Some of the joys of hitching around Europe

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Way back in my youth - in the '60's of the last century - every summer holiday I used to wander from south England (where I lived in those days) to go down to Greece, via sundry other European countries. In the course of these journeys I had a number of experiences, both pleasant and very much less pleasant - though I am happy to say, that generally they were pleasant.
One thing I did notice however, was the weird way in which men felt that they had an absolute right to touch women's bums and other parts of their bodies. On one journey I was with a girl (not particularly my girlfriend, simply a girl who was travelling with me) and we were in northern Greece and were offered a lift in a truck, so I sat next to the driver, and the girl sat on my far side, thus as far from the driver as she could get. This in no way interfered with the driver's attempts to grope the poor damn woman - he merely stretched over me and groped her groin as if I wasn't there. To be honest, neither she nor I knew what on earth to do about him so we managed to say to him (in our broken Greek) that he should stop and we would find someone else to drive us to Athens - which happily he was OK to do. 

This sort of experience was, sadly, all too common in southern Europe. On another trip, whilst walking around in Florence - this time with an American girl - we found ourselves surrounded by a group of about 10 young Italians who proceeded to grope her bum, even though this was in one of Florence's main streets. Her reaction was superb however! As soon as they started to grope her, she stopped, roared in good American a load of swear-words and generally gave them hell! This was the right way to react, as they were covered in embarrassment and quickly disappeared. She later told me that she was regularly treated in this manner, and had evolved this technique to deal with it, and by and large, she told me, it had worked. But one has to wonder why men behaved in this fashion, did they feel that it was their "right as men" to do this, or did they feel that somehow girls would value this form of behaviour? Or did they simply assume that any young women from other countries were sluts? Altogether very odd. 

Did you have any similar experiences whilst hitching? If so, do share them with us here please.

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