Tag Archive for 'Italy'

It’s good to have local friends!

Published
by
Kasper Souren
on 2007-10-13
in Italy and hospitality exchange
. 0 Comments

Thanks to Fabrizia, who put an ad in a local weekly, I have a new place. She and Davide have been very helpful.Unfortunately amylin hasn’t come back from New York yet, but that gives me the opportunity to make our place look good. There’s a garden, roses, a garden table, a bath tub and a lot of beds! I think the 72 year old landlady used to rent it to 4 students. Today I moved a lot of stuff there with a free electric pick-up trucklet.

Because I befriended Michele and Maurizio, who both work for the municipal parking organization of Trento, I was able to use the Ecomobile for a bit longer than the usual 2 hours. Last night I was invited for dinner at Michele’s girlfriend’s place, which was great. I mostly spoke Italian, but Michele speaks Russian very well, he’s been to many former Soviet countries on his motorbike (and also to India, Nepal and many more places) and he’s planning to drive through South America next year!

On Thursday I went to a concert of a trio of musicians playing anarchist and anti-fascist songs in a tiny “private club”. Our place is conveniently located between my work (or rather, my free lunch) and the center of Trento. It’s slightly uphill though, from the city center, but somehow I had rides there all the time. And I will have one very soon, since I have a tiny bit more stuff to move, and Paolo will arrive here shortly so we can quickly do some work and then I can meet Michele and his girlfriend again tonight.

On Monday the washing machine will be installed and hopefully the heater will be fixed, it’s leaking a little bit right now.

Right after posting amylin just sent me some cute pictures of her new haircut. amylin with short hair in New York

She’s still quite unsure about it, but I think it looks totally fkn awesome!
amylin with short hair in New York

Montreal, Boston, NYC, Dublin, Treviso, Verona, Trento

Published
by
Kasper Souren
on 2007-10-01
in Italy, United States, hitchhiking and hospitality exchange
. 4 Comments

We left Morgan a bit later than planned. I really didn’t sleep well with the prospect of waking up at 5AM. We started of taking a bus out of Montreal, at 9:16. Hitching in Quebec is easy. We had a couple of short rides, and then a ride down to Burlington, a college town in Vermont (in the US, the State of Cheese). Like most college towns, it was easy to hitch out of there. But then we were in a shitty spot. We waited a long time, till we finally walked to a traffic light, where someone was so friendly to drive out of his way. amylin prefers “on-ramp hitching”, that is waiting at on-ramps, but our luck with that had been mediocre in the US, so I decided to change strategy and be dropped at a rest area. The first guy we saw asked if we were hiking, and I said “well, we’re hitchhiking”, and we were treated to a long ride and an interesting life story. We made it to Boston that night where we had interesting conversations about Esperanto, veganism and (not for me) push-bikes with our hosts.

The next day we met up with John and his wife. After fruitfully working together on CS and later BeWelcome, for almost one year, it was great to finally meet John.

Later that day we took the Chinatown bus to NYC and went all the way to the upper point of Manhattan. The next day we walked a lot, saw some German thing at the Goethe Institut, with pictures and some dude who was going to go around the world with his motorcycle. The guy taking pictures was very interested in amylin and me. Rightly so, we were by far the most colorful people around. Friday I had to say bye to amylin :( and take a plane to Dublin. My flight arrived in the very early morning, and I basically had a stop-over of 23 hours. Fortunately, through BeWelcome I had found out that Matthew, who was my guest in Paris in 2004, was now living in Dublin. So I had a place to crash for a couple of hours.

The check-in for my next flight (with another Irish low budget company) was at 4 in the morning. Since there’s no nightly public transport, nor cheap taxis, I had to take my bus there at 23:00.

I arrived at Treviso around 9AM. I slept a bit in the first train, changed to the other one, and then got to Verona, to find out that there was a train strike, and no trains going north until after 21:00. Shit!

Well, just hitchhike, I thought. I saw a car in front of the station, and fortunately they took me to a better spot. But, not too great. So, from there I started walking, and walking. Into a bar, for a toilet, a pen (for my sign) and a cola. Then, more walking. Walking. Walking. And I walked more. I started to feel quite unhappy about all the Italians that were speeding by without stopping when someone finally stopped and took me for 15 km or so. From there, same story.

Italians are wary of strangers!

I ended up on a spot where I had found a ride straight to Trento the first time. But I wasn’t so lucky this time. I was getting thirsty. I saw some black people in the backyard of a house and they were from Ghana and very nice. A guy gave me a big bottle of mineral water.

After a while I decided to walk. And walk. Until there was a point in the road with construction work and a traffic light where all cars had to stop for a while. Finally I saw a small Fiat and got my ride.

Until a couple of kilometers before Roveretto, where I was picked up after not too long. By a very friendly Albanian couple, who started explaining that Italians are bastards. They dropped me off at the station, where the trains still weren’t going. So at 19:00 I finally took a bus to Trento, where I was treated to an excellent vegetarian meal. I woke up at 16:00 this afternoon…