Apart from booking my flight tickets, train tickets, bus tickets, hostels, hotels, Airbnbs, day trips, theatre tickets, filling out visa application forms, buying travel insurance (this is very important, apparently) and all that lovely planning people do before heading off for three months, I’ve also been re-watching Sex and The City. I truly love it. It’s just the perfect dose of Girly Goodness. After watching the whole series for the third time, yes you read that correctly, I can say without a doubt that Season 6 is my favourite.
It is in this final season that Carrie meets Aleksander Petrovsky, a pretentious Russian artist in his early 50s who sweeps her off her feet with old school romantic gestures like reading her poems, dancing in the middle of the street and writing her a song called “The Woman with the Luminous Shining Sparkling Eyes”. (I gagged a little too.)
By the end of the season, Carrie ends up in Paris with the Russian and she’s loving it. There’s a scene where she spots the Eiffel Tower from her balcony and squeals in excitement, flashing her infectious Carrie Bradshaw smile in a fabulous outfit.
That’s how I envision my travels to be like – me in complete wonder and excitement at what each place has to offer, surrounded by magical background music and wind in my hair. At. All. Times. Except that I’ll be living in a dorm with 15 other people snoring and farting, in my uniform of sweaty clothes and sneakers, with a ginormous Karrimor on my back. Ah well.
But, I’m also afraid that it’ll all go south as it did for Carrie. She didn’t speak the language and the Russian was swamped by work and left her alone. She fell in Dior. She stepped in dog poo. It started to rain. She ended up having a really bad time. Apart from the fact that I did not fall in love and move to Paris for a man, I think there are many similarities between Carrie and I. I am a klutz going away on my own for a very long time. As much as I love exploring new places, it can get lonely.
Travelling is great, I’ll meet new people (I hope) and gain new experiences (I hope). I’ll learn to trust my instincts and depend on me (again, I hope). But I’ll also learn more about myself than ever before. I’ll have to deal with my own thoughts and bullshit for the most part of travelling, with little distraction from the outside world. What if I don’t like the person I discover? What if my thoughts overwhelm me and I am unable to cope? Crying in public, I can deal with; but having a thought stuck in my head with no one to talk to about it, that’s hard. If I had to summarise my greatest fear in one sentence, it’d be this: What if I don’t like the me I’m travelling with?
I don’t really know how to answer that or where to begin, but I hope that when the time comes, I’ll have the strength and guts to deal with it. Come what may, I think..
Source for Jen: https://media3.giphy.com/media/L0Jj9bqqVNcoU/200_s.gif
NEXT TRAIN OUT 