On New Friends

Staying in hostels is like a perpetual first day of college. You tried to figure out who was cool and who wasn’t, but, if you were even a little bit social, you gave everyone an equal chance all the same. Everyone was a potential friend, and it was only after days or weeks or even school years that you learned who could be trusted and who was going to flunk out, flake, fuck off, or never be heard from again.

Traveling alone and staying in hostels is so much like that – figuring out who you can trust and who not to, but being open all the same. But the stakes seem so much lower. After all, if you make a mistake, say something stupid, you or he or she or they will be gone in the next night, or the one after that. You will never have to look that person, or group of people, in the eye in English 101 next semester. Your interactions in these places are fleeting and temporary and, often, follow a very similar pattern.

“Where you from?”

“How long you been here?”

“How long you traveling”

“Where to next?”

Names often come last, and only if the answers to the above are satisfying.

This isn’t to say the experiences aren’t valuable. There are interesting people, smart people, people whose lives you can’t even quite imagine, waiting to tell you their story. There is an open-minded and handsome young man from Dubai, who is excited at pathetic attempts to speak Arabic. There are Germans and Italians and French, all usually traveling in groups. There are the invariable shades of Aussie and English girls and boys, and one can’t help but fall a bit in love with their accents, in the same way they enjoys yours. There are one or two potential true friends, who leave too suddenly, and whose itinerates you wish you could match better. Just like in college, there are people with whom there is unexpected common ground. 

But mostly, when one is traveling alone there is only the road, that endless stretch of potential adventures. The question of what you are doing and why you are here has a million answers, but it only the answer that you can give yourself that matters. The ability to leave a place, and people, is a great freedom, but it comes with the cost of starting over at a new place, answering the same questions, and sussing out the same people again and again. It is the perpetual process of making new friends.