“If I were you, I’d start running.”
Then, he stamped my passport, slid it over to me, and waved me off. I was already pretty sweaty since I ran from my plane to passport control with thirty pounds on my back and two jackets tied around my waist (I prepare for every plane ride to be akin to a 9 hour trip through the arctic with no heat), but here I was, heavy breathing, continuing to run through Lisbon airport as the loud speakers noted that my gate had begun boarding. Gate S14. Which seemed kind of funny to me, because all the signs around me were referring to gate N-something. L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-.... There seemed like a lot standing between me, in the N area, and S14. One of those things, I realized as my speed walk morphed into a panicked run, was, to my horror, another security screening.
Someone ripped my backpack off, another person grabbed by purse, and yet another pointed at the small closet of outwear wrapped around my waist while pushing my bins on the belt, I raced through the metal detector, which flashed red (it always does but they never say anything?? Like, what’s the point of the red flashing, then??), and then I watched with extreme disappointment as my bag was moved from the “All Clear” belt to the one indicating that a random stranger would need to ruffle through my belongings. Always my favorite part of traveling. I tapped my foot impatiently while the security lady lazily thumbed through the undergarments of the bag in front of me before finally settling on the GIANT BOTTLE OF SHAMPOO that the owner had tried to pack away (???), tossing it out, and handing the bag back. Moving in molasses, she grabbed my bag, while I desperately pointed to the full water bottle attached to it, trying to tell her to just pour it out or keep it or whatever the hell she wanted to do, just give me my bag.
“Now boarding flight TP 558 to Munich.”
Now, some random angel has shown up to help usher me through the airport, and he is equally as irritated with molasses lady, so he starts having a seemingly tense word with her (though admittedly, this exchange happens in German and all exchanges that occur in the German language sound tense so perhaps they were just discussing the weather or what they were having for dinner and things just sounded tense to my uncultured ears.) Finally, she throws my bag on the table, waves her hand, and turns away. I saddle up and recommence my fun little jog out of security, to the left, and down the hall-- eyes set on S14.
Only to find out……
They were boarding.
Premium class.
Of which I am not a member.
So I sat there, patiently waiting, while they finished boarding premium class, then whoever didn’t have carry ons, then zone A, then finally, 20 minutes after finishing my 400 meter dash across the airport with a weight on my back, they called my zone.
Anyway, that is all to say that this brings me to my first Pro & Con of Solo Travel:
Pro: When running late, you don’t have anyone else to worry about. That means, no one moving too slow, or no one yelling at you saying that you’re moving too slow. No one complaining about having to pee or saying that their bag is too heavy or forgetting their neck pillow and needed to double back.
Con: Two sets of eyes are a lot better at finding signs than 1.
Bonus con: there’s no one to watch your bags when you have to go to the bathroom, so you have to bring all your bags into the tiny little stalls with you and honestly, this is the worst part about solo travelling.
The rest of my flights and layovers and transportation related adventures went off without a hitch. Solo traveling forced me to get outside of my introverted shell and actually -gasp- ask for help when I was lost. Chalk that up under things that I never thought I could or would do.
When I checked into Roadhouse, after walking by the nondescript door on a side street in downtown Prague no less than 4 times, I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s been awhile since I stayed in hostel dorms, so I wasn’t entirely sure to expect, but given that my last experience was in Nicaragua, where the shower head fell onto me while showering and we had a 40 minute stand-off with a cockroach, my hopes weren’t exactly sky high. But upon entering, I took off my shoes (FYI: this has never been a thing at other hostels, but I am so incredibly happy that it was here. It made it feel like actual home), set my bags down, and got the grand tour. Ranked as the top solo hostel in the entire world, the hostel staff cooks family dinner every night, leads nightly activities, and has the most amazing recommendation (seriously, I had a life-changing mushroom risotto thanks to Charlie.) The beds were crazy comfortable, with a little curtain to give me some privacy and my own outlet and light (luxury items for a hostel.) But aside from sleeping, I was pretty much never in my bed. After dropping my bags, I grabbed a beer, and (possibly quite awkwardly) introduced myself to the crowd on the couch. And thus began my 4 nights at Roadhouse, where I met some of the coolest, friendliest, and honestly just overall normal people. I emphasize normal because, prior to embarking on this trip, I was admittedly very concerned that I would be the grandma in a hostel full of perpetually drunk 18 year olds, who had their cereal with beer instead of milk and used a bunch of hip and cool phrases that I wouldn’t understand. I could, and maybe I will, write an entire post on all of the fears I had going into this trip, but this is only one of the many.
