The answer is yes. In France. My parents told me so many scary stories that I was afraid of picking up mass murderers, so I was very surprised to see people, even attractive young women, hitchhiking in my small town.

First, I live in Sèvres, a small town of about 22,000 people just outside of Paris. Now our town is considered a “big” town, because some of the smaller towns have half the people. And half the people means about 1/10 of the public transportation options. And that’s the problem. Instead of having buses that pass every 10-15 minutes, the small towns around mine have buses that pass much less frequently. Late at night and weekends it can be every 30-60 minutes. And even then, if you don’t live near the bus stop you have a lot of walking to do just to get to your place.

Now we shouldn’t feel sorry for all of these people, many of them live on the edge of lakes or the forest in multi-million dollar homes! But some live near them and thus suffer from a lack of public transportation.

So what do they do? Most wait for the bus, but a lot hitchhike. It’s pretty easy, just stand in the unofficial spot (which ironically is the bus stop), hold out your thumb, and wait for someone on the way home from work to pick you up. And it seems to work well because we see people doing it all the time.

The way to our house by car takes us past the bus stop and we often joke “Do we take ‘em?”, especially if they look a little shady. Fortunately for us (but unfortunately for them) we turn just 1/4 mile after the bus stop so it wouldn’t help them out much.

This hitchhiking talk reminds me of when we went to Morocco. Actually it’s the other way around, I was telling a friend about our Morocco trip and that made me think about hitchhiking in France. In the rural areas in Morocco, hitchhiking is the primary mode of transportation (many do not have the means to buy cars and gas). So when we were there, my wife & I decided we wouldn’t refuse a hitchhiker. Well unless he was really dirty. We even picked up a guy, we didn’t know it until he got in the car, but he had just gotten off from a long day at work. And his work was road construction!!!

The kicker to the story is that on the way back a few days later, we ran into him in the center of his small town. And of course, he asked us for a ride to the next town! He was dressed in beautiful Moroccan garb and on the way to the next city we saw a young Berber girl he knew on the side of the road. The result is the photo below!

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I’ve been suffering from writer’s block. I’ve sat down at the computer and went to my site ready to write a story, but the subjects I think of just sound kind of boring. This site is called “Everyday France” and I guess many days are in fact kind of boring. And I don’t want this site to end up being a diary like many other blogs.

One thing that kind of slowed me down was that a reader kindly notified that my articles were being stolen and illegally published on another blog. Apparently my site isn’t the only one, he’s stealing lots of others too. So far attempts at contacting him have gone unanswered. The next step? Filing a “Digital Millenium Copyright Act” violation notice with his provider. Great, more work that I don’t have time for. We’ll see if this post ends up on his site, that will be pretty funny if it does.

So, to get me out of this writer’s block, I am looking for ideas. Please leave a comment and let me know what you’d like to hear about. And if there are no suggestions, I will have to assume that there is a lack of interest.

I’ve been debating on a change in format, or actually an additional format. But I’d like to see what you come up with first. So let me have it!