on solo travel, and that little voice within
if 25 year old sarah could see 37 year old sarah, she wouldn't believe she was real
hola from mexico!
as someone who long believed solo travel was something reserved for cooler, braver folks than myself, it’s difficult for me to be in this moment, typing out this post at a bar seat at panaderia rosetta (my favorite bakery here in cdmx). to realize i did the damn thing. i’m really here. i’ve long started and abandoned essays on solo travel, for whatever reason—i run out of time, i can’t find the words, i don’t think i have anything useful to say—but i woke up this morning and found that i wanted to write. so, here we are! to orient us, we’ve got a latte (con leche de almendra, same as new york) to our left, and a giant bouquet of flowers (undoubtedly from the mercado jamaica, the largest flower market in the city!) to our right. there’s a pastry case full of croissants and the. most perfect cinnamon rolls you ever did see on the counter; to our left, a handful of tourists and locals alike sit, sipping their coffees and tapping away at their phones whilst tearing giant bites off of their baked goods. it’s nearly 5pm on a friday night, and the street is abuzz; though the bakery is more of a daytime place, it’s as busy as ever. in an hour or two, i’ll head out to rooftop drinks with a fellow new yorker i met earlier this week, who’s also down here doing the solo travel thing—proof that friends can and will exist in all sorts of places. i look around me, and i think, how did i get here?
that’s what we’ll talk about today.
though i’m only a week in, i feel confident that this—four whole weeks spent on my own in a foreign country (though admittedly, one i’ve visited a handful of times before) was the right call. that it won’t just be fine, or doable, but good. great, even. as i write this, i’ve been in mexico city for all of 5 days; tomorrow, i’ll take a bus 4 hours north to a UNESCO heritage city called san miguel de allende. i’ll stay in a hotel for two nights, and with a stranger i met on a house-swapping website (behomm, for those curious!) for four nights. this trip is, undoubtedly, the ballsiest thing i’ve done alone. in fact, just a few years prior, i couldn’t have imagined myself taking the leap. and yet, here i am.
years ago (i want to say it was 2015?), i did something i rarely do: i made a new year’s resolution to travel more. i was tired of waiting on someone special to show up and decide they wanted to criss-cross the globe with me. as far as i could tell, that someone wasn’t waiting in the wings, and if he was, he was biding his damn time. slowly.
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