I finished my beer just in time for sunset, so I grabbed my camera and wandered out of the hostel and stumbled right onto the famous Charles Bridge. I am not all that ashamed to admit I cried--just a little, I swear! It was so incredibly beautiful, with the clouds lit up and the sky a captivating mixture of pinks and oranges and blues and the cobblestone pavement beneath my feet. Sure, there were literally hundreds of people also chilling on the bridge with me, but I wasn’t about to let them take away from the beauty of it all. Sometimes I just get a little overwhelmed by how beautiful things are; things that I had only seen in pictures, things that I never expected to see in person, things that I honestly never knew existed.
After elbowing a few small children (some on accident, but some were just being tiny little heathens), I decided to call it an early night and set my alarm to experience the city without so many of these pesky tourists.
So, Sunday I got to experience the city nice and early. Just me and a surprising amount of bride and grooms taking their wedding pictures…
I took a free walking tour, as everyone absolutely should, took a nap (I will not apologize for this), and ate family dinner at the hostel. I should also note that today I stuck my finger in pigeon poop, which wouldn’t be noteworthy except this happened multiple times in Prague despite it happening to not a single other person (???) which means I either have the worst possible luck or the universe was realizing that it had given me amazing weather for way too long and somehow the balance was out of whack so I needed a dash of bad luck.
I started warming up to the idea that I would need to talk to strangers in order to make friends, and it turns out, I am not actually an incredibly awkward person all the time and it actually wasn’t terribly difficult to make friends. (Perhaps their standards were just really low, though.) When the evening rolled around, I agreed to join a couple friends out for a drink. One drink turned to two, which turned to going to a clubish thing, which required you to preload a little white contactless card and use that to pay for all of your drinks (weird, but sure.) I walked in, wearing jeans and a very boring white long sleeve, and felt only mildly out of place. This place was… cool? I mean “cool” in the sense that it is everything anyone would imagine a grungy foreign bar to be. There was a dog roaming around, multi-levels, and a million (not exaggerating) different rooms, with people sitting in little holes near the ceiling in some rooms and some sitting on the rafters in others. Two friends and I perched ourselves on a loft-ledge type thing on the edge of one of the dimly lit rooms and proceeded to people watch for a bit before ultimately deciding to follow the sound of music emanating from the room next door. Awkwardly scurrying down from the wall, I wandered through the sea of people directly into… the sound… of my old ringtone? I was one of the only females in the room, which had maybe 50 or so bouncing, shaggy headed, drunk 20 somethings, but I was also the only one screaming every word.
CHELSEA, CHELSEA, I BELIEVE THAT WHEN YOU’RE DANCING SLOWLY, SUCKING YOUR SLEEVE, THE BOYS GET LONELY AFTER YOU LEAVE! IT’S ONE FOR THE DAGGER! ANOTHER FOR THE ONE YOU BELIEVE!!!!! DA-DADADA-DADADA-DADADADADA!!!
As a Chicago Blackhawks fan, hearing that song actually may have made up for ultimately losing the little white card and having to pay 500czk to exit the club. I like to think I paid $25 USD for a live concert instead of dwelling on the fact that I essentially paid $25 USD for a single beer.
Major bummer.
(I am also realizing that this post has become quite the ramble, so perhaps I will start to shorten things a little?)
When I got back to the hostel, I ended up staying up until 6am chatting to a few new friends and, much to future-me’s dismay, having a few more beers. 5 hours of sleep and 6 too many beers? Not exactly my best decisions.
So the next day, I was struggling quite a bit. Thankfully, I had booked a food tour to force myself out of bed. While it took a bit before the hangover was gone, the food tour overall was a stellar experience. One of our stops was at a restaurant in the running for a Michelin star and the dish was so good that I briefly debating licking the bowl, however it was served family style and the older woman across from me didn’t give off the vibe that she would have appreciated me licking our plate. So I settled for obnoxiously scraping out every last drop onto my own plate. I would say I asked for the recipe, but it involved cooking potatoes in a pile of ashes and that alone made me think that I was not cut out for spearheading that culinary experience.
