At some point, the notion of a solo travel across Europe transforms itself into something real, exciting, and able to happen. It can start silently, with a vague intrigue of how it would feel like wandering the cobbled streets of Rome with no company, to stand and be before the Eiffel-Tower without any other person to put in your photography or to be lost in the canals of Venice with just your thoughts as your companion. A chorus of doubts, fears at not fiting in, fears of safety, and the mere fact that a foreign continent will be unfamiliar by yourself will easily drown this whisper. However, magic is a given when you decide which voice to listen to, the voice of whisper or the chorus. It becomes real as soon as you buy that ticket, one ticket, and one in which you will be investing in yourself: your adventure, exploration, and pure freedom as all will be.
Even the initial dose of such freedom is ecstatic. It is finding out how your itinerary is the blank canvas and you are the teller. It does not involve a negotiation so it does not involve accommodating someone, it does not involve the enforcement of another person, it does not involve making schedules compatible. Vienna is not the place to discover new things. If you choose to spend the whole afternoon in one Vienna cafe, staring into the world and eating one slice of sachertorte, you may do it. In case you want to wake up in the morning before the sunrise to observe the sun as it rises over the Charles Bridge in Prague, this is your choice. This complete self-rule is a luck in our everyday life. Here in Europe amidst the fusion of the mass you are at liberty to pursue all caprice and all inquiry. One can waste the whole day fantasizing over one painting at the Uffizi Gallery, order a cone of gelato during breakfast in Florence or attend a street performance that one had not initially planned to attend in Barcelona. It is a journey you will choose to create, moment by moment, of gloriousness, with no direction other than your want to.
Travelling makes you self- reliant and a watchdog of life. Out of the conversation and conversations, you start to see the world in yet a better way, as a correct vision is long missing when you have someone to talk to. The details of the world are brought to life. You see the wonderful designs of the tiles in an alley-way of Lisbon, the particular shade of ochre of a villa in Tuscany, the robust fragrance that drifts along in an early morning in the boulangerie in Paris. You are inaugurated into the rhythm of the city you are in the beat of the language spoken there, the stroke of bells to stamp the hours, the pulse of street and gossip that fill it with its own music. As you sit on a little table all alone you are not only a tourist passing by rather you become a part of the scenery as a temporary local swilling in the authentic unfiltered flavor of a place. Quiet observation is not passive thing, it is highly insightful and active form of interaction with the world you inhabit.
It is claimed that perhaps one of the biggest misinformed things about traveling alone is the assumption that it is a lonely experience. Actually, it exposes you to friends that you could never have known in the first place. When you are alone you are more available, a traveller, a novel whose cover has not been read just yet. These chats begin in the most unlikely spots: in the train cart with the old lady who is your silent companion to Swiss Alps, in a medieval city of Berlin with an exchange backpacker reading the same incomprehensible metro map as you are, in a cozy Irish pub with a friendly bartender who would simply like to know where I am a native to. These exchanges which are characteristically short lived can prove to be very deep. You place bets, jokes and a moment of common humanity with people you are very unlikely to see again. You realise that kindness is a worldwide language but that there is indeed a sense of community in a hostel common room in Amsterdam as efficiently as it can be found at home. It could be a short-term visitor but loneliness is not a long-time resident of a journey on its own.
Naturally, traveling around Europe solo is not so easy. Sometimes you will feel frustrated-the train you were planning to connect in Germany misses, you cannot figure out how to read a menu in Hungary, one day you feel completely lost in Venice when you venture out in the streets during the night. However, sometimes the magic of going on a solo trip is in these challenges. Every time you get over a difficulty by yourself, there is a wonderful statement that you are your own person and that you have the capability to survive. The paranoia of feeling lost gradually blows away to the ego of being found again. The trepidation about having to use a complicated system of public transportation leaves way to the comfort of knowing how to use such transportation correctly. You get used to following your instincts, finding out unconventional ways of handling situations and are at ease in your own company at times when things are not going your way. You go home more than with tales of lovely things you have seen, you to go home with the still, unconquerable feeling that you are a good deal stronger and more resourceful than you dreamed.
After all, the greatest adventure possible of a solo trip is the one, which is done within you. Distracted by the sounds and the activities of everyday life, it is now removed and all you can do is to get the most out of the situation by taking full self survey. You can walk the cliffs of the Irish coast or the silent halls of an ancient castle and you get the time and space to think, to dream and to listen to your inner voice. You get to realize what you are passionate about, what you are interested in and what makes you peaceful. You get back in touch with segments of yourself that you may have lost years ago. The magic of a solo travel to Europe, hence, lies not only in what you visit, but whom you become. You give a little of yourself to each of the cities you go to, but you take a bit of them as well, stitched into a fresher, more adventurous, more global version of you, and never again able to be what you were before the choice to simply take off.
This inner transition is the essence of the journey, but its magic is also embedded into the very nature of pragmatic decisions you take, direction you choose and rhythm you find. It is there in the big and philosophical realisations but also it is there in the minor regulated movements of travel in your days. The real masterpiece of the European independent travel process is the moment when you manage to walk as slow as you want and to get rid of the agitation of a checklist travelling. It is a refutation of the idea that you have to visit ten cities in ten days, with a blistering tour of taking a flurry of photos, but nothing actual connecting. The other choice is the deep beauty of slow tourism, of giving yourself the pleasure of time somewhere. Take as an example, the choice to spend a whole week in Florence; the city will show itself to you in layers. The initial days are spared to the landmarks, the Uffizi, the Duomo. However, then there is an underlying magic. You find your favourite place to make the reading break, the family-owned bakery, where they know what is your favourite coffee in the morning and the less noisy bridge where you could observe the flow of the Arno at sunset. You are part of the temporary resident, a known person within a small neighbourhood, and the city becomes a home instead of rather being a museum.
