016 Random encounters and basketball

The way I travel, I get to meet a lot of people. The couchsurfers I stay with, their families, their friends, the drivers I hitchhike with, other travelers. For me this is the main reason I like to travel. That might sound like I don’t care about the beautiful buildings and the impressive nature, which isn’t true, because I do appreciate that as well. But if it would be only that, I think that at some point the next old church and the next impressive vista in the forest would not be that different anymore from the last one. For me, it is the people that give the places I see meaning and detail. This is why the cities I’ve visited the last couple of weeks all have their own distinct image in my mind. And sometimes by simply meeting with the right people, great things can happen

And the last couple of days I’ve met such great people! Not only the couchsurfers I, in a way, was supposed to meet, but also people I met in a more random way, in busses, trains, bars etc. After hitchhiking to Klaipeda in Lithuania to couchsurf with Romualdas, I was sitting in a nice bar in the centre, drinking a beer and reading my book. After 10 minutes, two guys walk in and order something to drink as well. Then one of these guys turns around and says ‘Hey, you’re that guy!’. It turned out that he was one of the other people I had sent a couch request to earlier, and he recognized my head from the photo. He took me along to watch the Basketball match between Lithuania and Serbia. We won.

Basketball is sport number one in Lithuania, and right at the moment I was in the country the European championships were taking place. In Lithuania. It was madness. Envision a country full of basketball commercials and posters, people walking around painted green. Some people told me that Basketball is the second religion here. So it was cool to watch the game on a big screen in the harbor somewhere, with a bunch of cool people I met by accident. I didn’t know anything about the game, but it was exciting, and now I know a bit more.

After Klaipeda, where I also visited the Curonian Spit, a small stretch of land sticking out into the sea from Kaliningrad, I took the train to Vilnius. This was the place where the basketball matches were being played, so there were many more visitors in the city, and the whole place was loaded with Basketball shops, basketball shaped lights in the street, and a TV tower dressed up as a basketball ring. Lenny, my friend from Utrecht, also came to Vilnius, and we couchsurfed together. Our great hosts took us to the best bar in the city, we had a lot of fun. The next day in the evening, we met up with some other couch surfers in a bar in the centre. Most of them were there for the basketball. Lenny and I had earlier contemplated if it would be possible to go the games as well. We hadn’t know about the championship before we decided to go to Lithuania, so for us it was a surprise to meet a country so engaged in the game. Unfortunately people told us that the tickets for the Lithuanian games were sold out. In town earlier we were offered some tickets by a peddler, but that didn’t seem like a good plan. In the bar, however, was also a guy from Turkey who turned out to be part of the Turkish Basketball confederation, and he told us that there was a chance he might be able to get us tickets for tomorrow’s game! So the next day, after a race through the city to be back on time from a castle we were visiting with our hosts, we actually managed to get hold of some (free!) tickets, and we saw Lithuania beat Germany in a stadium full of ear shattering noise and very enthusiastic people. It was incredible, being there and realizing that it all happened by coincident and by meeting with the right people at the right time.