Up's, down's and a windshield washer closet

The second day of hitching on to the new life brought again that old feeling of not belonging, being alone. It's like a roller coaster: one day you feel like on top of the world, the next like you'd just like to return to home to the routine where you feel comfortable. All of it because you are going towards something you have no idea and further away from things you know. Besides that, you have no home base, no person alike to share your whole journey, you feel like you haven’t been in a shower in a month even if you had one yesterday, every muscles of your body is in pain because you forgot to stretch after exercise you did before heading the road with your way too heavy back bag and over all your body is everything else but in balance. There's nothing you want except a place to rest, and you ask yourself why you are in the middle of a cold snow pile your feet freezing and your thumb up with a sign that nobody even looks at when you could be of anywhere else that is way warmer and relaxing?

Yesterday my pal Dave and I had great luck hitching. In between of the rides in Umeå towards Oslo I felt extremely tired but energetic when I saw a sign of a gas station at the beginning of the high way. I sprinted there to warm up and encountered a dude who worked in there, while poor Dave wanted to stand in a bus stop wishing that somebody’s going towards South after mid night.
So, there I was drinking tea in the gas station with the dude in the other side of the counter who welcomed me and told me I looked like a well prepared hitch-hiker for the cold night. All I needed was a pair of those socks with a battery on them and a new mental health. Other than that, I was too much prepared with my heavy bag which had lost some kilos after me adding a fifth layer of clothes.

The gas station dude told how he'd been thinking to quit his job and hitch like he did back in the old days, an that I was like a sign to make the thought come true. The only reason he didn’t do so because he wasn’t sure what he actually wanted, but least it was something else than working in a gas station on a night shift. He didn’t know whether to believe his inner voice that kept saying he wasn’t in peace now. So if I was his sign, my sign was the arrow that had Gas Station on it.
I told him to be honest to himself while at the same time I thought who an earth would take a mentally unbalanced hitcher in the night as a sign for a better life. Never the less I told him to listen to that inner voice, that could have as well been a sign that he had some kind of double personality. No matter how crazy that voice was it was awake for a reason and not satisfied on the present life. He should ask why and change the life, even if it’s by changing the route he takes to the work.
By doing different things a person starts to think differently and realize what it is that drives him if the life lived is not what the little weird voice in the head wants.

After sharing a rather great hour talking and smiling in front of a cup of hot tea I felt like I should put Dave out of his misery and at least bring him some tea. But as I was about to head to the toilet first Dave rushed in to tell he hitched a ride from a taxi that would leave us few miles ahead. The dude from the gas station send me off with a pile of out of date salad boxes and some more tea. (Like I wasn’t in a need of a toilet already.) Few chocolates (which I shouldn’t have eaten, because my body is already confused) and a short taxi ride after we ended up in the middle of a dark highway where the wind was catching up. Looking at Dave one could tell it wasn’t what he had in mind. But then, life is making choices and going for them.
By looking back you can always be wise and say we should have done it differently. But it will not take you ahead. It keeps you in the past, feeling sorry for yourself.
So as we realized how pointless it was to bounder What If's we walked ahead in the empty and spooky highway playing a game called What If with a smile on our face. We ended up in a gas station hoping for a ride or place to warm up and sleep, but since the only interior warm place was the air-conditioned windshield-washer equipment closet, we quickly wrapped our bags in plastic bags to put into the wet floor and ate a salad after squeezing in between the shelf and the roof at 3am. I put my hat over my eyes since the closet had lights like in a shopping window and wished some sleep. Million positions later Dave woke me up saying sun was up and we should move on. I felt like I'd slept only less than an hour but he kept telling me I was fully asleep more than three hours. And if the sun wouldn’t have been up I'd call him a liar. He also told me that a dude had stopped to take our picture while I was snoozing away. I just hope it wasn’t because they were thinking of putting a lock on the closet in case for the future homeless travelers, who are looking of a shelter to warm up. If not, then i don't mind finding my picture in the Most Weirdest Places To Sleep web page.
As soon as I got up from the tiny little closet I was happily asleep again, this time in a Finnish truck. It had stopped to sleep overnight in that same gas station. Three dreamless hours later we ended up in a gas station near Gävla and few hours and some aimless walking later we go dropped off in the city of jävlar Gävla with farewell word’s that it would be a better place to hitch to Oslo than the gas station we were. I wonder, because after few hours my hitching spirit was in a real test. Also there was this little point that Dave had a schedule. He had to be in Oslo by next day afternoon. So he wanted to take a train to Oslo and I decided hitching in the winter with my feet cold in a bad hitching stop was not the way I wanted to do it. I've done it before. And I always told to myself never again I want to return to the cold especially to hitch. (That before was a time when my mission was to reach Finland without public transportation as fast as possible. Oh, and there were the times I’ve hitched inside in Finland, but smaller distances… Oh yes, and the time I left Krakow in Poland to get to a meeting in Tallinn, Estonia… Yes and that one inside Germany... Well, that proves my point: never again.) Now was the time to bounder what I'd like the most. And it sounded awfully nice to take a ride in the train to Stockholm to visit my old couchsurfing pal for couple days before heading towards Denmark to visit a school I was planning to go to (that was also my point B, where I’d head to C).
People set limits to themselves, so does the weird travelers. They think some things are not possible. But the limits are only guidelines that can be broken in mind of your goal. They are there to challenge you. But if you realize after three hours of hitching for a lift, that you don’t enjoy it anymore and would rather enjoy a train ride, you should go for it. If that crazy double personality in your head is not in peace anymore, you should give up and try something else. Giving up is not loosing. It is realizing your limits.
For me more important than keeping my limit was the next goal: Denmark, after which I’d hitch down in the South. Now I also wanted some rest to my tired body.
I've seen Scandinavia, I've seen Europe. I’ve hitch hiked around.

