It was whilst sitting in the centre of Melbourne yesterday, admiring the warmth the summer sun and the countdown to my final week in Australia, that I was approached by a stranger.
It was of course quite a typical scenario, but one that doesn’t tend to happen much anymore. The stranger, a girl roughly around my age had asked for directions to a local cafe and I was happy to show her (as my year long residence here was enough to make me a local). After talking a moment longer and realising that we both had foreign accents, our conversation quickly leapt onto travelling. The stranger had actually arrived two days earlier from California to find a job, a home and begin her working visa here in Melbourne and oh how that scenario sounded all too painfully familiar to me - give or take 365 days. It was as if I had been looking into a mirror at the girl in front of me, completely alone in a alien city. In that moment two strangers bonded over the fears that come with arriving in a new place and we became friends through the knowledge that we had both arrived with just a backpack. We exchanged contact details and I even invited her round to my house that evening to party with my friends. It was in that moment that I realised I had come full circle through my travelling experience and as the next wave of lost, broken travellers descend on my temporary home and I slip into the position of a local adviser, I guess it signifies that it’s my time to leave. Melbourne is accomplished. It was an interesting and wonderful moment but it also reminded me of a very important lesson that I vow to stick to. That brief encounter which quickly spun into a friendship, an invite to a house party, tips on jobs and also a personal reminder of how far I’d come was the result of my new friend asking a question, and asking for directions. This, in a year where we find so much comfort in using Google Maps and our phones to guide us through life, was a refreshing and positive moment. We all need to ask more questions. Though my Spanish might not be up to scratch I promise that when I find myself as the lost foreign traveler once again (in a mere 9 days) that I will step away from my phone and look to ask the people around me for help. Who knows what unusual friendships we could all create.
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Tamara DavisonNepal, China, Malaysia, Australia, Argentina. Archives
November 2017
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