{"id":2871,"date":"2021-09-24T21:33:43","date_gmt":"2021-09-24T19:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svjmedia.nl\/internationaljournalism\/?p=2871"},"modified":"2021-09-24T22:40:17","modified_gmt":"2021-09-24T20:40:17","slug":"nothing-can-stop-hitchhikers-but-hitchhikers-stop-cars-with-only-their-thumb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/svjmedia.nl\/internationaljournalism\/2871\/nothing-can-stop-hitchhikers-but-hitchhikers-stop-cars-with-only-their-thumb\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cNothing can stop hitchhikers\u201d, but hitchhikers stop cars with only their thumb"},"content":{"rendered":"
Once upon a time there were living objects roaming on, and around the European highways called hitchhikers. Maybe you haven\u2019t seen them for so long and thought that they were extinct, but they still exist. The hitchhiker puts their thumb out (or a piece of cardboard) and suddenly, almost magically, a driver feels the calling of the thumb and stops the car. Even the Covid-19 pandemic didn\u2019t stop them from thumbing along the European roads. But why do they still do it? <\/strong><\/p>\n The Facebook group \u2018Hitchhiking Europe\u2019 has over thirty-five thousand members and an average of four posts a day. One of the members of the Facebook group is Pawel Wrona (21) from Poland. Pawel has doglike eyes and a patchy beard. He traveled to fourteen European countries during the pandemic and came back last week from hitchhiking to Turkey. \u201cI travel to meet people and hitchhiking is the easiest way to get really close to people really fast. That\u2019s why I like hitchhiking.\u201d<\/p>\n Jack Reid<\/p>\n Jack Reid is a historian and author of the book: \u2018Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation\u2019. On the question of why people still hitchhike, he replied: \u201cOut of a sense of adventure and in resistance to mainstream norms. This was different in the mid-1970s (the peak years of hitchhiking) because it was normal to hitchhike: \u201cMany of the hitchhikers were middle-class individuals commuting to school or looking for a cheap adventure over summer break. They associated hitchhiking with romantic adventure.\u201d<\/p>\n Yonathan (25), born in Belgium now living in Israel, decided to go hitchhiking in Eastern Europe: \u201cBecause of the coronavirus I wasn\u2019t able to see my family for such a long time, so after I got vaccinated in June, my girlfriend and I decided to go visit them.\u201d His journey started in Italy and from there he went to France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and finally the Czech Republic. Yonathan had a different approach to hitchhiking: \u201cI went up to people at gas stations. I did this because I could establish a relationship and was able to take the doubt away, that they might have.\u201d<\/p>\n Hitchhiking in the midst of the Covid pandemic wasn\u2019t easy for Yonathan: \u201cIt was difficult sometimes to convince the driver that I was vaccinated and safe to lift.\u201d Pawel had a whole different experience correlated to the pandemic. When Pawel was on his way back from Turkey, he needed to cross the border from Bulgaria to Romania. Romania had a fourteen-day self-quarantine policy when entering the country: \u201cThere were two officers from the border control checking me, they didn\u2019t want me coming into Romania because I didn\u2019t go into quarantine. I first tried to talk my way out of it, but that didn\u2019t work, so then I bribed them.\u201d Powel paid each officer twenty euro, and\u00a0then he went into Romania without having to go into quarantine. Looking back, Pawel doesn\u2019t regret anything: \u201cI think it was fun. It\u2019s part of the adventure, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n Yonathan<\/p>\n Other than this incident, Pawel doesn\u2019t think hitchhiking became more difficult in the pandemic: \u201cI still had to wait just as long. Other than the drivers assuming that it was more difficult to find a ride, it was pretty similar.\u201d Yonathan agrees with Pawel: \u201cThe people that are scared to take hitchhikers don\u2019t take you anyhow. You still need luck; you need that one vehicle that stops, that\u2019s part of the adventure.\u201d Reid thinks this is because \u201cHitchhiking is such a marginal activity these days that it is difficult to argue the pandemic had a dramatic change. The majority of the people already had a resistance to offering strangers a lift, and the people that used to take hitchhikers probably still do and will keep doing so.\u201d<\/p>\n The way people use their body to say that they are hitchhiking hasn’t changed since the picutre from 1936.<\/p><\/div>\n A man and woman hitchhiking near Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1936, photograph by Walker Evans<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once upon a time there were living objects roaming on, and around the European highways called hitchhikers. Maybe you haven\u2019t seen them for so long and thought that they were extinct, but they still exist. The hitchhiker puts their thumb out (or a piece of cardboard) and suddenly, almost magically, a driver feels the calling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":462,"featured_media":2872,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cbj","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cHitchhiking can only thrive when there’s an overlap between people who think hitchhiking is a pretty good idea, and drivers willing to pull to the roadside and take a chance on a stranger.\u201d<\/h2>\n
\u201cYou still need luck; you need that one vehicle that stops.\u201d<\/h2>\n

