The Lady Will Dine Alone
Solitude and loneliness are frenemies, and they should really sort that out.
I was already on edge when I arrived at a posh rooftop bar in Budapest last summer, looking for a good sunset view.
I had spent the afternoon at a spa I had pinned on Google Maps because it looked like the quintessential, Accidentally Wes Anderson bathhouse of Instagram dreams. In reality, it was teeming with tourists. Tourists shouting in every language, tourists lining every inch of every pool, so that there was no way in or out. Tourists entering the sauna without towels and then standing with the door wide open, letting all the heat out, as they shouted with their friends about how hot it was.
Yes, I thought, that’s the point, and rolled my eyes as if I were not one of them, as if I had not arrived in Budapest fewer than 24 hours earlier.
Ah, I realized. I am grumpy. I am lonely. I am grumpy because I am lonely.
After the spa, I walked an hour to to the rooftop bar, which was on the other side of the Danube. I went at the suggestion of a friend who said the sunset view was incredible, even though the food was expensive and unmemorable. I arrived just as the sun was dipping below the horizon, casting the Parliament building in the most incredible glow. I asked for a table for one, and was then sent over to wait for the elevator with a party of five that had gotten there before me. At the top, I stepped aside so they could be seated first (once you get caught (accidentally!) jumping a queue in Britain, you never jump a queue again). The server looked at them, then at me, then back at them. One of the men in the party gestured toward me by way of explanation.
“She will dine alone,” he said, and I wanted to set the place on fire.
His English was heavily accented and I can only assume he was trying to be helpful. These were probably the best words he had for “she’s not with us,” or “we’re not together,” like when I forget the Spanish word for sunset, atardecer, so instead I say, “you know that time when the sun, it goes to sleep?” But still I felt exposed, even betrayed. It reminded me of the most cliché existential crisis I have ever had, when I joined the “single riders” line of a mediocre amusement park in Denver after a devastating breakup many years ago.
“That’s a bit dramatic, don’t you think?” a friend said, when I texted a picture of the sign with probably a few too many exclamation points. “Also, what did you expect?” (Touché.)
She will dine alone.
Why did it sound so awful, phrased that way? Why did it sound awful at all? Just the day before, I was thinking about all the solo travel I’ve done, and how it’s become so second-nature to me that I take for granted that I’m happy to do it. Occasionally, someone will comment that my lifestyle is “brave,” and I think, “Brave? Me? For going to a nude hot spring at a luxury resort in Japan? That’s not brave. That’s self-indulgent.” But there was a time when I changed a flight to Mexico City so that I would not have to arrive at the airport alone, after I learned that my traveling companion would be arriving a day later. There was a time when I flew to Munich for a last-minute assignment and had such a challenging time navigating Bavaria by myself that I called my dad at 5 a.m. Eastern Time from my rental car and immediately started crying. (I do not recommend trying to park an SUV in view of a bus full of German tourists under such emotional distress. It will not go well for you.)
In general, these days, I am content to travel alone. I like walking slowly, stopping to read historical signs. I like smelling every single candle in every single boutique store even though I won’t buy any of them, as I like to set my money on fire the old-fashioned way, by forgetting about things I have subscribed to. I like to sit for hours in cafes, drinking the same kinds of tea I drink at home, writing silly things on postcards even though I know I’ll probably text my friends these anecdotes weeks before they’ll get them in the mail. I come up with loads of essay ideas and often find myself hilarious, so when I’m in a good mood, my brain is a nice place to be.
But when the loneliness does creep in, it’s not a pleasant affair.
I had traveled to Budapest from London, some 26 or so hours of train travel spread over a few days. I started with a week in Amsterdam, where I housesat for some very kind and generous friends, and where I enjoyed the solitude almost urgently. I read three books, wrote at least a dozen postcards and letters, and spent hours talking on the phone with friends instead of texting or scrolling on Instagram. Their wifi was down because of some construction going on next door, so I wrote thousands and thousands of words: my masters dissertation, essays for future newsletters, and the beginnings of a standup comedy act, just for fun. I felt relaxed, creative, productive. I was alone, but I was not lonely.
It’s funny how quickly they change, emotions. Shortly after I arrived in Budapest, I extended my stay because I had been so engrossed in writing that I hadn’t seen any of the city at all. The next afternoon I was researching same-day flights back to London. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing anymore. I was traveling but I wasn’t having fun. So what was the point?
The main reason I did the trip in the first place was simply because I could. That’s rarely an ideal reason to travel, even if you can leverage the inevitable discomfort for significant personal growth. I had an unlimited Eurail pass (the same as Interrail, which is for Europeans) that would soon expire, and it seemed like a shame to let train tickets go to waste. I have always romanticized the idea of riding the rails around Europe with total freedom and spontaneity, and so why wouldn’t I take that opportunity? I love trains, I love writing on trains, and I love visiting new cities.
