From Barcelona to France

On the Couchsurfing meeting at Gracia I got in contact with some nice people, but none of them had a couch to offer since they were staying in a hostel themselves. From that one bar, after it had closed at about 1:00am, a group of 30 couchsurfers and like minded people including me - in the first place there much more - walked through Barcelona to get to another bar which was still open. We could manage to get discounts on drinks since we were so many guests the bar woman was apparently quite happy about. At that place I got to know some British, German, U.S.American and Norwegian people. There were two guys from Norway who had no couch yet either. After that other bar closed, too, at about 3:00am, we three without couch went with three some Americans to their hostel to see whether there was still some bed left. There was: one bed in a female form. Of course that reminded me of Lisboa, and of course we could not get it. So after the two Norwegians had tried to beg for a place to sleep on the floor which of course did not work we were about to leave the hostel, but after we had closed the door, instead of going outside on the street we stayed in the building, went upstairs, better to say we took a very old elevator to the top floor. From there we climbed up a ladder on top of the elevator construction where we found a quite dusty and small platform but anyways we decided to stay there for the night. There were wheels and steel ropes we were afraid of getting the sleeping bags or feet involved with but we did a test with the elevator and it was no problem, so we went to sleep, not too comfortably. Well, there was actually problem which we found out about the next day as we discovered our sleeping bags had traces of motor oil. Lars, one of them, took a picture of me laying there. We put all our things in our backpacks because there were already some people working on the next lower level and we didn't want to be seen. We got out on the street at about 8:00am laughing about the crazy night we had just passed. They wanted to go Valencia, I wanted to find an Internet café to check my mails and to recharge my mobile, so I walked a bit in the streets of the city which was even more beautiful with not yet that much traffic and people on the streets as there are normally. On the other hand, the Internet cafes weren't open yet, so I went to a tourist information, got a map and information on busses to Montpellier. Also I got to know about a library with free Internet which I tried first, but the one I went to was not public while the public one was closed until the late afternoon. I started already thinking about having bad luck but then I found an Internet café which could fulfill all my needs since it had a toilet, electricity to recharge my phone and of course Internet, where I found out that a French girl from covoiturage going from Barcelona to Montpellier I had asked the day before whether she could take me to France hadn't answered me yet. I found another guy going the next day from Tarifa to Köln who I asked whether he would take me for some kilometers on that trip. But anyways I wanted to hitchhike, so I checked on hitchbase.com where was an excellent description how to get to a service station close to Barcelona heading to France. On the way there I had to enter very easily a restricted area where I saw a graffity on a stone telling 'hitchhikers go here' which I found quite funny. I was just on that station, asked someone and was lucky because he could take me for a short distance. He wanted to see his brother in his summer house next to the beach about 70km north of Barcelona. The station he put me to seemed to be good since many people were going to France from there - but almost all with the car full of kids, so I had to wait for almost three hours, meanwhile there were another two German hitchhikers, until we found some French people from Agen with two cars, Natalie and her daughter both driving and two guys with them, who could take the three of us close to Narbonne. There we waited for more than two hours. There were two other hitchhiking couples on that spot, one German-Nicaraguan and a Polish one. And there were many Arab and/or Muslim families travelling with a full car and often having things on the roof bound tight with a rope. Then there was one bus stopping, full of German tourists, and soon another. We asked the driver whether he would take hitchhikers. He told us he would have done if the bus wasn't full but that we should wait for other busses stopping, some of them might have space. We saw some busses just passing that service station without stopping, actually more and more were passing, so we found two guys going with a transporter to the Ardeche who brought me to Montpellier and took the other two with them. They were funny and of good mood so I would have liked to go with them if there would have been time. In Montpellier then I got am tram to Frida's home. It was 0:30am when I arrived.

Per Mobiltelefon

To Barcelona with a covoiturage?

The next morning Jose had to get up early to go to work while Patricia and I could sleep some time more. At about 9:30am I got up to get my clothes from the washing machine, trying to dry them in the sun. One hour later Patricia got up too and put all the clothes in the dryer and gave them to me after breakfast while I was trying to get a covoiturage on her computer she connected for me with her mobile with the Internet. Around 2:00pm Jose came back from his work and we had lunch together. Meanwhile I got a reply from someone for a covoiturage from Murcia to Barcelona which I was happy about. I thought, also after the wise advice from a friend from Germany, that to go back home to Germany I shouldn't take another risk that hitchhiking would not work and already thought about taking another covoiturage to Montpellier the next day. Jose needed to go back to work at 3:30pm and he took Patricia and me close to the place where the covoiturage would start. There was a shopping mall which Patricia wanted to go to and show me while waiting. After 20 minutes she had bought three pairs of high heels for her and another for her niece Sabrina. The shoes and also the clothes were really really cheap there. Less than ten Euros for a pair of shoes or clothes, I saw some shoes for six Euros, some shirts for three Euros. It was the last day for the summer sale. Then we went to the Cepsa station where we should meet the covoiturage guy at 5:00pm. After a warm goodbye she got picked up by a friend. With the covoiturage guy, Pablo, I had to wait for almost half an hour until another person came to go with us, Irene, who liked electronic music as I does and who was in Mannheim and Frankfurt in spring to go to the Time Warp party. Then in Alicante we picked up two other people to go to Barcelona, a Lithuanian student from Southampton preparing for one Erasmus year in Alicante and a waiter from Barcelona working in Alicante. The trip was quite okay. It was interesting how the landscape changed from mountains to other mountains. Well, this wasn't too serious. Once I fell asleep for about 30 minutes and as I woke up I had the impression that the mountains were greener than the ones I saw before I fell asleep. After half the way we had a short break at a service station where I had the chance to watch two Muslim women bowing and kneeling on a carpet in the light rain. Then we went on, I took the chance to sleep again a bit and about midnight we were in Barcelona finally where I had to hurry since the metro was already closing. At about 0:45am I was at the bar Teatre Neu in Gracia, a nice place actually, to meet with many couchsurfing people to hopefully find a last minute couch.
Which I couldn't.

Per Mobiltelefon