Social-Cultural Shock

// May 1st, 2007 // travel

Fifty-six cents was the fee, but no change was given. “Welcome to the Balkan”, said my Slovenian driver when we passed the border with Croatia. He had picked me up from a gas-station ten minutes before, and was used to the toll-worker not giving him back the change from the one euro he had given him. My driver, a pizza-maker who “knows people here very well”, only interest was the price of drugs in Amsterdam and Barcelona.

I finally made it. Slovenia was already a small beginning but now I really have the feeling I arrived in a country where the culture seems to be very different to what I was used to. People look different, they talk different, interact different, and so on. After a tough hitchhiking day, this was quite something I had to get used to.

My day already started in shock. I just got out of nature and my host dropped me at a famous hitchhikers-spot just outside Ljubljana where the highway starts. It was a weird and alienating experience. Straight out of nature and suddenly standing in the middle of four roads with tons of cars and very little space for them to stop.

I even (!) got a bit scared -for the first time during my trip- with big trucks passing me from the left and the right. Nearly did I get run-over by two very noisy and enormous fire-trucks that were moving from the left to the right, as if they were very drunk, over the little space mend for those who are brave enough to hitchhike…

As if this was not enough torture, I had to wait for nearly two hours at this spot, and even another hitchhiker joint me there while a police-officer was waving friendly to us. We teamed up when a car stopped, a businessman who sells “everything which gives money” and travels “wherever there is money”. He had just closed a deal, so he was happy and bought us some coffee at a restaurant and to have a social talk.

They dropped me at an exit about 70 kilometers from the border, where a Catholic man who works as a waiter picked me up, and dropped me just before the border. There the pizza-maker was my saviour. I could literally see Croatia from the petrol-station but could not find any car going to that direction or drivers friendly enough to give me a ride.

The pizza-man (“A kilo marijuana would cost you 5000€”) had no problems though and brought me save and exited over the border, into Zagreb, into a new culture, a new city, and yet again, a new experience. The first thing that caught my eye? More people hitchhiking…