i love travelling on my own. this isn't to say that i don't also enjoy travelling with richard or my friends and family. but solo travel is special in its own way. it makes your destination seem more vivid. when i travel on my own, i notice things about the places i'm visiting that i don't see when i'm with others. i talk to people i wouldn't otherwise meet. and i spend more time listening to what's happening around me.
last week, i went to malta. i spent a day following a walking tour that was in one of my guidebooks, circling the capital city of valletta. i visited museums and cathedrals. i went to catacombs, saw a movie on malta's history, and saw stone architecture from 3600 BC. i followed in the footsteps of st. paul. i took the orange maltese buses around the island, and watched the countryside go by outside the bus window. i went to an internet cafe, climbing the circular staircase to the tiny balcony where i wrote email to friends and rich from an old Windows 98 machine with a monitor that was flickering.
i spent a lot of time on my own. but by the most strange coincidence, i also got to meet up with eissa and jali, my finnish parents from when i lived in finland as a 16-year-old exchange student. like me, they chose to go on holiday in malta last week, and we met each other for lunch at st. julian's, seeing each other for the first time in ten years.
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