Category — Germany

The last few days in Belo Horizonte I have been doing quite a lot of different things, the results of which you can hopefully see soon in the picture gallery. Here is a small summary:

I went to visit two beautiful caves on sunday with Amilcar, a host from BH, and Julie, hist guest at the time. The caves were really beautiful and located in beautiful natural surroundings. We spent almost all day there and then drove back to BH.

Another day we went to see some waterfalls, also reasonably nearby. They were very beautiful and it was the first time in my life I was swimming in a natural bassin at the foot of a waterfall. Very amazing experience!

And there was more: we went to a super luxurious meat restaurant with the most delicious all-you-can-eat meat and an astonishing view. The view made me sad too. Of the over 2 million people living in this city, a lot of people have to work very hard or don’t even succeed to put food on their table every day. And here we are, eating until we drop. Sad but true, I guess this is one of the many intriguing aspects of this country: filthy rich against alarmingly poor.

We also went to see a live band and a beautiful night view over the city (getting soaking wet while admiring it)

And then there are of course the girls. They might not all be extremely hot, but the amount of beautiful asses here is downright ridiculous!

I really love being here in Belo Horizonte. Her I am just a stranger and not  a walking ATM liek in Salvador. The surfers community is very nice and the regular people too. It is a very safe city, which is also very nice for a city this size (3rd biggest city in Brazil).

On sunday I am moving to Sao Paolo to celebrate christmas with a couchsurfing mother and daughter in Japanese style (their family chooses a different theme-country every year). After that I am not sure where I will spend New years, but that will be tomorrow’s problem

The following morning Marco and his roommate had to leave early to go to university. So I had a choice: walking around the city with a heavy backpack or finding a place where I could sit and edit some video together (that shit is piling up ). I decided the latter and immediately the following “problem” arose: where to go? After some careful thinking I decided that it shouldn’t be very difficult to find a nice quiet spot at the airport. I decided to walk to the airport which was about half an hour away.

After a nice walk I arrived at the airport, packed the stuff I thought I was gonna need in the next couple of hours in my daypack and put my big backpack in a luggage locker. I then headed into the terminal to find a nice quiet spot in the corner of a terrace. I sat down and started my journey into the wonderful world of video editing. Oomph! that shit is tougher than I had expected. After a while I had some decent part of the Coolblue goodbye party footage edited and felt like doing something different, so I played a game for a couple of hours.

Around half past one Friedemann sent me a message that he would like to meet me to have lunch together. I asked him to come to the airport to be sure I wouldn’t miss my plane and he agreed. I decided to go and check in my backpack so I had some more time to spend during lunch. The Bremen airport terminal that Ryanair uses is the most basic one I have ever seen: no digital signs, they just hang a sign with the name of the destination over the checkin counters. After succesfully checking in my luggage Friedemann showed up a little after two and we had a nice lunch at a cheap bar at the airport.

Then it was time to say goodbye for real. I thanked him very much for all the kind things he did for me. Without him and couchsurfing I would have had to spend my first few nights in a hostel. I jumped onto my plane towards Oslo to go to the land of Dimmu, yay!

So, after coming from that bar I met up with Friedemann again, who told me that it was kind of difficult to host me a second night. However, he called some friends and I could stay there. He would come with me to hang out and return back home later that night. I offered to cook for him and his friends in return for all the cool things. We went to buy some groceries and then to Marco’s place. There we cooked a nice spaghetti together and had dinner with the four of us. Afterwards we hung out and drank the beer we had bought. Two of the bottles however were over their expiry date, so they tasted very weird :S. Eventually Friedemann went home and I spent the night on the couch.

After waking up pretty late, I got up, did some work on the laptop and then decided to walk to the city center. It was a very nice walk and Bremen is a beautiful city, which really surprised me!

I had breakfast at a Gaststätte along the river, relaxed for an hour on the grass on the other side of the river and then walked into the city. I am now spending my time enjoying some Haake Beck beer in a pub on the old market. It has been a long time since I had such a relaxing day!

That’s all for now. More later! I hope you guys enjoy your life as much as I do right now!

The next morning Irene had to get up real early, so I didn’t see her anymore. Good luck at your new job, I am really happy for you that you finally found what you were looking for!

I got up around 9 and had breakfast with Ewoud. We had a really interesting conversation in which we concluded that neither of us had expected 5 years ago that the situation would be turned around 180 degrees. At that time (5 years ago, that is) I was the one with a steady income, a house and a girlfriend and he was the one (almost) without obligations (or money, for that matter ).Anyway, we are both very happy with the situations we are in right now, so that is really funny

After breakfast and “the packing of the bag” it was time for me to say goodbye to the last piece of familiar Dutch ground I’m going to see in a while. I made my way to the highway near Oldenzaal and started hitchhiking. I waited for an hour and a half with no car even slowing down :(. I tried changing my sign from Bremen to Osnabruck (100 Km closer) to no sign at all (after all I just needed to get out of there), without any luck . Out of nowhere it started raining quite heavily and I got soaked. Apparently that worked on people’s feelings, since 5 minutes later I got picked up by a guy that was working in the transport sector. He dropped me off at the truck stop at the German border telling me that 15000 trucks stop there every day. I just sat down with a sign Bremen in my hands (and of course I fell asleep ) I woke up from the sound of a truck horn probably 5 minutes later.

This ride turned out to be really great. It was the first time in my life that I was sitting in a truck, hitchhiking outside of Holland and hitchhiking with a non-Dutch speaking person. To some of you this may seem silly, but I was extremely excited. I continuously felt like screaming! As I said to my dear friend Duke:I feel like a little boy that finally gets his bright red fire truck for Christmas; totally worth the wait!

On top of all this, the truck driver turned out to be a really awesome Greek who actually made me a traditional Greek meal when we stopped at a parking along the way. He finally dropped me off at a truck stop at the edge of Bremen, from where I made my way to the central station.

As I didn’t have the luck of finding a couch in Bremen (started looking way too late because of all the leaving-stress), but I did exchange a couple of emails with Friedjof (a CS-host in Bremen already booked up for these nights) who told me he wanted to meet me for a drink, I decided to call him and ask him for a good hostel to spend the night there. He told me to meet him later at central station, so I did.

We went for a drink and then he offered to take me with him to his house and call a friend of his to see if she might have a place for me to stay. It turned out that there even was a place for me at Friedjof’s house, so I stayed there for the night. I am sleeping in the attic of the house, just under the roof. A perfect cozy place!

On the way to the pub and later to his house, Friedjof told me a bunch of things about Bremen and it all sounded pretty nice. Football without violence-happy hooligans, huh… what?