Article published October 2021 and updated May 2023. Mostar is the home of my family. It’s the home of my ancestors. It’s where my origins are. And yet I am thankful that I was born in Germany because only 2 years later war would strike the country, changing the lives of the people there forever. I was too little to understand what was going on. Probably my biggest luck. This way, I was able to…
Macedonians: A Peculiar Folk – Oddities about Macedonia and its People
Every country has its own customs, manners and people. Sometimes, this may seem odd to outsiders. We mentioned the Lisbonese, the Germans and the Philippines before; and this time, we want to share the things that we thought were peculiar in Macedonia. Great differences in one country In the Balkans, local buses seem to be gifts from other countries. In Herzegovina, buses are a present “from the people of Japan”, in modern-looking city of Skopje, buses are…
What we learned about the traffic on Bali’s streets and how it feels to be part of it
I am walking along an endless street close to Kuta. Indonesian streets and walking don’t go well together is the first that an Indonesian would tell you. On the local streets, the motorized traffic makes the rules and that is mainly the scooters. They can be divided into caring drivers vs. I-don’t-give-a-shit drivers. For those who want to walk – or have to walk, as Indonesians would say it – because walking is equal to…
Germans: a peculiar folk
Everywhere we go, seeing and meeting new people in a new culture, we notice differences. Every nation has its own stereotypes and awkward manners. After living among the Lisbonese for several months, we stayed in Germany for over a month. This blog post is dedicated to the Germans. We stayed in Germany for over a month but Tina already has been living there her whole life. In this post, we share what we think are…
What happened to our 10 hopes after we hit the road?
We finally arrived in Germany after 9 days of hitting more than 2000 km of road, spending 200 hours under the open sky, going through climate changes from sweating to freezing, from beach towel weather to heavy rainfalls, sharing our stories with 26 drivers and that in four different languages. It was our first hitchhiking experience together on such a long distance from Portugal to Germany. In our journal we kept a record of our…
Hitchhiking – 10 hopes and wishes before we hit the road
It’s been 10 months that we moved to Lisbon to work and travel. We’ve gone through winter, Christmas, spring, Easter, summer and autumn. Winter will begin soon, whereas Portugal has one of the mildest winters compared to the rest of Europe. There are a lot of things we’ll miss for sure. The blue skies and the bright sun sending warmth and happiness so that there’s no way to not wake up. A look out of…