SeptemboMo Day 26 in SeptemboMo

What’s one thing you’d like to do more?

Travel.
More than anything.

My crippling social anxiety and paranoia has kept me from venturing out of my comfort zone for so long.

Few years back I decided to carry that anxiety and paranoia and just go. Went to Thailand. Spent 15 days there.

By the end of first week, I was friends with the hotel management, cab drivers, exotic dancers, and even one “mistress”, while she had her lunch every day with me. Being friends with the cab drivers paid off the most, they’d always get me discounts where ever I was going, and their suggestions were always superb. Besides their disappointment in me that I refused to visit the “massage” centers and bath houses.
By the end of the vacation, it felt like I had more than enough social prowess and my engagement with strangers was always great.

Then I visited a couple of other countries.

The last one was Turkey. It was amazing.

Waking up in a foreign place, knowing the “hunt” for breakfast was going to be an adventure and everywhere you walk is a completely new scenery and experience was sublime.

Not knowing where I’d be at lunch time was even more exciting.
I always chose to have dinner far away from the hotel, so I can absorb the night life of the city and take note of places I want to visit at night.

I bought some local perfumes in Istanbul and the shop girl offered me some chocolate. I loved it so much I asked about the shop she got them from and so I went. It was a shop in an underground subway station.

The inside of the subway tunnels had such beautiful murals, flowing on the walls. It was magnificent.

I bought a ton of that chocolate.

While I was admiring them, I heard this lovely voice singing a song in Turkish.
I followed the song to find a girl with such deep dark eyes, lush wild curly hair, dressed in all black, busking with a guitar.
I sat on the floor and listened to the whole song. I wish I had recorded it, I was just so lost in the moment.

I want that again.

Being lost in foreign cities and just following sights and sounds with no care in the world.

Perhaps next year.

Last updated September 26, 2021