I DO Have Friends, Honest ...

I did it! I survived my first solo travel experience! A plane, a train, two hostels ... For experienced wanderers, this is probably nothing to get too excited about, but having not gone too many places on my own, especially places outside of China, I'm pretty pleased.

Now I just have to stop feeling like a kid at camp. I'm staying at this giant, crowded hostel in Hanoi, and I feel like a total loser.

For one thing, since I got in yesterday morning, I haven't ventured out further than a half-mile radius around my home-base. Truly, this is because it wasn't my goal to come here and see all sorts of things. It was my goal to spend these free days waiting for my friends to come by planning my section of the trip and catching up on things that I've left unattended for awhile. I've done pretty good on both accounts, but I feel self-conscious from sitting at the computer for so long ...

Further, my room yesterday was filled with seven-ish girls from Melbourne who all knew each other and had traveled different sections of their trip together. The host of the hostel noticed me sitting by myself, eating some breakfast and waiting to check in. He was asking me about room preferences and said, "Well, there's a group of girls that all just got in too. They seem pretty cool. It's probably time to start making friends, right??" Ugh. You could tell already that I'm the antisocial type? The girl whose counselor tries to convince her that it will be fun to meet new people?

I've told myself that I'm not actually this shy. I think if I weren't waiting for my friends to come, my mindset would be a lot different and I would probably take more initiative in meeting and mingling with people, and it would probably be a really good experience. But that's for another time.

I did have a more positive meeting-people-experience yesterday. I was sitting at a cafe, working on planning some stuff for Thailand, and a man at another table asked me where I was from. I told him, and it eventually came up that I'd just been in China for awhile. He started speaking to me in Chinese, which was fun, as I thought I wouldn't get to speak it again for ages. Then a girl sitting nearby overheard, and joined in the conversation in Chinese as well. She was about my age, had majored in Chinese, and had studied in China for two years. We chatted a bit, and she was really sweet.

Well, I should probably get off the computer. Not because I have so many cool things to see and do, but because I can't handle the host walking past again and seeing me here ... still ...