picking up garbage and it was clean in a matter of minutes.
To all the anarchists out there: If within such a crowd of free-thinkers, world-travelerstravellers, it takes a police order to have everyone to cooperate, just imagine at the scale of the human society. That is mostly populated with lazy followers, you will agree.
Once the tents were down we could go back to sleep; it might actually have saved all of us some hours of sleep if I had decided to have the tents pulled down before going to bed, another blink to my anti-authority readers.
And the Sunday morning took off lazily, and was follow by a lazy Sunday afternoon. I was a bit craving for action. The only collective actions activities were a big discussion (involving everyone that was still there) about a webplatform called "couchsurfing".
It's a hospitality network that started around the idea of sharing what we have and learning about other cultures but turns out to be a great business venture. As usual, the end-user have little hints about what is behind the nice looking webpage so we heard the testimonial of former volunteers.