Six things I learned as a rather shy person after 10 days of traveling alone
Here are some things I learned during my recent trip in Europe. I think they don't just apply on traveling solo, but on life in general, but the trip made me aware of it:
- Socializing is like a muscle, you need to warm it up every day. Even if you don't feel like it, just make smalltalk to some random person. Afterwards everything is much easier.
- Don't have expectations how your trip will be, because it most likely won't be like that anyways. Just living in the moment and paying attention to the things around you takes a lot of pressure from you.
- It really does not matter what you say to people when introducing yourself. One day I just said "Hi, I'm X" and went for a handshake. Afterwards explored the city with these guys for hours and we went for beers in the evening.
- Just showing up is already a big step. Take a book, go to some social place, have a look around once in a while and eventually someone will ask you what you are doing/reading there.
- There are up and downs, and that is fine. Anticipate the downs, take a rest day, but recognize that this is no permanent state. Also try to rationalize why you are feeling down. E.g. for me it was: Bad weather, feeling a bit ill and nobody I could talk to in my hostel.
- Don't let "failures" drag you down. One night, I had no plans for the evening and there was nobody in my hostel. I decided to go to an Couchsurfing meetup but it turned out it didn't took place this evening. Later I tried to join a pub crawl in the city but the people there were already pretty drunk and I didn't want to hang out with them. So I decided to go to a bar on my own, but it turned out that they wanted 5€ just for entry. I just went home to the hostel then. I guess such evenings just happen, but I still have experienced more than if I would've stayed at home.
Submitted April 01, 2019 at 06:22PM by stfoc https://ift.tt/2UncrtT
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