I was growing up believing that behind every tree there could hide a mass murderer willing to kill me, so you can imagine that I was more than suspicious about the idea of my flatmates to hitchhike to Bucharest last weekend.  This way of transportation just seemed far too dangerous and insecure to me.

Jennifer, Mireille and me wanted to start our trip to Romania’s capital on Sunday early morning and wanted to come back Monday afternoon. Luckily, I convinced the two not to hitchhike around 6 am from Brasov since standing in the darkness in an empty street waiting for an unfamiliar car rather reminded me of some other sort of business … 😉

So we took the train at 6 am and spent two very nice days in Bucharest!

But well, do you know the wanderings of Odysseus written by Homer? It took the main character Odysseus several years to finally arrive at home after a long, long period of wanderings. Our way back to Brasov reminded me a lot of this…

Due to the lack of money, we decided to hitchhike back on Monday morning. Sitting from 8am-9am in a McDonald’s (free wifi!), we checked hitchwiki.org, paper maps and google maps as we had no idea, how the hell we could get out of this big city. Of course, everybody of us wanted to choose a different point but finally, we decided to go to a Carrefour in Baneasa, near the motorway up north. But how to go there?

At 11:30 am we decided to travel home. At Piata Unirii in the metro station, we “talked” with a woman who couldn’t speak English about our travel opportunities (5 min). Somehow, we understood to take the metro to Parcul Herastrau and then take a bus to Carrefour Baneasa. We went to the metro station and for again 15 min, we didn’t find the right metro. Finally, we found it and waited for it about 10 min. The metro journey itself took again about 10 min. Then we went out of the station, ran confused around the traffic circle near Herastraul because we didn’t find the right bus stop (10 min). Finally, we found it and wanted to buy a bus ticket in the little house but it was closed. We had to go to the other side of the street (5 min). Next, we didn’t know which bus ticket was the right (and cheapest) for us and talked with the bus woman again about 5 min. We bought the ticket, went to the other side of the road and waited for the bus (5 min). We went inside the bus, Jennifer’s ticket didn’t work so we were kicked out of the bus, Jennifer bought a new one and we had to wait for the next bus (10 min). The bus ride itself took about 20 min.

Near the motorway, we certainly wanted to find the best place to stand and had to walk another 10 min to the best point. With every step, my mood went intensely down.

And yes, standing there we only had to wait for about 5 min for a car. (Jennifer and I deduced from this that we were either not incredibly ugly or at least didn’t look to dangerous or disgusting 😉 )  And it seemed, we got a very nice driver and a very cool car! (Anyway, I was way too tired and annoyed of our long journey to be scared of him) It only took 2 hours to Brasov where we took a bus back home (+10 min).

So, let’s sum up: 60 min McDonalds + 5 min + 15 min + 10 min + 10 min + 10 min + 5 min + 5 min + 5 min + 10 min + 20 min + 10 min + 120 min + 10 min =  295 min = 5 hours

The train would have taken 4 hours and way less difficulties…

Buuuut, being home in my warm and cosy bed, I laughed about this funny hitchhiking experience 😉