Tonight's Dining Companion

LEBRON is a girl's best friend 💎

There's a toddler on this turboprop from Prague to Belgrade. She's blonde, intrepid, doesn't speak English and on a mission to make sure every seatbelt on the half-empty plane is securely fastened and pulled tight. She wanders up to the open seat next to me, moves my ticket to my lap without saying a word, tugs on my seatbelt to make sure it's tight and buckles the one in the empty seat. She then dutifully moves on to the next row, and the next.

I don't know where her parents are. Perhaps they saw Etihad's commercial and figured Jennifer Aniston was on babysitting duty with its partner airlines too. But the child has secured half the plane at this point and nobody has moved to stop her. Half of me wants to find her parents and the other half wants to praise her for taking the safety briefing seriously.

You want to follow her and ask just exactly why she owned such exotic jewellery and how she managed to pull it off so well, and if she would like to tell you what must be a fascinating story over coffee. And if it were any other day of your vacation you would, because that's what solo travel is for.

Zuzi, from Prague. I met her about three years ago when she came to Abu Dhabi for New Year’s and stayed with my CouchSurfing friends. She took me around Prague on my last day of the trip, showing me where she grew up in what is now the main tourist district and telling me of the days before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Bursztyn, my Polish friends’ dog.

I’m in Warsaw visiting the people from the Bali wedding, which is the absolute craziest thing I’ve done in my life. Two of them have adopted this dog, whose name translates as Amber.

Bursztyn was a shelter dog. He was there for eight years, starting when he was a year old. He developed a fear of humans. He lost all his teeth. He was basically written off as a lost cause in a no-kill shelter. And then my friends Anya and Sotez adopted him three years ago, giving him a home and forging a bond with him.

For most of last night he was laying in a corner of the apartment. We let him be, because if anyone but his owners tries to approach or pet him he’ll snap at them. The other friends’ dog, Snupi, would occasionally try to play with him, but Bursztyn was having none of it.

And then near the end of the night this massive, fearful boof of a dog got up, walked over to my legs and lay down at (well, on) my feet. And he sighed that contented dog sigh. I didn’t try to reach down and pet him - he’s still not too trusting - but I played the rest of the night with a smile on my face and a warm, toasty feeling in my feet.

This is Wojtas. I met him two years ago on the Polish wedding adventure in Bali, the craziest thing I've done in my life. He was with me on one of that trip's highlights: sneaking up a volcano in the middle of the night. No guide, no real marked trail and no admitting just how big of a mistake the whole thing was until we were huddling together for warmth penguin-style about 200 meters from the summit, gazing up at the most amazing set of stars I've ever seen and waiting for the sun to rise above the cloud line. It's always an adventure with him.

So when he asked me a few days ago if I'd like to do a 66-kilometer mountain bike race with him when I came to Warsaw, I didn't worry about how I've only ever ridden a mountain bike for 20 minutes in my life before, or how I haven't been on a bike since February-ish, or how I didn't actually have any equipment. I just borrowed his wife's bike, his clothing and his buddy's shoes and hopped in the car.

Once again, it was definitely a mistake. I came in dead last, about an hour behind most of the other finishers. I fell four times, not including the two times I was saved by a well-placed tree. The race director had some harsh words for us until he learned I was from out of town and not used to the Polish woods.

But the countryside was beautiful, Wojtas stayed by my side the whole way and I can claim this trip as a racecation. It was a wonderful time - and now I can wait another two years before trying something that athletically ambitious again.

(Bonus pics are from the volcano two years ago.)

After the race, his wife Zosia served us homemade pizza and cheesecake. (I’m so glad he married that woman.) The last time I saw her in Bali she was bouncy and energetic and had a head full of radiant red hair. This time around she was still as happy and energetic, but more subdued in how she expressed it. The hair was now reduced to a grey stubble and a yellow beanie, though. That’s what happens when you get 16 rounds of chemotherapy.