Somewhere along the way, I got a little restless, and sick of myself. Amsterdam is such an international city that you can speak English almost anywhere, to almost anyone, and it does not feel like you are an imposition. But in Vienna and Budapest, I felt keenly aware of my total lack of German and Hungarian. I sent long text messages and voice notes to friends, ending them with apologetic, self-deprecating excuses: “Wow that was a lot. Can you tell I haven’t spoken to anyone all day?”
The morning after I dined alone, I seriously considered aborting my trip, at significant cost, to go home just one day earlier. I spent an hour or two crunching train schedules and comparing sleeper trains with flights. Then I realized I was hungry, if not hangry, and that trip-binning decisions should not be made in such a compromising state. I typed in something vague into Google Maps, like “food” or “breakfast,” and it told me to walk about one hundred feet to a cafe called “Grumpy.”
Obviously, it called to me.
At Grumpy, I ordered rösti, a shredded potato dish. I remembered reading about rösti in a travel story I am still obsessed with, in which Taffy Brodesser-Akner was sent to Switzerland with 24 hours notice and found that this dish “suits my constitution better than anything else I have ever eaten in my life.” I found that it suited mine, as well. Nourished, I called my friend in Amsterdam who had, by then, returned home. I admitted I’d been feeling lonely. That was all it took. Almost instantly, I felt much, much better.
It feels cliché to say this, and quite cheap, as well, considering I am so aware of how hard it is to actually do. But when I sat back and examined the previous 48 hours and ‘sat in the discomfort’ and ‘interrogated the loneliness,’ as a meditation guide might suggest, I actually did learn an awful lot. I took stock of the decisions I made and realized I had been quite a poor travel buddy for myself. There were times when my feet hurt but I wouldn’t take public transportation because I didn’t want to spend the money, which was not coming from a practical place; I was not on a college budget. There were times when I wanted to stay in and keep writing but felt that I should go out, because why was I here if not to explore? This resulted in situations where I felt guilty working when I believed I should be taking an opportunity to rest, and then felt guilty resting when I felt like I was behind on work. There were times when I craved familiar food and then scolded myself for being a cliché tourist rather than the cosmopolitan traveler I like to think I am.
It was a spiral of emotion. It was not a healthy storm.
When I returned from the trip, I made a joke out of how badly I had done. I laughed at how I had gotten sick of myself, how a throwaway comment about my solitude made by a total stranger knocked me off-balance. It was quintessential Type II fun: So much more enjoyable in retrospect, from the comfort of my couch, than in the moment.
“It’s kind of exactly what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?” one friend said, when he called to ask about the trip once I’d gotten back. “You’re always going out in search of misadventure and you’re disappointed when you have a nice time. Well, this time, you got what you wished for.”
And it’s true: I am always looking for travel experiences that make for good stories back home. Just before my rail journey across Europe, I had basically begged ChatGPT to lead me astray on the England Coast Path. The year before, I set off to paddle from Glasgow to Edinburgh with my friend Corey and we hoped for bad weather and a friendship-threatening brawl so we’d have something to write about. And just this month, I put my sanity through the wringer on a bargain-basement budget trip almost guaranteed to disappoint.
But I hadn’t wanted to have a bad time on my train expedition. I’d had a busy and emotionally tumultuous year, full of meet-cutes that turned into distracting, false-start romances. As if my life were a romcom with an ellipsis where there should be a definitive ending. I was led on, lovebombed, let down, strung along, bailed upon, ghosted, and, once, dumped on account of living on the wrong side of the Thames, a river “too wide and too deep” for tepid interest to overcome (to be fair, we were on the same page with that one. Eight miles, on public transit, definitely constitutes a long-distance relationship in London). I had taken for granted my ease with discomfort, and I set off for a grand adventure—something I would be able to upcycle into paid work—when what I really needed was a vacation.
On top of that, all of this was happening around the same time as some close friends were getting married, and I had failed to lock down a Plus One to the wedding even with two deadline extensions. It makes sense, now, that being perceived as lonesome by a complete stranger would have set me off the way it did. Strangers often see us much more clearly than we could ever see ourselves.
I’ve tried to write this newsletter about a hundred times since last summer, and it never felt complete. I couldn’t figure out what it was that I was really trying to say. A solo traveler goes on a grand adventure and is outed for feeling lonely: So what? But maybe that really is the whole thing. Maybe this experience sticks out to me, maybe it’s something I think about every single week, because it forced me to see something I had been quite good at ignoring. It would have been easy to cancel my trip and run home to London, where I’ve been lucky to share a house with a rotating cast of very close friends. But I knew that the easy way was not a long-term solution. I had this realization in between putting a new travel itinerary into an online shopping cart and inputting my credit card details: I can bin off this trip and leave Budapest, but I cannot leave myself behind. When I get home, I will still be me, and I will still have these feelings.
