In October 2023, I decided to run a travel experiment. I had several months of free time, and I realized I was terrible at keeping in touch with people, especially after moving across multiple countries. So I created a public Google Form, posted it online, and asked a simple question: “if you want to meet up anywhere in Europe, tell me your city”.
November and December were busy for me: I was doing another trip from Azerbaijan to France without flying (which curiously brought me through Cyprus).
When I finally checked the form responses in February, 30 people had signed up. The plan was simple: put the dots on a map, connect the dots, and voilà, I had an itinerary.
In practice, I had to make some concessions and couldn’t visit everyone in one trip. After taking organizational constraints into account, I ended up with a 4-week route covering 18 cities across France, Switzerland, Germany, and Poland.
Traveling in Europe is simple. I grabbed my backpack and jumped on the first train. I had nothing but a list of cities and dates, so the whole trip felt like an adventure.
Because the form was public, a few people I had never heard of filled it out. That added a new layer of surprises and randomness.
A Job Interview
Among the form submissions was an entry from Nicolas, someone I had never met.
He had attached a short message, mentioning he left Google at the same time as me to start a company. He was looking for someone with my background.
Zurich was already along my route, so we met up at his place. Alongside his co-founder, Quentin, we had coffee, we talked, we kept in touch. And later, they made me an offer, which I eventually accepted.
A Hidden Phone Museum
Near Nuremberg, a former Google colleague I didn't know personally invited me to his house for lunch.
After eating, he mentioned he had a phone collection downstairs. I followed him into his basement, where he had built a fully operational telecommunications setup:
- He has 55 functional landlines, each wired with its own local extension number, plus dozens of non-wired models.
- Routing hardware to support legacy phones that couldn’t dial modern signals.
- An old coin-operated phone running on original German Deutschmarks.
He explained the architectural differences between phone systems, e.g. how American coin phones relied on distinct acoustic tones generated by falling coins so human operators could determine the coin value by ear.
In front of his house, a working German public phone booth was connected to his system.
A Beer Festival
Leaving his house in the afternoon, I planned to take a train back to Munich. When the train made an intermediate stop in a small village, a dozen people wearing traditional Bavarian Trachten got off. That caught my attention, so I stepped off the train and followed them.
I could have asked them where they’re going, but where’s the fun? I like surprises.
We waited on another platform, boarded a second regional train, and got off in Erlangen 15 minutes later. After a 20-minute walk, I arrived at the Bergkirchweih. It’s a massive beer festival founded in 1755, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.
So I spent the rest of the evening at a beer festival purely because I visited a stranger who filled out a random form on the Internet a few months earlier.
Conclusion
I like traveling when there’s an element of the unknown. Going somewhere without knowing much about it, with no expectations and no guarantee that it will be worth the detour, is sometimes more interesting than following a carefully researched itinerary.
So I'll call this experiment a success. I even got a job out of it!
I've never closed the form. I still get notified whenever someone fills it out. So technically, the experiment is still ongoing, although I make no promises to anyone who adds a new submission.