Zosia: “Getting cancer has changed everything about how I live my life. I don’t work anymore, so I spend my days at home. I’ve barely left the house since late last year. It’s too cold here and I don’t want to get sick. My body isn’t up to keeping me warm. So I spend my days cooking and cleaning. And researching. We know so much about dealing with cancer, and we’ve become resources for other Polish people who are lost in the mist. People say my blog has helped them find the right doctors and the right care with their cancer. So I feel like I’m accomplishing something.”

Me: “That’s crazy. And you’re so young.”

(She’s only one year older than I am.)

Zosia: “Yes, but I’m not the youngest it’s happened to. There was another girl I met when I was going to get my mastectomy. She was 23 and with child when she was diagnosed. They took out one of her breasts, and then after she gave birth they started chemo.”

Me: “So she can’t nurse the child, can she?”

Wojtas: “No. That’s one of the hard things about breast cancer: it’s tied to pregnancy. The hormones from pregnancy increase the risk of the cancer developing, especially if you’ve already had it. They say that after ten years of being cancer-free you’re considered effectively cured. Anything that develops after that time is independent of the breast cancer. And for the first two years after your chemo ends it’s too dangerous for you to get pregnant. After that there’s still a risk, but it’s not that high. We’ve learned this over the past months.”

Me: “So are you two looking to have children after you hit the two-year mark?”

James, from Australia. He was staying at my hostel in Budapest:

“I’ve been traveling for seven months now. My job let me take 10 months of leave and sill come back to it, though at this point I’m not sure I want to go back. I took the vacation time and decided to see Europe. All of it.

The first two months I was traveling with my girlfriend, and we were basically always together. We never got to meet new people because we were so concentrated on each other. Then we broke up and I’ve been solo since then. And now after so many different places, all the historical sites and monuments and statues all blend together. I’m not really interested in those things as much as the people I meet and see them with. That’s what I do now. I get my fill of people, then I fuck off to the wild and hike for a few days where I don’t have to talk to anyone.

I’ll be making my way to Austria after this, where I’ve found a beautiful hostel to work at in the mountains. Work hard, hike hard, repeat. And then it’s back to life in Oz again.

Ellie, from Chicago, whom I met at a hostel in Budapest. We spent two days seeing the city together, including a trip to the synagogue in the Jewish quarter.

“I’m a vegetarian when I’m in the States, but I don’t keep kosher anymore. I stopped when I switched to vegetarianism, but I still consider it keeping with my faith. Kosher to me is all about being mindful and ethical of where your food comes from. It makes you slow down and think about what you’re eating. And I do the same thing when I’m overseas and trying new foods, even if they have meat in them. I’m not going to let that stop me from learning about new foods and cultures. It’s important in Judaism to know the history of something and where it comes from.”

Bonus:

“I can’t ride a bike. I tried once, in Israel. I kept tilting over to the right for some reason. And I couldn’t use my brakes. I just kept going and going until I’d fall over or crash into something. So I haven’t tried since.”

Sonia: Yes, yes of course.

Hilary, left, and Nicole, from the US. They had just finished their 20 months in the Peace Corps, where they were stationed in Albania, and were traveling in Eastern Europe before moving home. We met on a guided tour of Belgrade.

Me: “What’s the most important thing you accomplished in your time over there?”

Hilary: “Probably starting the country’s version of the Girl Scouts. I helped set up the program, and there are now about 250 girls involved in it from all over Albania. It’s pretty common for girls to be deprived of the opportunities boys have because of the culture over there, but that seems to be changing with the generations. The kids I worked with all seem to have much more modern views on equality than their parents and grandparents.”

Me: “Did you get them selling Girl Scout cookies too?”

Hilary: “Ha. No, that’s a US thing. But some of them did make their own cookies to sell, so I guess kind of?”

(Side note: She and her co-founder were only able to start the Albanian Girl Scouts because of help from the Let Girls Learn program, which may have just been canceled by Donald Trump’s administration. She says it helped fund a lot of desperately needed school bathroom products too.)

__________