A life of a nomad is unexpected, lonesome, full of ups and downs, schedules lost if you ever had ones and many wise lessons you learn on the way. But it can be more secure, more constant. It can me a life with a routine just like the one back home if you set your mind into thinking it is something permanent like it is. You need things like, jobs, places to rest in between of wandering, a morning tea, a morning shit, a movie on the couch with a friend. And it is those things you learn to appreciate on the road, those things that you need in between of A and B on your way to C.

As I finally said good bye for the time being to Dave who went on till Oslo as I reached my couch in Stockholm after short but nice ride in the Swedish train, I felt relaxed. I was enjoying the company of a old friend again, joking about a job as a windshield-cleaner-automate with my friend being my pimp. I knew I needed these few days to rest.

Speed hitching is awesome, but then, it is not constant and in the cold Scandinavia where people are born to be scared of unexpected things is not the best place to do it in the winter time. Even if I still like to believe I'm like Alice in the Wonderland where everything is possible, even hitching 500km to Oslo sooner than with a ride on the bus. Because when you end up hitching in a place you don’t know, you have no expectations on how to get from there. You just go, because you are crazy enough to be believed.

With these thoughts I fell asleep with every inch of my body dreaming a life as a windshield-washer-closet-machine automate… Which is actually not a bad idea for a traveler wishing to have some work with accommodation included.

Oulu-Sweden, here I come!

Life is taking risks, it is going beyond of what you see, and it is all about doing something incredible today, what you could postpone for tomorrow. If this would be the last day of your life, what would you do? I'd raise my thumb and go on! I'd share my journey with someone who lets me in their life with an open heart. Somebody said do me three years ago I am an observer. And that is still true. I observe and learn to share what I know, I pass it away.

Today I left Finland where I got used into old customs for more than a month. I met a friend from couchsurfing, Dave we shall call him. He found his way up to the north to meet me and made me see again what my hometown, Oulu is like. That is something I constantly keep losing when I get there: they eye of the newbie. The eye that has no expectations for a place or a situation it stumbles in the journey.
It was then when I realized the traveler awaking in me again. It was time to leave again, since I actually didn’t plan to return in the first place. And even when my grandmother told me to come back soon, because her heart felt out of place when I was gone, I knew it's only because she loves me. And she’d let me go to do what was meant because that’s the only way for me to grow and to love her even more. I couldn’t stay and she didn’t expect me to even if she said so. A person who is living his or her dream shouldn’t feel quilt even when people expect to let the dream slip through your hands to be just a dream, because they are worried, jealous, possessive or just don’t understand. You can’t be worried of everything when you go to where you have never been. You can’t expect the worst, because life should truly be lived like a dream where everything is possible. That's how Alice did it in the Wonderland, and that's why she filled her real destiny, that's how she did all the things some only dream of doing, but at the end of the day they won’t because they are scared for their lives, for the result of making the dream come true. What if you suddenly win that million you always dreamed of?
Would you be happy then? I doubt it. People intend to dream on until they learn to enjoy and appreciate the present.

So, If my destiny is to return, then my grandmother with rest of the family will appreciate it more than if I would have physically stayed to pretend to be there without my heart into it. Soon they wouldn’t have cherished the time I am there thinking I'll always be there.
Every day should be special, like the last day of your life. Enjoying every breath you take.
What it comes to my fellow traveler, my fellow hitcher, your paths will go in different directions soon. But we are smiling as we go, where ever. We share the journey. We speed through Scandinavia on a mission. And at the end of the road we split to meet again. (Because we do have a mutual mission called a cookbook, a hitch hikers guide to the kitchen, that we work on as we surf in other peoples kitchen) Dave, in one day thought me a lesson I might have learned much later while staying in the cube that's called comfort of a hometown. With him we talked about culture, different reasons of living, different fucked up ways of controlling lives without harmony and love. We spoke about human relationships, where you grew up expecting things instead of letting it go because you love yourself and the other, because you are free like your worst enemy to do what you wish, because life is being honest and true for yourself. That's why if something doesn’t feel good you wonder.

