La Vie En Rose for 2006 September 15

Last night I met up with Kristi, whom I have not seen in two years. We went to a greek restaurant, Mezes, and had a delcious dinner, then met up with some of her friends and a trendy apartment. Not surprisingly the theme for the night's conversation was travel; we swapped stories from our most recent trips (she was in Latvia and Prague while I was in Serbia. We briefly considered meeting up but apparantly Eastern Europe is actually bigger than it looks on the map). Some of her friends had just gotten back from a trip to Turkey, and her roommate from a "Bar" trip (which is something I suppose like an "LSAT or MCAT trip"... or perhaps an MA thesis trip???) around Europe.

The merits and demerits of travelling alone were discussed. They seemed to have been travelling in big groups, a method of which I am skeptical. I think best is with one other person, but with the trials of the road, incompatibilities, etc it would be difficult to get on with any one person for any length of time. I suppose my experiences of actually travelling alone are slightly limited. They all agreed that the worse part is you start to get paranoid, which I definitley agree with, and that the worst is when you're alone on an overnight train. Which I haven't experienced personally. Although I have set off on many a long trip on my own, I always end up meeting people whose own agendas coincide with mine, which I think is a lot more likely to happen on the road than at home. Even in my last days at the hostel in Belgrade there were several people passing through that I could have tacked onto had I been going on. And it's so nice knowing you can do whatever you feel like doing, and that if you get sick of whoever you're with you can always ditch them with no hard feelings, which you can't very well do if it's someone you planned your trip with.

But I think I'm just looking at it from a different angle. It's tons of barrels of fun to go with your friends on little week or two trips wherever, but I am thinking about these long cross-continent trips that last months. Two very different things. Also I just watched Cabaret, I don't know how that is affecting my thinking.