It’s funny, flying makes you realize how inconsequential things are, how small your world really is. To see entire towns from above is to see how tiny the biggest buildings can appear and, in comparison, how incredibly small people are.
As we flew over Dublin at 4 in the morning, it appeared as a glowing beacon in a sea of darkness. Quite literally, I could not tell what was water and what was darkness. The city was illuminated with lights the way that I was illuminated with excitement for the coming months. It seemed fitting then, that Ireland would be my first mini-stop on the way to a much bigger adventure, it was just the start of my journey, yet it felt like a huge step in its own right.
That was the very first time I had flown across the ocean alone, navigated a foreign bus system, mostly, alone (thanks mom & free airport wifi), and the first time I had ever really explored a city all by myself.
It was liberating.
It’s funny that you can meet a total stranger and talk to them for hours about their life, knowing you’ll never see them again when the plane lands. It’s comforting to run into a girl about your age from San Francisco in the middle of the Book of Kells exhibit at Trinity College. It’s exhilarating walking around Temple Bar in the cold and going into a café just because it’s there and looks cute and you don’t have to ask anyone else if they think it looks like a good place to stop. It’s interesting to be the only person in that café at 7am and hear the young baristas talk about their life in this city that is so foreign to you.
It’s incredibly liberating to navigate with no service causing you to rely on signs, directions from strangers and your own sheer will to get somewhere. Traveling alone brings you closer to people because you’re all going somewhere unfamiliar and figuring it out along the way.
Things like this make me realize just how much that places are just places and people are just people no matter where in the world they are. Everyone is living their life and location; relationships and goals seem to be the biggest difference. When it comes down to it, we’re all the same at a basic level.
It’s crazy, I could go on and on about this stuff and I was in Dublin for about 4 hours. Standing in the reading room at Trinity, I was so aware of myself and all the history of the books that lined the shelves as far as I could see. Each book was written by someone with a different perspective than the author of the book next to it, very similar to how each person around me has a story so different from my own. There’s so much we can learn from each other and what better place to do so than out in the world? It’s amazing to realize how much that experience impacted me, in a place similar in language and culture to home, just because I did it on my own. I cannot begin to imagine how much more I will learn and change during this voyage, in places so different from anything I’ve ever seen.
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