As the journey continues, but the ride where I am writing this is about to end I’ll end it with the thought of today by couraging a troubled soul to start living with the heart open, without quilt about leaving, about filling expectations that you or somebody else have set to you. Just be and enjoy the moment without lies in your heart. Because at the end of the day you'd start saying to yourself you'll do it tomorrow. Today you just had some other things to do, things that are expected. Don’t be scared. Go for what drives you today!

A thought of today

Leaving is sometimes so hard. For me it seems to be overwhelming in many cases.
Especially when you have got used to the life you created around you, when you realize you are enjoying it like it was yours... until the time you open the door to the sunny winter day to have a quiet walk and realize it’s -25 degrees.

In the other hand, staying put is even more difficult sometimes. These cold breezes from the North Pole remind me of those days. You keep on moving just to be warm.

My feet are getting cold as my thoughts are growing restless, but I'm still almost forgetting the reason I packed my bag. I'm now looking at it without really knowing where we will end up when we walk out from the comfortably place called mom's home where there are no cold breezes to remind me of the road I've chose to ride.
But I know my bag's backed for a reason; and once I open the door, whether it's cold or warm, summer or winter, I'll remember where I was heading to.

It has been opening, exhausting, interesting and at the same time a little bit boring here in the north of Europe in a little city called Oulu. I am going to miss this place; after all, it's the place where I grew up, but also grew out of.
The things I'm going to miss are those, which made me feel like home again. Like salsa with the other salseros. It's been a warm breeze from Cuba in the middle of the coldest winter. I'm also going to miss swimming with my mom, experimenting in my grandma’s kitchen, meeting old friends and making new ones. Though, making new ones in the road has never been a problem. However, the problem seems to be keeping the new friends.
Well, those who will forget will be gone. Those, who are close to your heart, will be remembered. Life will go on, just like thoughts will change in time; like view will change from a window of a moving car, like the snow will melt to give space for the new grass.

A new day, a new thought, the same interests that keeps you going. I'll end this one with the best quote I came up so far: Life is.

Little something about life

Though, for only the past half a year I have taken this huge leap into finding out who I am and how I am to be me.
And the answer were all in these books, all in these wise words I heard while searching, but they didn’t reach my heart until I understood it. I still am not quite sure how that happened, but here, right where I left, my home, might be the answer. And it might be the old book that I found at my new rental rooms shelf just by accident and decided to open only one page and read that the answer was a bit clearer. There might have been a dozen times in the past I have heard the same quote that I wasn’t quite ready to accept, but now, suddenly it makes all the sense in the world.

Funny that when I came back from living 4 months abroad I began to understand even more clear how much the past had affected me...
And now it's just so clear. I realize just by being me, simply, accepting me, being honest to me, being naked in front of the mirror and thinking I love that person, or just by being silent in the crowd room of friends and strangers just because, just because I don’t have to talk, I can just BE. BE me.
You can always advice people to love them self but it might take a year or even 45 years to that listener to understand what do you really mean with those words.
For me from the time I was 19 (that's when I started to open myself a bit, open my field of experience, my vision so to speak) to the present it has been a revealing journey to realize just how much my family relations and surroundings have affected me. And now that I returned to take care of those relations I have been blessed to see it with different eyes. I don’t enjoy the things I used to, like clubbing or watching telly, but it is nice to still watch the old episodes of Frazier that they show here or laugh at the stupid commercials which promise you a healthy life in a yogurt can.
But now that I know the solution is not found on those things or even at my grandmother’s kitchen, I can be more free here that I was before. I can ask myself what do I want from the rest of my life, and I can aim for it.
After WHAT, I used to ask WHY, because before I might have done it for wrong reason, which had something to do with my ego. But now I can even talk calmly and listen, even in the family table where the emotions are exploded finally, when, after 45 years, the truth is spoken out loud.

I also think the less you have the more clear your path comes. I currently have very little money, but I know what I NEED to be able to do what I WANT instead of having all the money I dreamed but losing my goal while spending too much time in the grocery store. And I have enough money to make my dreams come true.
And when I tell to my friends, that while I had to live 2 weeks with 10 Euros in a busy city I was actually happier than when I had 1000 Euros, they don’t get me. Maybe it's because they are strong. But at that time I wasn’t, and I had to experience it, I had to experience even few days without eating to see, that I actually don’t need to focus on eating. I just need to focus on being in a moment FULLY. Thus I can see more clearly.

Here I am again, putting my thought out there. I think I'm mainly writing to put my thoughts into a paper, but if they can help somebody else, then why not putting them out here =)

Good night everybody! Frazier has left the building ;)