This paper questions how breaks of convention, such as those which exist in hitching a lift, impact upon the sensing of place and the encounter with road-scapes. As a method of travel, hitching ruptures normative journeys, whereby destinations are no longer extensions of the present. Hitchers act on a compelling need to move in an intensely free yet highly constrained manner; to seek heights of physical and mental experience and to do so as if travel, perhaps even life itself, were fleeting opportunities.

"Why did the Anthropologist Cross the Road? Hitch-Hiking as a Stochastic Modality of Travel", Patrick Laviolette

> Be good conversation: If you share a language with the driver, it often makes sense to try to engage them in casual conversation. Drivers often pick people up to make their rides more interesting. They are doing you a favor picking you up, you can return the favor in part by keeping them engaged.

r:  
e: ah *now* you want me to front lol

> Avoid dark or military clothes, they do not create a lot of trustfulness. Looking too much like a colorful hippie will possibly scare other drivers off. Take off your hat (unless it's a really funny one), don't wear gloves, open your jacket, even though you might freeze. Also helpful are t-shirts that identify you with something, be it a country, a football team or a band - Zenit has been picked up because of his "Switzerland" t-shirt more than once.

 the problem is that it's cold as fuck. all my windbreaker stuff is black bloc standard issue, I can see how that's a problem but I don't have money for new clothes  I have colourful clothes and fun dresses and whatnot but they're all too light to stay on the side of the road or rest stop parking lot at 5° with drizzle. I guess I could go with the white overcoat and take off the windbreaker when trying to meet people.

and I should probably spend money on a reflective belt or something, statistically *that's* a real actual danger, if you find yourself having to walk besides a highway late at night with no space for pedestrians—you think that's unlikely to happen but it happened to me in Heidelberg.

> Take off your hat (unless it's a really funny one), don't wear gloves, open your jacket, even though you might freeze. Also helpful are t-shirts that identify you with something, be it a country, a football team or a band - Zenit has been picked up because of his "Switzerland" t-shirt more than once.

oh no, an actual reason to wear the brazil T-shirt  well Mother Anarchy will forgive my sins if it's for a good cause, right?

but the problem is if I wear the brazil T-shirt here literally everybody will assume I'm for the football team, and I don't have enough knowledge of football to even fake a conversation >.>

> Wear a short-brimmed straw hat or a light coloured cap as long as it doesn't hide your face too much. If it is raining, it's better to use an umbrella than a hood.

> Your mood is very relevant. So always be happy, or at least pretend to and keep smiling.

does not apply to Germany where if you smile at people they think you're insincere and crossing boundaries lol

though I guess maybe in the hitchhiking context you could get away with smiling since it's clear that you want something from them and they know what. if you smile at Germans in daily life as a matter of politeness they react like "what is this person trying to sell? is this a cult? are they hitting on me?"

conversely Germans in normal conversation will gaze right at you with direct eye contact (the famous "German death stare") and speak with a clear and loud voice in an intonation and facial expression that to the uninitiated feels like you're in an argument. they're not doing it to be scary, it's just a cultural thing. it's invisible to them and they're, as a general rule, very unwilling to understand or accommodate other norms regarding body language or conversation, so I can't imagine how uncomfortable it must be for Japanese people (who have the exact opposite conversational norms) to talk with strangers here.

(*does not apply to the neurospicy queer people who, as a rule, generally skip the death stare and value gentleness in conversation, though they still have the overall attitude that if a stranger talks to you they're being inconsiderate.)

when I'm having trouble with mistakenly parsing normal German body language as aggressive when it isn't, I imagine I'm living in the city of (fantasy) dwarves of Final Fantasy 1. "a short and sturdy creature fond of drink and industry", they're just missing the "short". when you imagine the dwarvish folk looking grumpy on the way to the mines but actually generously giving you food and drink at the inn, it's easy to parse the type of tsundere grandma who at first approach makes me feel like she's about to give me an earful at Netto, but actually gives me a sheet of discount stickers and leaves without elaborating

also the German witch grandmas who teach which weeds are edible in herbalism courses are very much dwarf-witch-coded rather than wood elf-witch-coded  

the only elf-Germans I remember are the forest occupiers and even then they're more of like, those wild wood-elves with sharp fangs whose bare feet grow lichen and who can hear the cry of a willow and will curse the logger for it

the Poles I find hard to summarise. yes they have a well-known resting angry face and Slavic folk have a reputation for being scary, but once you accept that the facial language as just a cultural thing, they way they talk and act is actually way less intimidating than Germans, and they're also culturally much more amenable to conversation with strangers. if you drink alcohol you have a big advantage in bonding. they will kinda shower you in souvenirs and gifts and handcrafted little wonders like the Japanese. I don't have as much experience with Slavic people generally but I found all the Ukrainians and Russians and Croatians I've talked to actually very easy to befriend, in contrast with their image in the West. like if you invite a Pole or Ukrainian to go somewhere they'll actually go with you. if I could pick I'd much rather live in a Slavic country than Germany (though I'd probably pick Croatia or Montenegro or something, for the climate, though they're still too damn cold…)

some cultural things: Poles like talking about negative things but they don't let it like, paralyse them. it's more a like "you think *this* is a bad neighborhood? back in Poland we went uphill both ways…" kind of thing. In many ways Poles resemble Asian cultures to me, they're unexpectedly collective-type in many regards. For example, expressing negative emotions is a form of bonding, if they do it that means they're seeing you as a friend, while pride is toned down even between friends https://journals.pan.pl/dlibra/show-content?id=99862 . this has to be navigated by us Brazilians, who culturally value optimism and looking on the sunny side of things. if you do it just right you can be the ray of sunlight for them, but that can be only possible if you are willing to engage with the "Polish culture of complaining"; to be accepted as sunlight you have to be open to the austere appeal of a snowy landscape, so to speak.

I don't know enough Polish people to make a judgement but in my limited experience, they are more like than the Chinese than the Japanese in that they can easily resent foreigners coming up and making pronouncements about Poland being this or that without really understanding it. interest in Poland is still appreciated, but you have to make clear a position of humility (remember it's a culture generally averse to boasting). the idea that Polish names are hard to read or pronounce is a very common sore spot, and here you can get a lot of bonus points by putting in the work to learn to pronounce things, and most importantly don't be like a USA person who keeps talking about other people's languages as if it was some impossible ordeal. conversely, Poles who learn English or other languages come from an education system that highly depreciates their own language traits—I can barely looks for videos on Polish phonology on youtube without having to wade through endless channels about "accent elimination"—and unless you know someone feels positive about that you should refrain from commenting on a Polish accent, no matter how pretty you think it is, as it's often a sore spot too.

one common experience between Slavs and Latinoamericans is that a lot of us are read as "white" in Western Europe, and that doesn't really fit the model of what they expect a "migrant" to be, so Germans will kinda completely erase the historical and socioeconomic gap between you and them and treat you as "just one of the guys", as if you were the same as a Frenchwoman or an Italian, with absolute incuriosity about your personal history in the Second/Third World or the state of your country and its history etc. it's easy to bond with Poles by complaining about how the Germans treat you :3