Polish guy who I talked to at my favorite gas station in Brno. He was going to some village near Vienna, but considering my previous experience with gas stations on the Brno-Vienna autobahn, I decided to get out at the border and hitch there. The guy worked as maintenace for cell towers, which I found fascinating, so we had a really interesting conversation about it. He himself was also pretty cool, he used to play basketball professionally and even lived in Lebanon for a while!
Getting of at the Austrian border really paid off, as a Polish truck pulled over fairly quickly thanks to my "Graz" sign. He was going all the way there, so this was a perfect ride, getting me past the nightmare of Vienna. The trucker was Ukrainian and we had a great conversation in Russian. He used to be a smuggler between Ukraine and the rebel held territories, which he said paid off well, but he stopped for moral reasons. He even showed me a video of how he got arrested by the Ukrainian military :D Being a former soldier, the warzone was nothing for him. He now lives in Poland and is a trucker. We talked a lot about his wife, who divorced him and how hes finally found a reasonable Ukrainian woman in Poland. It was a great ride.
Austrian guy driving an old "handicapped transport" van. Talked to him after a fairly long wait at a gas statio, which I though was great originally. Although it was a bit difficult to understand his German, we still had a good conversation about how Flixbus fucked me over (the one time I didnt hitchhike and took a bus to catch a flight and guess what, the guy takes off with my bag…). He even went out of his way to get me to a good gas station.
I was quite happy to see a Czech license plate at a gas station, which seemed a bit dead. The guy actually departed from Brno a couple of hours later than I did and was actually going all the way to Ljubljana! We had a really interesting conversation about his business (he owned a clothing company) and it was so exciting to listen to someone with so much experience. We talked about customs, how he travels to China for business negotiations, how Bangladesh made good clothes but was a bit unreliable, etc. Also talked about Brexit, which he had a really good understanding of an importer. Needless to say, we got to Ljubljana in no time.