Arrival

   I finally made it! After the 48 hour trip I’m pretty exhausted and in need of a shower but I'm really starting to enjoy solo traveling. My only other experience with this was my recent trip to Miami where I had such an easy time chatting up strangers and making friends everywhere I went. Something about traveling alone makes you an easy/interesting person to talk to I suppose.  In this short time I had two really memorable conversations. 

   The first one happened after a long day visiting Westminster, the aquarium walking through Tate Modern, seeing the London Bridge, and sitting through Sundays sung Eucharist at St. Paul’s cathedral (chilling acoustics for all the choir and organ music) after I offered the rest of my table for a family from Moscow to sit at when I was grabbing lunch at the George. 

They had a son and daughter about my age and mom was a cardiologist. The mom had pretty good English and the son was really helpful at translating some things to her mom even though he never tried speaking English. The conversation just consisted of what they visited in London, vacation plans and what its like to be a doctor in Russia/med student in America, but it was really cool to see how excited they were about visiting the US on their next vacation. 

   After lunch I walked all the way to Paddington station, through Soho area. I was blown away at how big the entertainment area was! There were literally hundreds of blocks filled with all kinds of specialty/clothing shops, cafe's, theaters and people. You'd have to spend a ton of time just to get an idea of what is available.

   After I made it back to Heathrow, The next awesome conversation I had was with a cute girl with a dragon tattoo (lol) from London on my 10-hour flight to Johannesburg. She was traveling with her father on vacation after recently graduating from University. This girl was quite the traveler (Mexico, Chile, Colombia, lots of Euorpe, SA  etc.) and said her favorite place in the whole world to visit was Cuba! Said she'd been there 5 or 6 times and since it was been isolated by the US it a really fun/unique place - It's funny how commonplace visiting Cuba, Mexico and other places in Latin America is for Europeans where if you told an American you visited those places all we think about is how dangerous it is. Makes you realize how easily we Americans shelter ourselves from the “dangerous” outside world and miss interacting with some amazing people. - She bartends for a pub somewhere in London and gave me a lot of stories on the ups and downs of growing up in such an international city [Unfortunately for her people don’t tip the service industry people which means her high hourly wage still doesn't compare to her American counterparts especially in such an expensive city. A 5-euro tip for her is a big deal since she'll be lucky to get 1. So a little advice, to easily get on a European bartenders good side is to do the American thing and tip even something as little as 5% will make you seem like a boss].

After landing A driver from K-RITH picked me up and took me to my apartment. The drive here had some great views of all the rolling hills and beautiful beaches that make up Durban. Current temp is a little cool with high 64 low 43 but I can live with the week long forecast of mid 70’s in this mild winter vacation wonderland.

In summary: Traveling alone is a lot of fun! It makes it so you cant ignore the people around you by only conversing with your friend and it makes you super approachable for other solo travelers (you instantly have something in common).