4350 miles｜Dresden, Germany

Every mile I've traveled has been driven by the kindness of people.

After two full days of waiting for a hitchhiker, I finally managed to leave Berlin. The morning after arriving in Dresden, I was lying on the inn bed, world-weary and not wanting to check out. But the price of the room before the night is 650 NTD, which is close to my travel budget for a day.

I stayed until the last moment and reluctantly got up and packed my bags.

I bought a Sim card at the station, but I couldn't open it. After I went to the telecommunications store to ask for help, an uncle from Norway took my passport and helped me to apply for registration online. Before leaving, he joked with me, "Do you think I'm really helping you solve your problem?" As if asking me not to trust him, weird sense of humor.

Originally I wanted to go out and sing, and strolled around the street, but the hot weather made people tired. After wandering around for a while, I couldn't find a suitable place to set up a stall, so I decided to go back to the inn to rest first, and contact my friends who were studying in Germany. After that, I bought a ticket online for the early morning of tomorrow, and planned to go to Munich to disturb my body and mind at the other party's house.

In the evening, I left the inn with my luggage on my back and walked to the other side of the city. I happened to encounter a concert. The atmosphere was quite like the Taichung Jazz Festival. The German actress was singing on the stage, and the singing was so wonderful. I unpacked and sat on the turf with the locals and listened carefully. The night is getting deeper, the wind is cool, the grass is full of people, making it a beautiful summer night.

I feel that I haven't been able to listen to it, and the concert has ended abruptly. I went to a place with no street lights nearby, tied my luggage together, and without setting up a tent, I used my luggage as a pillow and fell asleep. An hour later, suddenly a very unusual wind blew. The wind was dancing wildly in the dark, and I looked at the distant sky and found that thunder was coming, and I had a bad idea. I quickly started to clean up, and when I walked to the bridge, I found that there were still many people lingering. Intuition tells me that now is a good time to set up a stall.

I quickly took out my guitar on the bridge and sang, and instantly someone stopped to listen and take pictures. It's a pity that the good times don't last long. After two songs, the rain began to drip, so I had to pack my bags quickly and hide under the building. There were many people hiding under the building, watching them chatting happily, presumably because of the good mood brought by the concert.

Until the rain became sparse, everyone dispersed, and in the end it was just me and my homeless old man. I guess this is probably his own shelter from the rain, he hummed calmly, without any sadness.

Yes, whether a person is happy or not is not how his quality of life is, but what is happening in his inner world. I have verified this many times during my travels, unknowingly.

After the rain was light enough to leave, I said goodbye to the old man who had not spoken to him. I crossed the bridge and found McDonald's. After staying there for an hour, I walked a long way to find a place to camp. Go to bed at four in the morning.

The next morning, I woke up in the bushes of a park in Dresden, and although I had been hearing people's voices since the beginning of the morning, no one was actually bothering me. The mobile phone still can't access the Internet. Today is Sunday. I tried to go to the telecommunications store, but it was not unexpectedly closed. After that, I walked back to the inn where I stayed yesterday, and the turf outside the inn was using the Internet.

At noon, I went to the supermarket to buy pizza bread and orange juice. I tried to set up a stall outside the station. My body started to burn inexplicably.

I went back to the inn to rest and sang at the station for 3 hours before going to eat pizza for dinner before 8 pm, and then slowly walked to the bridge where the singing was sold yesterday, watching the sunset while waiting for the music festival in the distance to slow down. The curtain ended slowly, and he continued to set up a booth to sing, to the young people who couldn't listen to the concert, to the happy woman returning home, and to her still burning heart.

Not long after, a family of three Taiwanese passed by the bridge and noticed my sign. I sang the island sky light, my mother encouraged and supported me, and then continued to sing the long-distance night train. I haven't been able to sing to Taiwanese for a long time, and I am very devoted to singing Taiwanese songs. The sound of music makes the bridge in Dresden become the hometown of the four of us.

After listening to the song, Dad gave me the money without saying a word. When I saw the amount of the note, I was startled and said, "That's too much."

Dad just smiled, didn't say anything, and insisted on handing me the money. I bowed in thanks and watched them slowly walk away. After singing a few more songs, I closed the booth and settled the hard work for the whole day today. Dad's generosity and hard work during the day turned out to be the highest earning day of the whole year.

In the past two months, I have experienced too many good and bad things in one breath, and today's abnormally smooth, did not make myself feel particularly happy, on the contrary, there may be a bigger crisis, waiting for my unease . When the day often swings between two extremes, is it that I slowly look down on many things, or is my mind gradually numb to the ups and downs? Sometimes, I can't even tell the difference between the two.

I told myself that I was just thinking too much, walked steadily to the next step, and sang every song attentively, that would be fine. Once again, I entered McDonald's, turned on my laptop and recorded my journey, writing down what I thought and felt.

On July 22, 2019, at 2:20 midnight, I boarded the night bus to Munich, which ended my 10-week journey across 5 countries: Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, with a total of 117 buses. car with a total mileage of 7,000 kilometers.

While the hitchhiking score doesn't need to be talked about, it's just the result of standing there with your thumbs out. What really deserves praise is always the car owners who are willing to stop for the hitchhikers, and their zealous souls.