to sofia by autostop in three people

So on thursday morning i met marcin and xav only an hour after we planned... An hour or two later we were walking from the last metro stop to the place on the highway recommended by hitchwiki. We were attempting to cross a big busy road, standing on the corner, when a lady who happened to have her window open asked us if we needed a ride. And so began our trip!
Hitching with 3 people isn't necessarily the best idea- it means you need cars and trucks with enough space, and people are slightly less willing to pick up that many people. But we managed. It wasn't the fastest trip i've ever had- it took up two days- but it was a lot of fun. We squeezed into tiny cars, trucks of various sizes and one water delivery van. I spoke more turkish in one day than i had in a week in istanbul. We met about 6 other hitchhikers just after the border (which we arrived at around 10pm), and one of them, a nice french guy called emile, joined us for a midnight picnic and bottle of duty-free turkish raki, amongst all the little shops and petrol stations clustered around the 50metres of road just after the border. And then he added his bottle of syrian arak as well (i prefer raki i think) and somehow our night finished at 4 in the morning, sleeping on a patch of grass beside the Shell station!
In the morning it was too hot to sleep by about 9am, but our friend emile, who had attempted an early start, was still standing at the border, waving his sign at the few trucks and cars passing by. Unlike at 4 in the morning, the place was disturbingly quiet. I wonder if this had something to do with Ramadan, or if it's always like that. We figured that as long as he was there, there was no way the 3 of us were going to get a ride. So we sat on the little veranda of a store that sold coffee and a strange assortment of other things, and waited. None of up was feeling like standing in the sun for hours, anyway...
A few hours later we noticed that emile had gone, so we took up his position and started getting a little more proactive. Trucks and cars had to stop at the last part of the border check, which gave us the opportunity to ask them more directly. We were asking even for 5km, as we had been told there was a truck parking place 5 or 20km away (opinions varied) and most of the drivers who passed us were going there to sleep. (to be continued...)