Vacations 2010, part II

in Prague, 14.7.2010
I lost the game. The idea to hitchhike, myself alone, till the beginning of August, while sleeping in the wild; the idea failed, I was too weak for it. It seemed to me, I was almost always: looking for a place to hitchhike or looking for a place to sleep or looking for a supermarket to buy cheap food or looking for friendly people refilling my bottles of water... Even when in a city, I could not have enjoy it properly, there was too much worrying about everything.... Also, after few nights outside, without taking a shower, a lot of people seemed uneasy about taking me to their car - I was too much homeless-like... I made my decision after two successive nights, when it rained and I got a pretty bad sleep (one of those nights, I hid into a partially built object; I was woken up by a few Gentian adolescents, listening to terribly loud music, trying to teach me, how to say "homeless" (the word was probably "zwerver", as I recall it now) in Dutch - ironically, they knew hardly any English.
On the positive side:

• I've seen the cities of Gent and a large part of Brussels; a bit of Liege and Regensburg
  
• I made my second longest hitchhiking trip ever (perhaps the longest, if I count all the way from Versailles)
• I found out, that I was already pretty apt in speaking Dutch - of course, I'd been learning for just a few months, but already, I was able to strike a pretty funny conversation
• I met a few pretty nice people - perhaps the best one was a Belgian trade union negotiator (this one, while hitchhiking); yet another was a guy who travelled around a pretty big part of Asia; ... and much more. I was also told: "There should be more hitchhikers like you. It contributes to the cultural exchange." :-D
  

By the way, if I was to make a statistics of English-speaking population among French, Belgian and German people, all would fare rather badly (of course, the highly educated ones knew English often almost perfectly, yet my experience with "the commoners" was much more modest.
About some cities:

• Gent - a student city with the traditional brick architecture; I found some individual buildings magnificent, on the other hand, Brugge seemed much more harmonic and "compact" to me.
  
• Brussel - a pretty big city (counting in the suburbs); a lot of development has apparently happened in a past few years. I've seen quite some innovative approaches to "city engineering" there; on the other hand, quite some things just didn't seem to be perfectly polished (trash bins located in places, where no one used them, on the other hand, a lot of places with insufficient number of the bins; crazy traffic lights on a few places - red lights on both pedestrian and car lights 2/3 of the time....; not to mention the skyscrapers placed in the middle of historical buildings.

As for hithchiking in Germany - wonderful, as long as you stay on the gas stations and ask the drivers. Terrible, once you get into a countryside!!!

Sleeping:

• 10.7. - Gent, in a construction site, with the Gent adolescents above mentioned...
• 11.7. - in a small village between Liege and borders with Germany
  
• 12.7. - Regensburg, in a bush near a highway exit

Arrived home 13.7. in the evening...

OK, that's it.... Now, what???