On What I Thought It Was
Interrailing is very dissimilar to how I had pictured it. Not to say in the least that I haven’t been enjoying my time exploring a beautiful country with my close friends, but there are definitely some discrepancies between reality and the expectations I had. It’s something I’ve thought about every once in a while, but that really came to the forefront of my mind this evening. I’d like to first go into ways the experience has so far exceeded my lofty expectations, before elaborating on what some of those expectations were, and I’ll see if there’s a larger point hiding in the text that can be extrapolated and learned from.
This is my first time travelling for an extended period of time without family, so there were bound to be things I was used to that I can dismiss as facets of travel I can live without, but it has equally shown the small details that make a trip that much better or more comfortable for me. I am a creature of habit and comfort, after all. But first – the plentiful pluses. I’ve gone to museums and shows I can definitively say I wouldn’t have done alone, and am all the better for having done so. My exposure to culture in general is something that, on the whole, has been significantly improved in quality and quantity, and I’m glad that I have people around me eager to see and show me the more artful side of the country. I’ll rattle off a few more before switching lanes a bit: I’ve been pushed to try some absolutely delicious food, stayed in gorgeous places I would never have considered and talked to many interesting people, an activity I tend to avoid at its purest form.
My expectations seem only tangible in my mind, but nonetheless very important. Something so small as the types of train carriages we would be travelling in really threw me for a loop in how big a factor it played for me. We travelled in one of my expected-type trains this evening and for a moment, it seemed like a beautiful merging of fantasy and reality, one unfortunately upon which I cannot expect recurrences. The majority of the remaining expectations, I now notice, simply centre themselves around my travelling behaviour in the past, and my reaction seems to be more to change in general. These are unfamiliar experiences, and my instinct is to paint them as bad purely based on that fact, regardless of how I might feel if my thought process were just a bit different.
One thing I know for sure from this trip, and I mean this with absolutely no intention of disparaging the week that’s past or the friends I spent it with, is that I am really looking forward to travelling on my own for a bit. Now that I’ve somewhat entered an independent sphere in life, I am nothing less than excited to see what kind of adventures I could curate if given the same opportunities to do so as my friends did with this one. I am, admittedly, a tad disappointed I’m not where I’d like to be with my social anxiety to be able to carry out such a trip and create and sustain social connections with others but on that note I have two thoughts: I will get there one day – I ought not to let my shortcomings in that regard limit my opportunities now – and there is no reason to assume truly solo travel wouldn’t be a perfectly nice experience in its own right. How exciting.