This pace is somehow slower and it will permit you to go beyond the realms of the city, to see what worlds are just a train ride away. Starting in Florence, you can drive an early-morning day trip to the country, hills of Tuscany, touring San Gimignano towers of the middle age, or Siena town. Escape Munich and find your way to the top of the Alps foothills and explore the villages of the Brothers Grimm where air is fresh and the only sound you could hear is a cowbell. These are usually small excursions in which the most real things are found. They provide a relief of the stress of the big cities and a peep into the daily lives that is not disturbed by tourism in other places. You are in a small restaurant in a country where people do not speak English, and you eat one of the best meals of your life with gestures and smiles. You accidentally fall at a local festival in some French town and therein you get involved in a happy celebration. In these un-planned, un-Googled moments you feel that you have discovered your own secret part of Europe.
Slow traveling is all about just rolling with it and taking a wrong turn not as a mistake but as fate. It is a wonderful sort of joy to consciously ignore the crazy-detailed schedule, and to put away your phone. You just have to pick up on any direction in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona and walk. In Montmartre a winding staircase is followed simply to know where it ends. It is the way of discovering the secret courtyards where potted plants grow, the small artisan works where craftsmen are busy, the small and sunlit squares which are never mentioned in the tourist guides. Such instances of luck turn out to be the pillars of your travel. And they are your stories, very much of your way, and they are also born of a faith in the unseen. The practice develops strong intuition; the sense of a traveler that will lead you to experience that is specifically your own. It is a quiet strength used when you are lost even on a geographical level, but you are in the right place at the right time.
Your night accommodation destination will also largely determine the magic of your trip. The room you choose is not merely a bed, but it is the outline of your everyday life. Whereas the loud, busy community surrounding a hostel in modern times presents an unbelievably amazing opportunity to encounter other travelers who are utmost from the other end of the whole planet, there are other forms of magic which are more subdued. Take the appeal of a family based guesthouse in the Irish countryside. In this case it is a personal experience. Your host may have suggestions to bring you to the best local coastal walks, they may tell you stories about the village in which they live over a traditional meal of soda bread, and allow you to feel a bit less like a tourist and more like a favoured guest in their house. This form of hospitality delivers a strong feeling of ownership and belonging, weighting your experience into heartwarming human contact.
Instead, there is that weekend charm, the ability to live somewhere like Rome or Amsterdam and to think that you are a local person; renting a small flat for a week somewhere. The experience starts with a visit to the village market which is a feast to the eyes and senses owing to the fresh cut fruits, the smell of cheeses, and fresh bread. You are taught how to go round the aisles, and choose ingredients of an easy dish. In your apartment again, with the window open on the noise of the street beneath, you make your dinner. There is something so satisfying about eating a home-made meal that you have made and the ingredients that went into it are a few blocks away. It develops a strong sense of belonging. During that short time it becomes your kitchen, it becomes your neighbourhood, it becomes your life. Instead of being a visitor, you become a part of the rhythm of the city, you make a temporary home 3000 miles away, where you are not supposed to be.
No history of the European solo experience can fail to applaud the lifeblood of Europe, the rail network. Train journey has become part and parcel of European identity and as a single tourist, it is the best way to travel. The process of journey becomes equally important to the destination. Staring through the window of a large train, observing how the world changes in front of your own eyes, has certain meditative action. The scenery has changed, going through the flat and tulip fields of the Netherlands to the dark and dense woods of Germany and, however, elevating itself dramatically all the way to the snow-capped mountains of the Swiss Alps. It is a film experience that bonds the geography of the continent in a manner that the air travel can never bond. You experience the distance you are passing; you observe the boundaries mix and the architecture change up to the borders of the other region.
The train station as such is a theatre of human stories. you have the pulse of the continent in a large terminal in Paris, at the Gare du Nord or Milan at the Centrale. Departures is an endless options menu, with names of cities that are not only days, but hours away. That energy is of eternal flux, of greetings and farewells, of start and finish of a journey. This is pure freedom to a solo traveler using a rail pass. You can wake up in Brussels and at any moment you can change your mood and arrange dinner in Cologne. You might alter your plans on a whim to pursue a good weather or the advice of a tourist you have just met. The train is not merely a means of transport between A and B; it goes hand in hand with the adventure, provides room of contemplating and observing and the nostalgic prospect of spontaneity.
To experience the magic, you have to interact with Europe on a physical level with all your senses. The continent has to enter into you by five senses. Keep your eyes closed in the busy marketplace in Marrakech and just listen: to the song of the call to prayer, to bargaining of the sellers, to teacups clanging together, to the concert of at least a dozen languages all at once. In Lisbon, the attachment may be the lamenting clink and shriek of the yellow Tram 28 as it struggles up steep hills of the city. In London, it is the courteous, computerized voice that reminds you to take care of the gap and makes it the best background tune to your adventures. Such sounds build an aural map of your passage through them, a mixtape of memories that can send you flying back in no time.
And there is the touch, the physical first hand contact with centuries of the past. It is the emotion of freely passing your hand over the cold rough-hewn wall of the Colosseum in Rome, an architecture that was thousands of years old. It can be the soft dul usage of a wood pew in a church a few hundred years in Poland or the taste of salt spray that hits your face as you stand at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean at the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland. And the odors–the dictionary of fragrances which characterise a place so much more than any monument. It is the familiar smell of newly made waffles and burning sugar that lingers in the air in Bruges, the smell of lavender in a market stall in the region of Provence, the damp and earthy air of a Scottish castle or briny air of a Greek island. In mindfully focusing on such sensory things, you create a more vivid and dense and immersive mental object of your travel. And the magic, you know, was not only in what you saw, but was in all you felt and heard and smelled as you went.
