All solo travellers heard this at least once, asked by friends, relatives, or simple people you talk to. That mix of doubt, suspect and pity in their eyes. But nothing can explain the feel of being out there in the world, alone but never really lonely, because hey, it's a busy planet.
Not tonight.
Not in the bus.
Well, it's 05:20am, so no wonder there's little company around. My trip starts now. First stop, Budapest. Than back to my beloved Georgia, where I'll finally be able to eat khachapuri again and to show the world I didn't learn much language-wise. Also, this time I'm not only going to export, but also import, as my friend Tiko entrusted me with some goods. Well, we have a long merchant tradition, after all.
I'm also quite excited to see Budapest again, though. I visited it years ago, but this time, when I say "years ago" I mean it. We're talking 25 years ago or something... guess this counts as the first time again, right?
And speaking of first times, this is the first time I use the electronic boarding pass. All wonderfully smooth. Also, first time they don't ask me to remove shoes. Unfortunately no first time without assholes in the airport. There's never shortage of those.
The trip has been remarkably smooth. There was, of course, an infant, but he cried during landing only, understandably, as pressure change is always annoying. The hostess spoke an unintelligible mix of English, Hungarian, parseltongue and Epson printer noises. All went according to plans. Well, almost everything. As another "first", I got my first outbound flight without applauses at the end. As I don't believe in human evolution, I can only thing that some extremely popular comedian made fun of the practice, enough to make people realise it's stupid.
Budapest welcomed me with rain, a bomb alert in the airport and an ATM that proposed me to withdraw 1000 €.
Not bad for a start. Not bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment