I have travelled as a hitchhiker many times. Not only because my resources haven’t always been the biggest, but also because it’s interesting. Travelling alone might be a bit lonely. However, at times when you have people around you, you can always find you some company. And no, I’m not talking about hookers.

Heck, you don’t even need to know the local language, it’s enough if you can speak the local language just a bit or the other person can speak just a bit English, for example. This one time at band camp….or actually in a French railway pub I started talking with one guy who turned out Algerian. He had a boutique in France and he just wanted to tell me all of his problems. Well, I listened. I couldn’t speak a word of French, he couldn’t speak a word of English. So we ended up speaking in English-French-German mixed language. Oh man, it was ugly, but by the end of the day we really did understand each other. I had spent some interesting hours talking to a total stranger. Do that - you might find it very enlightening.

A couple of years ago I stayed in a hostel in Paris, everyone living there seemed to be foreigners. The first evening there wasn’t much to do…there was quite a bit of people in the café, but shy as I were, I didn’t really go to talk to anyone. Nobody came to talk to me either. What a boring evening it was.

The next evening I approached an Austrian gal - what a pretty gal she was, but I won’t go into details. Anyway, lets just say that after that I didn’t really have to find anyone to talk to me. Once people had seen I’m able to communicate and not just sit and drink at my own table ten feet away from others, they started coming over. It was interesting and enlightening, and I met some great people from Australia, USA, Austria Germany, New Zealand, Israel…and I was there just a couple of days. The Israeli guy wanted to talk about TV systems though, not sure why…he kept asking if we have analogue or digital TV…weird.

So if you’re abroad – just talk to people. But why shouldn’t you do the same in your own country? I know we all try to avoid bums. Most of them stink, talk stupid jokes just to get your attention (or money..) and once they start talking, they don’t go away. We’ll, that’s the general idea anyway. However, even a so-said bum can actually be very good person to talk to. This one time at band camp…or actually just near a river in the town where I live…we were just sitting on a bench with couple of friends drinking beer, talking about the weather and politics, when one *bum* came to take our bottles and then started talking to us. I don’t really remember what his pick-up line was, but the result was that we talked to him about half an hour. He talked about his life, how he came to become this way and how he actually isn’t a bum in a normal sense. No details, but you get my point. Hopefully.