So I tried a different approach. I had an imaginary conversation with myself, as if I were two people, and I tried to put aside my frustration the way I would if I were speaking to a friend who was feeling sad or lonely.
What would you like to do today? I asked. What would be relaxing? If you could do anything, how would you enjoy this city?
I didn’t push myself to explore something I didn’t really feel like doing. I allowed myself to stay in the neighborhood, to bring a magazine to a cafe and sit there as long as I liked. I went to a hotel I had heard was nice, and I bought a day pass to their sauna and steam room, which were serene and devoid of tourists with selfie sticks. I went to bed early and got up before dawn the next morning to catch a bus to an iconic sunrise spot. I walked nine miles from there to Margaret Island, in the middle of the river, and back to my Airbnb, while listening to my favorite podcasts.
In my twenties, I had hard rules against retracing old steps, because I thought the best way to see the world was to never look at the same thing twice. I have outgrown this now, and so I went back to Grumpy and ordered rösti for the second day in a row. I got to the train station early so I could stop at the post office and mail a handful of postcards, and I gave myself a long stopover in Vienna to see things I had missed when my mood had been souring.
I caught a night train from Vienna to Amsterdam and had a lovely conversation with another solo traveler who had been assigned to the same compartment. In Amsterdam, I hugged my friends, took myself to yet another sauna (perhaps there is a trend here; perhaps I have gone soft), ate Dutch comfort food and the same stroopwafels I buy every time I go to Amsterdam, and went out for some surprisingly amazing tacos. I kept asking this very cheesy question: What do you need? And I listened to the answers. I took much kinder care of myself, and I arrived home feeling lighter and grateful.
But perhaps this is the kicker I needed, the full circle I didn’t realize I’d been waiting for—the oldest trick in the book: As I write this, I’m on another grand European rail adventure. I’m now crossing Germany by train en route to Kufstein, Austria. There, I’ll spend a few days in the Tyrolean Alps at an adventure travel trade event with other journalists and people who run travel companies across the world. I’m thinking about my last train expedition and how it went wrong so quickly, but I trust that I have learned. I’m a better companion to myself now than I was a year ago—both at home and on the road.
I’m alone right now, but it’s not quite solo travel. I’ll be meeting the group when I arrive, and in a few days I’ll head to Kitzbühel, where I’ll be reunited with some old friends I’ve enjoyed backpacking with over the past few years. I’ll have some downtime around town here and there, but for the most part, someone else is taking care of my itinerary and has promised me excellent Austrian food, which I’m really looking forward to.
The best part? I hear the hotel has an excellent—and calming—sauna.
Minor confession: I did draft this newsletter on the train, but I’ve now returned from Austria. I’m very happy to report that my week there was the most rejuvenating and relaxing I’ve experienced in a long, long time (the saunas were even better than advertised). I’ll be back in your inbox next week with some postcards from Tyrol, like the little sneak peak above. Spoiler alert: This might be my favorite travel destination yet.
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Till next time, adventure well!
Kassondra x
P.S. Those of you who have been long-time subscribers know this newsletter has always been free. I’ve been investing much more time into it this year and have now enabled paid subscriptions. In the not-too-distant future, some posts will be behind a paywall. If you’d like to support my work, I’m offering a special discount to anyone who subscribes by the end of June: 50% off for life. That means you’ll get half off the going rate for this newsletter for forever, as long as you stay subscribed with the same email.
I’ve got some fun stories lined up for you over the next few months, including:
-Wild London (Kassie’s Version)—postcards from a sunrise paddle through East London’s marshlands
-An experiment in self-impression—a photoshoot in Lisbon has some fascinating consequences
-Postcards from the Tyrolean Alps—how to plan a perfect trip to Austria
-‘I suspect there is an owl in the moss’—and other idioms from across the world
It’s been fun getting out of office with you! Let’s stay out there. <3
Ah that would be what we in the UK call a 'hen party'... My principle is to do stuff that I genuinely expect to be fun - enough always goes wrong to make for an interesting writeup anyway!
Hi I have just come across your newsletter and I have enjoyed it so much. I dont think I have related to something so much for a while now. Whilst you were speaking about solo tripping and the very unwelcome feeling of loneliness- it has just made me think that I have been in many similar situations, where a couple of times the lack of familiarity and sheer awkwardness have made me bail and run back to London. But whenever I have put my foot down, deciding to stay, I have ended up overcoming very many insecurities and have thoroughly enjoyed myself by the end of it.