At a bar in Valencia, I meet a Polish girl. She says she spent one hundred euros and two full days on a bus to get there.
“It is our first time outside our country!”
She smiles happily at her boyfriend and translates for him. She studied English at school, but this is her first time to use it.
“Do you understand me? Yes?”
When I speak, she leans in and stares at my lips. Her big, brown eyes search for the shapes of the sounds. She is unquestionably beautiful, made more so by her enthusiasm.
“Wait! Wait! Wait!” she shouts when she needs a word from her Polish friend, the one hosting her here.
“At first, everything was very weird for us. Everything is different!”
“For example?”
“The climate, the people, the city, the food…the hardest thing is that everything is so…Wait! Wait! Wait!”
“Late?”
“Yes! Late!”
I gesture to myself and smile. I arrived an hour late. She takes a photo of us together as a souvenir of her first conversation with a Canadian, and I spend the rest of the trip wondering what the world would be like if I had never traveled before.
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