Last weekend my traveled to and from Barcelona via rides found on comuto.es, a Spanish rideshare website. I had used a similar website (mitfahrgelegenheit) in Germany once, and had also used craiglist rideshare once in Los Angeles. I personally have a relatively high level of trust for strangers on a website like this and am not terribly paranoid about getting kidnapped or run off a mountain or anything like that from a rideshare, but I guess it's understandable if others are. I just see it as a good way to travel, share costs, have some company for an otherwise boring trip, and decrease the size of my carbon footprint :). And the people from comuto are never boring!
On the way there, I called Bouzid and he said that at 8 or 9am he would in Valencia... little did I know that the next morning I would receive a phone call at 6am from him, telling me that he was already here! (It ended up being ok, he waited for about half an hour.) Anyways Bouzid was born in Algerian, and has lived in France for quite awhile. His Spanish was really good though, and we chatted about quite a few things. I learned quite a bit from him. For example, I learned that there are 4 words that mean cat in Arabic and also that Toulouse (where he lives now) is known as the Ville Rouge and for the Airbus factory. I'm not sure what he does now, but in the past he worked as a French language teacher. Also, it seems like everybody has something to say about "La Crisis" in Spain. According to Bouzid, the reason why Spain is in crisis was that 20 years ago, they entered the EU and received a lot of aid because they were among the poorer; but of course, not all this money was wisely spent and much of it was pocketed, wasted, etc. After more countries had entered the EU, Spain was no longer receiving aid and couldn't keep up the level of construction that they were doing.
So the ride back had some interesting people as well. One girl, Nuria, was a pastora for a living. She's originally from Barcelona but has lived in the Pyrenees for about 5 years, doing substitutions and taking care of animals. I guess her boyfriend's family needed someone to help out so she started working with them, and then she took a class, and then people were introducing her to other farms that needed help. She also mentioned doing work with olives. Another woman on the ride was originally from Venezuela but she said she had always felt more European than Latina. She moved to Germany when she was around 25 and worked as an au pair, and then after 2 years she worked in Zurich and now she's lived in Spain for about 5 years. She seems quite content now... she lives in a small city and works as an unlicensed dental technician/hygienist.
I've only met about 5 other people through ridesharing websites, and in my experience the girl driver I was with in Germany was the most "normal" or mainstream while the ones in Spain were more diverse or "alternative." The ones in California were definitely the weirdest (one was a conspiracy theorist who had to go to court because he accidentally voted once, and another one was going to visit her chemist boyfriend who experimented a lot... she experimented as well but in different ways to be clear).
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