How I stopped dreaming about travel and actually did it (or how the universe made me do it)
Over two years ago, I wrote a story about my longing to go abroad. “I feel like there should be Part 2,” a reader commented. I agree. Here it is.
“So why are you still here?” I asked the friends gathered in my kitchen, blinking back tears. It was the last Saturday of 2022, and I had invited them over for an annual ritual: First, we’d journal in silence about the year behind us and the one ahead, and then come together to discuss.
Many of my friends had traveled, and I mean traveled: backpacked through Asia, spent three months in Kenya, or gone on a two-week kite-surfing trip to Morocco. One of my friends had interrailed through Europe and, one night, having run out of money, slept on a bench somewhere in Eastern Europe.
My friends were fearless. So it baffled me that, at that specific point in time, many of them had no tickets booked to explore another part of the world.
If you’re not afraid, why are you still here?
Like most questions, this one revealed a lot about the person asking it: I felt trapped by my worries and neuroses. But that same fearful inner child was also eager to explore.
It’s not that I hadn’t traveled. On the contrary, I’d visited many places in Europe and North America as well as lived in Germany and Canada. But most of that was within my comfort zone. There were many parts of the world I secretly dreamt of visiting (Asia, Africa, South America), but which I’d struck off the map for being too scary or dangerous.
Two months prior to the annual-reflection-turned-therapy-session, I’d written about my longing to go abroad. Here’s how I ended the story:
In case the gods of international travel are listening, I have one more thing to say. If you, dear gods, someday decide to send me an idea, an opportunity, or a destination, I’ll be more than happy to follow through.
It turns out the gods of international travel were listening.
The offer
Four months later, I was laid off from my dream job at the time, wiped out along one of the big tech lay-off waves. But after first enjoying my freedom for a few months, I struggled to find a new job in my field, that is, service design and UX research.
Then, one day, I received a message from someone I used to study with. Jaakko, who works as a consultant in Finnair’s design team, said that the company was recruiting a new content designer. Maybe I would be interested.
What I find peculiar about Jaakko’s message is that he had no idea I was unemployed; I mean, who sends someone a message about an open position if they’re not actively looking for a new job or at least browsing? The gods of international travel must’ve been rubbing their hands together, chuckling to themselves.
In any case, I applied. I applied although I’d only ever heard of content design that summer through another job ad. Sure, I’d studied design, but my experience with writing — a content designer’s core skill — was limited to blogs like Medium.
After two interviews and a little case, I was offered the job. But I wasn’t sure I would accept it.
I had done my best when applying, but I hadn’t taken it very seriously. Was I actually going to pivot to a new field? Would I have what it takes? And what about working at an airline while Extinction Rebellion was regularly blocking the streets of Helsinki?
I called Jaakko, still hesitant, but his message was rather clear: “Take the job.” Then I called my previous manager, Amanda, the lovely, grounded, yet spiritual individual who’d also lost her job and whom I’d come to trust. After I’d vomited my rationalizations on her, she asked me one simple question: “What do you feel in your body?”
What did I feel in my body? Below all that mental chatter, I found something surprising: curiosity. And that was my answer.
“The job came with an employee benefit I wasn’t expecting: very affordable standby flight tickets. It’s as if the universe conspired to make it dumb not to travel.”
The job came with an employee benefit I wasn’t expecting: very affordable standby flight tickets. It’s as if the universe conspired to make it dumb not to travel. Like my sister said when I was still hesitating, “If you’re not going to travel around the world when you’re working at Finnair, don’t take the job.”
I accepted the job and knew that was exactly what I would do. But now that the price of plane tickets was no longer a valid excuse to forgo travel, I had to confront the rest of my mental roadblocks: choosing where to go and venturing into places that set off my uncertainty alarm.
Little did I know that the universe would support me in these, too.
The first adventure
Our lips brushed as we greeted, which wasn’t out of place since we were lovers, but a bit clumsy since we hadn’t agreed on how to behave upon our second meeting. He smelled exactly like I remembered, one of those pheromone cases — impossibly good yet impossible to describe.
We walked up the dark wooden staircase to my Airbnb flat — or my room. The prices in Bilbao were so high that I’d rented a room from a thirty-something-year-old man, who turned out to be a tattooed — and rather muscular — psychotherapist with a shelf full of psychology books, a closet full of jiu-jitsu uniforms, and a salsa hobby. We hit it off right away despite the language barrier. But he wasn’t home now.
The stairs squeaked below our feet in place of words. I fumbled with the key — the host had warned that the lock would be tricky. When I closed the door to my room, we embraced for a long time.
“You smell exactly like I remember,” he said as we lay in bed.
“Like what?”
“Like I remember.”
We seemed to be on the same page on that.
When I was planning the trip to Bilbao and San Sebastián — my first bigger trip after starting at Finnair — I tried to let go of all my expectations. I knew seeing him again could only be the inspiration for the trip, not the key reason, and that I shouldn’t be greedy as to how much time we’d spend together.
