Intimate strangers

Gamelby and Vastervik, Sweden

Hitchhiking in Sweden is not so easy (see hitchwiki)... 
                    Rides from a re-patrioted Swedish ex-patriate who previously lived in Panama and Caracas, Venezuela,          a professional race car driver for BMW,        an aging Italian-Swedish cheesemaker who no longer eats cheese, locals who hitchhiked like hippies back in their day, and             raw vegan foodies on the way to a raw food retreat
                                                              ... leave us stranded in a nearly empty highway information stop off Norrköping, only 160 kilometers southwest from Stockholm.

How many times have I explained?

"The logic is simple. If you are going in the direction or destination that I am also going towards, and you have free space in your vehicle of transportation, why don't we ride together? Since I cannot always afford to pay for the bus and the train, but I do have the time and energy, then why should I, nor anyone able-bodied like me, try to get with one of the hundreds of private vehicles who shuffle across mass distances transporting limited mass?"

[Compared with experiences in Central America where families sometimes hitchhike together on the road and at least one person in a town drives a pick-up to transport goods (or hitchhikers) from small village to big cities --- no, hitchhiking in Sweden is not so easy.]

Even if your car is supposedly private property, the earth's fossil fuel resources and atmospheric space are not. For every time we delude ourselves into thinking that the oil-operated automobile for which we might pay monthly payments is simply our own possession, remember that oil is a finite planetary resource and that the 400ppm of carbon dioxide currently in the sky is our collective contribution to the rapidly altering constituency of the sky as commons and the planet under climate change.

I am a bit disappointed to learn firsthand how global north consumers actually practice privatized consumption to the point of exchanging only sheer banalities in everyday stranger sociality, at the collective expense of resource sharing and intimate interrelations... On the other hand, I realize I'm being perhaps a bit too harsh: You are all free to do whatever you want in this world

Stuck stuck stuck 

in Sweden 

FOREVER

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
But what do you know (what do I know), we were picked in a camper van of a wonderful couple! 

Intimate Encounters with Strangers Part 1:
The wife worked a second job as a 'goodwoman' for underaged refugees living in Sweden to gain citizenship. We stopped in the small town of Gamelby, so she could complete her weekly visit to a 17-year-old boy. As we waited in the meanwhile, the husband invited us for a walk through the Gamelby forest where Viking rock sculpture art designed by a Polish artist were erected among the evergreens. 

Intimate Encounters with Strangers Part 2 (continued):

Where are you going?

Where are YOU going?

Vastervik, where we live.

Is it south of here? 

Yes, and it's by the coast.

Bjorn from ABBA is from there.

Sweet! Ok, we'll go.

Hour later.

Where are you going to stay?

Is there a park? We have a tent.

You can camp in our garden.

Thanks, that's kind of you.

Hour later.

Just stay in the camper van for the night. 

What, really?

We're not using it.

Under the roof of the camper van offered by a goodwoman, 

we escaped the only night of rainfall in our so far sunny travels. 

Intimate Encounters with Strangers Part 3 (the end):

After a royal Swedish breakfast together, we left Vastervik, its coastal fjords, seabirds, and locals with many good vibes. Bus tickets to Kalmar cost $11. We stopped hitchhiking and went, stopping by the new port and ancient water tower to take breathes of gratitude under the warm, unfamiliar embrace of the Scandinavian summer sky.