Monday, March 18, 2013

I ask strangers to take pictures of me; a memoir of my trip to the UK

  For an extroverted person I enjoy spending a lot of time on my own. I particularly like traveling by myself because it gives me freedom to do whatever I want.

   I can change plans on a whim, lounge around all day and eat whenever I want without having to coordinate with anybody else's schedule.

   It wasn't perfect on my first days in London since the people at the hostel I was staying at kept to themselves and it was hard to make friends when everybody (yours trully included) just sat in the common area with their headphones in staring at their computer/phone/tablet screens. But things eased up. I made friends from a different hostels, and we spent some time together before going on our separate ways. After London I was basically visiting friends in the cities I was going to and that was great as well. Because they were there for only part of the journey, in their home territory so they could show me around the nooks and crannies of the lesser beaten path.

  This trip is exactly what I had romanticized traveling to be like. I went out of my comfort zone. I choked on meeting my idol, I ate haggis, I climbed a mountain, I drank with strangers, and got hit by a car. All stories I'll cherish for the rest of my life, of the time when I could have put this trip off for another year, to wait until I had more money, or more stability on my job... or a job at all to be honest. But no, seeing the UK has been a dream of mine for a very long time and I didn't want it to be my good china.
 
    I'm not the kind of person who looks at a mountain and says "I'm gonna climb that", what I am though is the kind of person who doesn't deny herself experiences. And I climbed that mountain, figuratively and literally, and it was completely worth it.
view from the top of Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh Scotland

   Now that I'm back home I have some projects that I want to pick up and work on, hopefully some of them will pan out alright, and the ones that don't will be a good way for me to spend time without feeling like I'm wasting my life.

  Still no progress made on those new years resolutions though.

Best,

M.



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