Free rides and other stories

Some people who spend time around me claim that I have a super-human luck in those small everyday events when it really counts. I make it to ferries with a minute to spare, when I drop the jam jar it miraculously falls upright and so on. I claim it is mainly a combination of attitude, instinct and experience of always putting yourself in situations where you need the luck. So it doesn’t affect big things, and I keep losing votes (I’ll tell more about that later), but still, I am usually relaxed and trusting things will work out for the best, and they do.

Anyway, yesterday I missed my train. No bad luck, just stupidity, I remembered the time wrong. This is the last train we’re talking about, last one to Aalst from Brussels, at 23.26. Ridiculously early for someone who grew up in Espoo (a Helsinki suburb) in the 90’s and you could catch the last train home to behind nowhere at 1.42 on weekdays, 3.06 on weekends. They later changed the 1.42 to 1.47, I think.

Anyway, Aalst is unreachable already before midnight. Talk about a dampener on social life. No buses, no trains, no nothing. Weekends aren’t any better, and Sunday evenings even worse, as I have learned.

Even in this case the universe had tried to conspire in my favour by delaying all trains by a fire at Bruxelles-Nord, but it wasn’t enough, the train was gone. So my options were to call up my co-workers and ask to crash at their place, or to jump on a train that goes kind of close. Since I’ve already used the first option once in the past two weeks, I decide for adventure. Denderleeuw is a beautiful name for a horrible little Spießer-town where I arrived at one in the night. This place is only 10 kilometers from Aalst, so quite a typical walk for a drunk Finnish teenager in summer, and the night was warm, a 2/3-moon was out and in general things were nice. Felt quite nostalgic, actually.

No taxi at the station. No people anywhere. 10 km to go. So get walking.

After the first kilometer I started doubting my way. Bike path signs that are easily twistable are a bad basis for decisionmaking, and I decided to trust my own instincts rather than them, which was a good choise, as it turned out. Still, when I saw headlights approaching and a car with the magic shining yellow sign on top, I waved like crazy.

Lesson 1: use whatever you can of the local language, but then shift over to English. This will prove you are the rarest kind of ally: a foreigner with an interest. Works especially well in minority language regions or groups with weak selfconfidence for other reasons.

So after managing to (in Dutch) managing to find out that the taxi first had another ride and the ageing driver coming from Aalst wanted a totally absurd Vijfentwintig euro for the 9 km ride, I happily waved him on.

Lesson 2: Show effort but only as much as you are happy with.

Since I managed to at least confirm the direction to Aalst from the driver in English, I felt happy continuing on my way. A nice walk, some jogging and marvelling at the horrors that are the faux medieval castles of the petite bourgeoisie. My thought runs like this: If I make it from the city of Denderleeuw to the city of Aalst, the taxi driver will come by on his way back, and pick me up. He will even be wondering if I’ve gotten lost. Each meter that he has to feel a bit of worry, worry that I’ve misunderstood the instructions and gotten lost or something, will give him a feeling of relief once he finally sees my thin, pale cloth jacket light up in his headlights.

So I jog, but not enough. If he doesn’t come by I don’t want to exhaust myself. I will just have to sleep a bit longer.

Lesson 3: Accept help

He does, of course. I look around when the first headlights in the whole 40 minutes I’ve been wandering turn up behind me, and smile. The taxi pulls up next to me five minutes after I’ve made it into the district of Aalst, and the driver opens the door and nods to me to get in. Without a doubt I jump in. I’m home clear.

Lesson 4: Being nice doesn’t cost anything, and makes you something else than a customer.

Apparently the driver had picked up a regular customer that took the same train as me to Denderleeuw, driven her somewhere even further away, and was now on his way back to Aalst. Technically it didn’t cost him anything to pick me up for the last bit, but the last thing I wanted him to do was to see me as a potential or lost customer. So talk, talk, talk. Sit in the front seat, never in the back. Be nice. Keep company. The same goes for all hitch-hiking, of course.

Lesson 5: When you know payment will not be accepted, do offer to give it.

Again, a part of being nice is acknowledging that you have just been made a favour. So, once the cab stops in front of my home door, I ask how much I owe the driver, knowing well that this is just a formality, that he can not ask me for anything (since I turned down his first offer, since I made it into the next town, since he stopped to pick me up without being flagged), bit it does offer one big opportunity: for me to be sincerely grateful and to express it. So I thank him and thank him again. And am home not one minute sooner than if I had taken up his first offer of 25 €, at 2 in the morning.

In some bigger things, where luck doesn’t count for as much, I have more trouble. Last Saturday I lost a very tight vote in the Federation of Young European Greens (FYEG) General Assembly for the position of Secretary General. I made it to the second round in fierce competition with three excellent competitors, and lost in the second round against Bruno Nicostrate, the ex-office administrator, current SecGen of FYEG, with a result of 27 to 32.

That pretty much puts an end to my period in the Young Greens. I still have to hand over some of the tasks I’ve had in there, and I wouldn’t mind being given new tasks either, as long as they are not inside actual Young Green structures, but that is still in the future. Now I will concentrate on the EP Press Room, and get ready for the wedding in August and for moving back to Berlin in the Autumn.

And will keep counting my small blessings.