I've been telling the same stories over and over again. It's helpful to have an arsenal for awkard moments in cars with people who picked you up on the side of the road. One theme that keeps coming back is Facebook. For one thing, I've been keeping friends and family abreast of my travels with it; for another, I've been making new friends and adding them to my network; and for yet another, it's helped to facilitate coïncidental meet-ups in the most random of places.
First, Quentin. A friend from grad school, he was actually an undergrad student in my class when I was a TA in grad school. And so we're not exactly the same age. But, opposite of what you think, he is not 10 years younger but 10 years older. He had a regular IT job for a while but decided to quit to finally get his degree--in viola performance. I hadn't seen him for many years--4 or 5--and so had to learn to Facebook that he was getting divorced. His extended family saw oppportunity in crisis and sent him to Europe for 2 months to take his mind off things. Already our stories resemble each other--aside from my noticable lack of divorce.
We stayed in contact through Facebook, following each other's position just as friends back home do, the one difference being the noticable lack of jealousy in our comments. We decided to meet in the middle, which is probably the best and only reason to go to Luxembourg.
Quentin and I tried to meet once after our meet-up in Luxembourg--this time at the top of a mountain to watch the arrival of the Tour de France. Q posted on FB that he was headed to Morzine to continue following the Tour from city to city. I was going to watch that stage too and so left him a note telling him I'd be calling when I got there. But, faute d'internet, a lack of internet, and he didn't get the message until the next day. I hitchhiked from Geneva--boo, hiss--and got made it in 2, really 3, rides. The first guy was French but of Arab extraction and was too excited about the United States and the direction in which Obama is leading it. Direction is good, but it would be nice to advance some in that direction. The second guy was really hard for me to understand but was great: he dropped me off in his town and then decided that he had some time to kill so might as well take me all the way there--about another 30 or 40 km.
Got to the mountain, called Quentin's cell phone(s), which were both off, and wandered around looking for him. Later we found out that we were within a kilometer of each other near the finish. Close but so far. So I had no place to sleep and had to make do, after watching the World Cup final, with sleeping on some newspapers on the side of a road. After it got too cold, in the middle of the night, I had to be resourceful and found an advertising banner to wrap myself up in. Plenty warm but hardly slept. Sun woke me up at 5:30.
Final FB story. After I hitchhiked to Zurich, I did carsharing to Stuttgart and then took the train to Tübingen, a student-flavored town in Swabia. Or Schwabia. I got there, planning to spend 2 days, and posted "Evan is in Tübingen" on FB. My old friend Jay--whom I've known since grade school, and then high school, but really becoming friends with through Ultimate frisbee in college and both living in Hyde Park in Chicago--told me that a mutual friend from Chicago had just moved there to work on some application of math to develop artificial learning. We got connected through Facebook and met up for a drink and then breakfast.
Like I tell people: it's a tool, one that can be used to bring people together. But bring people together too much and you lose privacy and your wallet. Use it wisely--like the internet in general--and reap the benefits while hopefully avoiding the downsides.
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