Some Notes on Traveling Alone

These are some things that you look at when you are by yourself on a train.
The Window.

The Ceiling.

The Window Again.

Yourself.


Trains go the perfect speed for enjoying a landscape, it's like on fast forward so you can really see how it all morphs quickly & seamlessly from one region to another. Unfortunately there is no pause when you see something you would like a photograph of:




This train meandered through the Alps, gradually changing scenery from Italy to Austria to Germany. It was cold and pretty.




At the beginning of my 3 week solo trip, I felt up to my eyeballs in fear of traveling alone through places I've never been, languages I don't know, far away from anyone and anything familiar. Sometimes you just feel deaf, dumb, mute and helpless. But you just have to think: one train at a time, one city map at a time, one hostel at a time. And, that it is supposed to be Vacation. Here's Paris:


Sometimes you don't even realize you are by yourself until you see a mirror in an unexpected place like an elevator. This is me after I had breakfast at a table alone in early one morning in Berlin.


Other times you don't realize you are alone until you see how many things are in front of you and the chair is empty across from you.


I was waiting for a train and there were a lot of bugs. In fact there were about a million of them, and only one of me.




This is 4:30 am in Venice, I think the most alone moment ever, it was really very fascinating:



Immediately afterwards, I walked in pouring rain in the dark at 5am trying not to get lost, I watched the sun rise on the empty train, soaking wet.

Dawn again, in a different town.

I don't think I'd seen dawn so many times in a row.

I arrived early at the train station and drank coffee until I was supposed to get on the train to Koln. And with all that waiting and watching and asking, I still managed to get on the wrong car.

I had a layover and had a look at all the small individually packaged items you could spend your euro change on.





In Prague, I walked for hours, and then got a table for one at a restaurant. The wait between ordering your food and when it arrives really makes you think about the fact that usually you have someone to talk to you during that time.

The thing I hate most about solo traveling for long periods is that you have no one to tell you if you have like food in your teeth or you left your fly unzipped. It makes you a bit paranoid if you care about those things, especially since you have no one to joke with about it if it does happen.



Somehow your own expression becomes very interesting after seeing a multitude of unfamiliar faces. I had never taken a self-portrait before this trip except for a school assignment.

I went to the graveyard Pere LaChaisse in Paris where Jim Morrison was buried. How quiet and peaceful & serene this place was. But the expression on this statue made me think about how I still don't understand where the people I've lost are. And maybe death is the loneliest thing of all. Or maybe you don't know you are alone at all because you're dead.


Traveling alone for that amount of time defined what was alone and what was lonely. And anyway, there was always something pretty outside the window to have a look at.