Today’s word is socialize

I have
travelled as a hitchhiker many times. Not only because my resources haven't
always been the biggest, but also because it's interesting. Travelling alone
might be a bit lonely. However, at times when you have people around you, you
can always find you some company. And no, I'm not talking about hookers.

Heck, you don't even need to know
the local language, it's enough if you can speak the local language just a bit
or the other person can speak just a bit English, for example. This one time at
band camp….or actually in a French railway pub I started talking with one guy
who turned out Algerian. He had a boutique in France and he just wanted to tell me all
of his problems. Well, I listened. I couldn't speak a word of French, he
couldn't speak a word of English. So we ended up speaking in
English-French-German mixed language. Oh man, it was ugly, but by the end of
the day we really did understand each other. I had spent some interesting hours
talking to a total stranger. Do that - you might find it very enlightening.

A couple of years ago I stayed in a hostel in Paris, everyone living there seemed to be foreigners. The
first evening there wasn't much to do…there was quite a bit of people in the
café, but shy as I were, I didn't really go to talk to anyone. Nobody came to
talk to me either. What a boring evening it was.

The
next evening I approached an Austrian gal - what a pretty gal she was,
but I won't go into
details. Anyway, lets just say that after that I didn't really have to
find
anyone to talk to me. Once people had seen I'm able to communicate and
not just sit
and drink at my own table ten feet away from others, they started
coming over. It was interesting and enlightening, and I met some
great people from Australia, USA, Austria Germany, New Zealand, Israel…and I was there just a couple of
days. The Israeli guy wanted to talk about TV systems though, not sure why…he kept asking
if we have analogue or digital TV…weird.

So if you're abroad – just talk to
people. But why shouldn't you do the same in your own country? I know we all
try to avoid bums. Most of them stink, talk stupid jokes just to get your
attention (or money..) and once they start talking, they don't go away. We'll,
that's the general idea anyway. However, even a so-said bum can actually be
very good person to talk to. This one time at band camp…or actually just near a
river in the town where I live…we were just sitting on a bench with couple of
friends drinking beer, talking about the weather and politics, when one *bum*
came to take our bottles and then started talking to us. I don't really
remember what his pick-up line was, but the result was that we talked to him
about half an hour. He talked about his life, how he came to become this way
and how he actually isn't a bum in a normal sense. No details, but you get my
point. Hopefully.