After the food tour, I went out to dinner and got traditional boar and dumplings while enjoying a beer with a few other new friends. I shouldn’t say I was “enjoying” the beer. I was extremely hungover, still, so I’ll just say that I drank the beer. Not much enjoyment came from it.
(At this point, since arriving and walking the bridge, I have done exactly 0 things alone. I wish I could go back in time and tell that to one-week-ago-me, who was beside herself with worry about feeling lonely.)
Monday was also the first night in which I couldn’t sleep due to someone else's snoring. Seriously. So loud. It took me several hours to finally tune it out.
Tuesday was a quiet day, as the friend I had been closest was moving on to Berlin, so I was yet again forced to pretend I was outgoing to make some friends. I took a castle tour and met two people from the East coast that I immediately clicked with, which made me feel much better about Amy having left. It is thanks to one of these friends, TJ, that I have the only videographic proof that I actually went to Prague at all. This is also the point at which I set my hand down in pigeon poop. Again.
Also, in the span of 24 hours, I got to eat fried cheese not once, but twice. So, yeah, I’d say Prague was shaping up to be pretty goddamn great.
I went back to the hostel and sat down with 10 other people for dinner. At this point, I was buzzing with “on-ness” (you know, that feeling when you have to be outgoing and make new friends and you’re in a generally great mood, so you’re just extra friendly?), so I ended up pouring everyone’s water, while chatting with the staff. This led to me being asked if I worked there… so I guess the moral is not to pour water for 10 people unless you want them to think you’re staff.
That night, my team won pub trivia, which meant we won some random bottle of liquor, which my team of 5 polished off pretty quickly and then nearly everyone at the hostel went out to the bars, played some foosball, and drank possibly too much. I scored many goals while playing, and although most of them were on my team, everyone was pretty good sports and, for the most part, no one was really keeping score (at least that’s what I told myself when I scored on my own team for the 3rd time.) The group wandered back to the club that had stolen 500 czk from me (I say stolen, but I do recognize that it was kind of my own damn fault) and spent the next couple hours roaming around the maze that was this random underground club. Eventually, we drifted back to Roadhouse (but not before stopping for a kabob which was quite possible the best decision I’ve ever made), and a friend and I stayed up, again, until 6am (my body absolutely hates me right now) talking about work and life and traveling and probably a TON of really pointless crap.
Thankfully, I had stopped drinking early on, so I the following day wasn’t entirely wasted to a hangover. My Chilean friend Maca and I spent the day lounging, wandering, and going back to the castle complex to enjoy the views with crystal blue skies as the backdrop. Maca and I wandered through the winding streets of Prague, stopping for pictures whenever we wanted to and talking about how crazy it was to meet someone that you get along with so easily.
But that’s the thing with traveling, people are actually, generally, pretty damn cool. I mean, I met probably 20+ people staying at the Roadhouse, and I can’t name a single one that I didn’t like.
The problem writing about solo travel, though, is that I can’t, or at least don’t want to, throw names out and talk in detail about people who, one week ago, were total strangers. It feels a little weird to talk in detail about my relationships, however brief, with people I just met. So I’m just going to assume that I’ll remember which stories above involved Maca, and which involved Amy, and which involved Neelasha, or Charlie or Howie or Spencer or Ronnie or Hector/Alex or Chris or Beck or Kurtis or any of the other incredibly people that I had the pleasure of hanging out with halfway across the world.
TLDR: Solo travel is not lonely. Pick a good hostel. Put yourself out there. Maybe try to have some semblance of a normal sleep schedule? Honestly though, that’s probably unlikely, so instead just stay safe but otherwise drink as much as you damn well please and stay up as late as you want.
So, even with my two encounters with pigeon poop (which is 2 more than the rest of my life), I still think Prague was pretty amazing. That either says a lot about how much I loved Prague or indicates that I am worryingly accustomed to bird excrement.
Ok well this has been a RAMBLE and I sincerely apologize (but also I do not because this is written for me to remember and if anyone else reads it, I guess that’s cool?)
Anyway, next up: Budapest. I somehow have a full row to myself AGAIN on this plane, so the universe must really be on my side this week. Or I’m about to have 4 days of terrible luck to reset the universal luck balance. I guess, TBD.
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