When you are traveling and staying in hostels, one of the nicest things is to meet new people and make new friends. Friendships grow so much faster and so much stronger while you are traveling – I’ve always thought that that’s because people give more of themselves, are more comfortable with who they are and are more open and more themselves while traveling. I guess one also meets more a-like-minded people on one’s travels than in the normal day-to-day life. 

But when I started to think about this theory more, I also realized that one also meets a lot more people while traveling than one would in normal life. Not all of them become one’s closest friends so I guess also quantity plays a role here – when you meet enough many people, you are bound to meet also the ones you get along and make a connection with.

When it comes to the ones you don’t connect with, the ones that you only share a bedroom with, borrow a pen from, ask to use the frying pan after them – the ones that pass your path like a person you meet in a grocery store line – for those I wish I had a t-shirt to get me out of having the meaningless small talk conversation with. It’s not that the conversation itself is stupid, it’s just the extensive number of times you have to have that exact same conversation that really wears you out.

We actually came up with a t-shirt –idea with a friend while traveling (she was and still is one of those great travel friendships I’ve formed) since we both got annoyed telling the same things over and over again. It would be so much easier to wear a t-shirt that already said it all. All I would need to do whenever another new roommate started with the usual questions, “What’s your name? Where are you from? How long have you been traveling?  etc., would be to point on my shirt. My friend and I had a blast when coming up with the things we’d write on ours and I think we would have had them printed just for fun if it hadn’t been so expensive to do in NZ.

If I’d print mine now, it would simply say:

Hi, I’m Mari and I come from Finland. And no, I don’t care if you’ve been to Sweden.

Read also my post about the quarrel between Finland and Sweden.