Friends in Many Places

Certainly one of the benefits of traveling is meeting people from all over the world. One of the benefits of that benefit is that you can meet up with these people further on in your travels and have a friend in a strange city or have a place to stay and be lazy when you don't know what else to do.

Way back in Laos, Adam and I met a couple of German travelers on our way to Savannakhet from the 4000 Islands. It was Lalita's birthday and she was celebrating by spending a day in steaming buses and vans on Lao roads, and occasionally puking. Martin was flying home the next day.

We found a cheap hotel in town, and spent the next few days together, fruitlessly waiting for Thai visas, exploring a river and cave that Lalita fortunately convinced us to go to, and moving onward to Vientiane and beyond, meeting up again in Luang Prabang.

Fast forward to Berlin. Thanks to the beauty and horror of Facebook, I met up with Lalita at a show, and she offered me a place to stay in her flatmate's room while it was empty. Mom was leaving the next day, and I didn't know where to go or what to do, so it was a perfect situation.

I may have overstayed my welcome, but Lalita is too kind and knows what it's like being a traveler. I didn't do much besides sleeping in, lounging in the apartment, lounging in parks, going to yoga classes as part of a cheap promotion and frequenting CouchSurfing meet-ups. It was a carefree and unproductive week. In fact, it was remarkable for it's high level of unproduction.

I did make a decent meal one night to justify my presence there, and we watched a couple movies together. When she wasn't working or out with her boyfriend, we had some good talks about traveling and life and hipsters and yoga and cats.

I also met another friend from one of my Australian trips in Berlin. We ate cheeseburgers on the Fourth of July and I felt truly American. In Baku, Jamie and I stayed with a friend of his he met through CouchSurfing in London, and I also went out for dinner with a Dutch friend that I kept running into throughout Russia, Mongolia and China. And in Amsterdam I had a couple drinks with a friend from Korea.

Spend enough time traveling, and you have a network of travel friends who can actually become real friends if you actually follow up with staying in touch and making visits. I'm theoretically off to see some more friends, but with how lazy I've been the last week and a half in Berlin, I'll be surprised if I wind up actually getting anywhere.