Boldly Go Solo

Back to (language) school

This is the second year that fall has come around and my thoughts have turned to...Guadalajara. 

The foods, the family I lived with there for a few days and the Guadalajara sights.

The San Juan de Dios Market. (I just recently finished the vanilla I brought home from there, which reminded me of my trip every time I baked with it.) The Corona Market in Guadalajara's city center. And much more. My nice teacher at the IMAC Spanish language school in downtown Guadalajara. 

I was in a class with about five others, who ranged in age from teens to probably 60's. I loved the fact that la maestra couldn't revert to English to explain things (she didn't speak it well) and that I was able to follow along in Spanish pretty well.

Solo female travelers shouldn't let safety concerns put the world off limits

I've often been terrified before traveling to foreign countries outside of the "safety" of Europe.

I planned a trip to Ecuador and worried for weeks before going. Someone told me about a woman he'd met in Brazil who'd been harassed in Ecuador. I read about pickpockets and thieves and how careful women had to be at night.

The same thing happened before going to Egypt. All I could think of was the massacre I'd remembered that had taken place there 15 years ago. As if the next one were planned for the very time, place and day I'd be at, say, the Valley of the Kings or the Pyramids at Giza 15 years later.

And people around me freaked out when I said I was going to Mexico last fall. They'd read too much about kidnappings and drug-related killings. As had I. Although in that case, I wasn't very concerned. Can't explain why.

But while staying with a family in Guadalajara, Mexico, taking the city bus to Spanish classes and sightseeing around the downtown, I have to say, I didn't see one person carted off by a drug cartel member or shoved into a car and driven off for a ransom call.

Life seemed pretty normal despite the horror stories in the paper. Which are mostly about the border states, in any case, not all of Mexico.

This kind of thinking is understandable (I've GOT to say that, don't I, since I engage in it sometimes) but also not particularly rational.

I live in Washington, D.C. I watched the smoke from the 9/11 plane that crashed into the Pentagon rise into the sky as I made my way home that day. Terrorists had attacked within two miles of where I worked and within five miles of where I live.

27 travel tips and what we learned in 2009 - a roundup of travel bits and pieces

I scour millions of pages of the Internet every day so you solo travelers don't have to. Below are some finds on lessons learned, cheap tips traded and discussion boards discussed:

Fodor's recently posted an entry on lessons learned from travel in 2009. One person learned from travel to third world countries how "very blessed with riches and people" she or he was. 

Another learned that people can "communicate without any common language." Any English speaker who has traveled in a non-English speaking country understands the beauty of this. Smiles and pointing fingers can accomplish a lot.

Lonely Planet came up with 27 travel tips. One of the many tips I liked was to take your hobbies with you. A big soccer fan? Get tickets to a game while in Buenos Aires. An architecture buff? Take a walking tour when in a city like Chicago. Pursuing your passion while abroad is bound to connect you to people.

And honestly? If I go to one more church or temple...

These are the sights most often touted by guidebooks. The churches and temples. They're fine. Nice to see. Especially if you happen to be a church or temple buff.

But I don't go to them in my own city. I'd rather dig deeper and get behind the tourist sights. I've seen way too many small churches that didn't need seeing.

Check in with solo sites such as Tripadvisor's solo travel forum. Just as a for instance, an entry on Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, says that the city comes highly recommended for solo travelers, especially female solo travelers. The writer says it's one of the friendliest places on earth and that you never feel like you're alone.

Food shopping in foreign countries is as worthy as museum going

I was in a supermarket aisle in Buenos Aires staring at the boxes of yerba mate tea. I'd drunk a fair amount of it during my vacation and I wanted to take a box or two home.

But I wanted tea bags, not loose leaves, and since I didn't know the words for that I couldn't tell what was inside the colorful boxes.

A woman came down the aisle doing her shopping and I asked, in my typically inventive Spanish, if she could help me. I might have said something like "es este te en bolsas papeles?" which I think means "is this tea in paper bags?"

This was on the heels of an attempt during a separate shopping excursion to buy tissues at a little cafe shop near the Perito Moreno glacier.

"Tiene papeles para la nariz?" Do you have papers for the nose? Or maybe I said "servillettas para la nariz," meaning, I hope, "napkins for the nose."

(Now perhaps you get a better grasp on why I continue to need Spanish lessons.)

In both cases I got the answers and the products I needed. And cracked myself up while doing so. And perhaps made the people I interacted with chuckle too, though, if so, they were too nice to do it in my presence.

I love shopping in food stores and little convenience markets in foreign countries. For one, there are few tourists inside. And I learn a lot about the culture and the food. And I usually ending up buying all sorts of interesting-looking things to try and often bring food favorites home.

In Argentina, that meant a jar of dulce de leche and packages of alfajores, a sandwich cookie.