Leaving Toulouse
As I had mentioned before, B. kindly dropped me off before he went to work in the morning at the petrol station on the western section of the highway ring, pointing south. There were lots of cars but I figured most of them are just going somewhere within Toulouse, so I asked just drivers with something else than 31 on their number plates. (France is divided into 100 departments and each of them has a number designated to it. 31 belongs to the department of Haute-Garonne, where Toulouse is located.) Before I got picked up by two Frenchmen after half an hour, I had seen a plane passing quite low above me (the airport isn’t far away) but I couldn’t tell if it were an Airbus. We didn’t talk at all for quite some time as the guy next to the driver had a long phone call, but later they showed me Pic du Midi in the distance. There appear to be two mountains of this name – it means simply “Peak of Midi” (Midi = southern France) – but looking at the map it had to be Pic du Midi de Bigorre, especially as I seem to remember the dome of the famous observatory on the top.
They dropped me at a petrol station after 100 km and the first driver I asked – because he had Spanish plates – agreed to give me a lift. L. was driving a van to Bilbao. It turned out he was actually a Gallego from a village not far from Santiago de Compostela: when he got a long phone call from a friend, it seemed to me he had a very weird accent. I didn’t understand much but I had thought that my Spanish being so crap is the only reason for this… Anyway, I learned my first phrase in Galician (Bus dias!*) – I later found out it’s actually Bos días, but from his mouth it certainly sounded like Bus. He told me that Galician sounds like Portuguese, but actually isn’t that similar, besides, the Galician they learn in school differs a lot from what they actually speak.
L. works for for the textile company Zara, he named a few more brands they produce, but I didn’t know them, just 2 of them sounded kind of familiar. He told me a bit about his colleagues at work. One of them has the same name as me, another is Romanian, a good worker, but there are many others who don’t want to work but prefer to beg for money on the streets. He heard of a beggar who was offered work by a passer-by, but ran away from the plantation after half a day. Earlier L. worked in Switzerland, in Crans-Montana, where his colleagues were Safet and his brother from Novi Pazar, a mostly Muslim town in Serbia. Safet wasn’t very religious, unlike his brother, a strict Muslim who was fasting during Ramadan, never drank alcohol (except beer) etc.
At 11:15 am he left me at the service area after Donostia / San Sebastián, where I asked a few people for a lift. A French couple told me they couldn’t take me because they were on holiday, but another elderly French couple saw no problem with that and took me for about 250 km. We stopped in Bilbao for some shooping, got lost a bit in the city but quickly found the way back to motorway, so I saw just the Sacred Heart Monument (Jesusen Bihotzaren Monumentua / Monumento al Sagrado Corazón) pictured in this article and the sign pointing to the Guggenheim museum. When we started discussing money and prices, it turned out the Frenchman collects coins, so I promised to send him Slovene euro coins once they were isued, and we have kept contact since then.
The real motorway (autopista) ends at Burgos, and after they left me at a petrol station between Burgos and Palencia, I discovered it would be probably a better idea if they had left me there, because the service areas were further apart, and therefore more frequented. But here on autovía (dual carrigeway) there is a petrol station at almost every exit, so I waited for quite some time and in the end asked a Portuguese truck driver to just take me to a busiest one. It was large enough but the mostly Portuguese truck drivers either claimed they aren’t going my way, or that they don’t understand me, although I hardly said more than “Valladolid”. So I rather went to the junction and soon got a lift to Valladolid, almost to the door of my host.
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