The first time I stood in front of a European ticket machine on my solo backpacking trip, I panicked. Six languages, a dozen buttons, a line of locals behind me, and a train I was terrified of missing. I bought the wrong ticket. Then I bought another wrong ticket. By the time I got it…
The first time I fell for a canal town, I wasn’t chasing a bucket list. I was a young woman with a corporate desk in New York, scrolling through photos on a lunch break, wondering how people actually got to those little pastel houses leaning over quiet green water. It looked like another planet. It…
The first time I backpacked across Europe on my own, I signed up for a big bus tour in a city I won’t name to save it some embarrassment. Fifty of us shuffled off a coach, took the same photo from the same spot, got herded back on, and drove away. I remember sitting by…
The first meal I ever ate alone in a foreign country was a plate of dumplings during my hiking trip through China. I remember sitting there, holding my chopsticks a little too tightly, convinced everyone could tell I had no idea what I was doing. Then the food arrived, and something shifted. Nobody was watching…
The first time I really saw street art, I wasn’t looking for it. I was backpacking across Europe on almost no money, killing time before a night train, and I turned down a side street to find a wall the size of a house painted with a face that seemed to stare right through me….
The first time I went somewhere truly underground, I was hiking in China, ducking into cool stone passages to escape the heat, and I remember how the air changed. Quieter. Older. Like the ground itself was holding its breath. I’ve chased that feeling ever since. There’s something about going below the surface that flips a…
The first time I sat at a rooftop bar by myself, I almost talked myself out of it. I had spent the afternoon walking a city until my feet ached, and I stood at the elevator thinking, “People go to these places in groups. I’ll feel silly alone.” I went up anyway. I ordered one…
The first time I backpacked across Europe on my own, I was broke, jet-lagged, and honestly a little scared. I had left my office job in New York, saved up by working flexible gigs, and finally bought the ticket. I did not have money for taxis. I did not trust myself to rent a car…
The first time I understood what folklore really was, I was not in Europe at all. I was sitting on a packed-earth floor in Ghana, in the family home I lived in for a while, listening to an elder tell a story I had clearly heard a hundred times before, except I hadn’t, because it…