Unlike the week he’d spent in Helsinki — hanging out with his cousin who lived here (and who seemed more like a brother or best friend to him), sightseeing, and spending any remaining time with me — he would be much busier. A paper for his doctoral thesis to finish, his primary partner to see, podcast episodes to script — a regular life to lead, that is.
So I thanked the universe for giving me a destination and enough of a push (infatuation is a pretty strong one!) to get off my neurotic and indecisive ass. Because what were the odds of us meeting in the first place? He’d accompanied his cousin to a bachata dancers’ New Year’s party at my friend’s place, 2,600 kilometers from home. And unlike his cousin, he didn’t even dance bachata.
“Meeting a lover in a part of Spain I would’ve never thought of visiting is an example of the peculiar ways in which I ended up choosing destinations.”
Meeting a lover in a part of Spain I would’ve never thought of visiting is an example of the peculiar ways in which I ended up choosing destinations. The others were slightly less cinematic — friends, Latin dancing, tea, places Finnair has direct flights to — but just as helpful.
As I mentioned in the previous story, I’d come to rely on serendipity when choosing new destinations. So I wasn’t going to say no to a trip to meet my Ecuadorian lover in Bilbao, to stay at my Malaysian friend’s mom’s place in Petaling Jaya, or to visit a tea festival in the middle of the forest two hours from Prague. I was simply grateful for the idea and the opportunity to turn it into reality.
A note from Vienna
Here’s something I wrote while I was working remotely from Vienna in August 2024 (another lovely coincidence: a Finnish woman my sister knew through her studies rented out her apartment for a month):
I feel like it’s time for a sequel because I’m no longer here. Or I am here. But here is not Finland. And it feels so right. I feel aligned, if you know what I mean. Like my soul is aligned with my purpose. Fallen into place. I feel happy.
My increased happiness hasn’t gone unnoticed. Recently, one of my oldest friends said that I seem happier than she’s seen me in years. “That’s probably because I am,” I said.
Of course, I can’t attribute the change entirely to my travels. Even with its challenges, the job in content design has felt like the right choice and Finnair an interesting company at which to practice it.
I’ve also taken bigger chances with my writing: I’ve applied to three different writing-related publications or courses (with not much luck so far, but that’s not the point) and am currently working on a new project. So if you’ve been wondering where I’ve disappeared for six months, now you know.
Conversations in a Bratislava tea room
I’d already finished my tea when the young woman working at the tea room struck up a conversation. “Are you living here or visiting? What do you do? How did you get into it? You’re from the north? I could tell by your accent, I love the northern accent.”
I’d escaped the buzzing and sizzling — it must have been 32 degrees that August afternoon — old town into a tea room in an empty neighborhood near the Bratislava railway station. ICHIGO Tea could’ve just as well been a speakeasy. It was located a couple of steps below the ground, its existence marked with only some scribbles on a chalkboard. Behind the curtained doorway was a gloomy space with an arched tiled ceiling, a bar with brass details, and a few tables — as if a medieval restaurant had gone through the Extreme Makeover: Tea Room Edition.
The people present when I entered only reinforced this first impression: Three big, bald men, and I mean BIG, sat around a table scattered with packages of tea and teaware. I gathered I was the sole guest (the men’s rather unstereotypical look and the table set-up suggested they were associated with the tea room somehow), although I never confirmed my guesses, as none of them interacted with me.
The tea room employee, however, did. She first put on some Edith Piaf (Non, je ne regrette rien) — a rather peculiar choice for a tea room specializing in Japanese green tea. But only a moment later, after I started journaling while sipping on my mecha, she asked me if I minded her turning off the music. “I enjoy the quiet,” she said. I didn’t mind. So we continued journaling in silence — yes, she was also scribbling into a notebook.
When I went to pay at the bar, she started asking me all those questions, and I asked her a bunch in turn. (Later, I wondered if she’d been trying to figure out the right time to start a conversation.)
She introduced herself as Nina, a 21-year-old who’d studied political science for a while, but then quit. While she’d enjoyed parts of it, she’d begun to miss something more creative. Now she was working at the tea house, trying to figure out her next steps. She’d done all kinds of creative things: writing, poetry, photography. She could see herself filming documentaries. But she felt stuck in Bratislava.
She was clearly in pain. She wanted to go abroad and explore, but was unsure about how to turn her longing into action and where to gather the needed courage and audacity. “I’m this tiny human being. I’m 154 cm. Like a child. I’m just trying to imagine myself going around with a massive backpack. It would be the same size as me.”
“Now I was the guide. I was the one who’d done it.”
I must have stayed at the tea room for another hour, sitting at the bar, talking. And when I went to the bathroom, something dawned on me: Now I was the guide. I was the one who’d done it.
So when I came back to sit with her, here’s what I said: “So you’re meeting this stranger here, at this tea house. What is it that you want them to tell you? What is it that you need them to tell you? Something that you don’t dare to tell yourself.”
Funny enough, I don’t exactly remember what I told her. But I did fulfil my purpose, or so I believe. Then we exchanged contacts, said our goodbyes, and I headed towards the railway station to catch a train back to Vienna.
Non, je ne regrette rien. Especially now.
