For people who have experienced the hostel life, or a working holiday life, they will know what it’s like to make, meet and make new friends on a daily basis with who you’re sharing a room with for the night. On my last month in Europe this is what I did, and it was a great way to end my OE. One girl I will remember especially, as we had just met and spontaneously decided to shamelessly do the Paris bar crawl together with another girl (who turned out to be a Turkish model), and we spent our last day in Paris together walking through half the city and eating our way through it, and ending it with a sunset picnic by the seine river. She had travelled through 20 cities in the last two months alone before she starts her postgrad at Yale, and we connected, both being virgos, agreed on many outlooks on life and shared a mass amount of life stories in a days time. She taught me how to really ‘wanderlust’, to literally wander and get lost in cities as the beauty to travelling, and how to survive on one hour’s sleep for a week and still be that energetic. The next morning her flight was at 7, so when I woke up she was gone. I have met a lot of strangers like these throughout my travels, and mostly all of them will be people I will probably never see again, but with some conversations that I was always remember. Sometimes you share the most with these kind of people because there is almost no judgement, no fear and no shame. One man in Sydney told me how he didn’t believe in marriage and thought many parents only stayed together majority of the time because of their children. One told me how unhappy their father had been growing up, working only and purely for the money, and the mental instability of their mother. Some older acquaintances gave me wise relationship advice as someone who has been through a lot more. During connections like these, I would share my same dosage of thoughts and stories in return. I have met some incredibly intelligent, driven, and influential strangers all over the world, and some of them have influenced me in strange ways, and maybe it is the stranger fact that makes the meeting so much more mysterious and worth remembering, and I believe these occurrences only happen more to the solo travellers, who are open to experiences. After living with and around strangers – friends I have almost forgotten how to truly interact with my real friends and people I was close to! I’ve been trained to welcome strangers with warmth and open up with vulnerability, it’s truly a strength built from the life of travel. Another reason to fall for the wanderlust life, and why one must travel at least once alone, in their life time! It will shape, change and open your mind and perspective up in ways you could not expect.