Travel with Your Friends, but Talk with Strangers

I was at Volmar Market in Amsterdam and I didn’t even know how to ask for salt. I already asked the employee for cream cheese, so I couldn’t go up to her again. You know how it is. I was walking through the aisles slower than every other shopper. There was a gym bro on the phone picking up a gargantuan amount of yogurt, carrying it in two baskets while his biceps blew up in my face, and I was walking through these aisles that tower all over me. Spice section. Salt. Salt. Salt.

Zout. You become a child when you travel with your friends. You are kids together. I’ve shed my personality like a street lizard’s skin to instead sport the awkward crawl of a desiccated one. I’ve got gangly gesticulation trying to ask for directions and an ungainly look in my eyes when served the answer. I know nothing, I am irrelevant, I am as small as a grain of salt, and it is liberating. There is an exhumed extraversion that comes with traveling with your friends. I will even say it’s confidence. With family, I crave independence. With myself, I aim to look brave. But with my friends, we are gummed together despite emitting signs of a solitude deficiency. I feel left out, I confront the ache. I hear that I have left people out, I ache for them. We move on. It happens again because there’s not enough space on the sidewalk or because we ran off faster than others could catch up to. Our paces do not match and our feet suffer the disparities. I need to drain the blood from my left toe soon, but they offer the needle. And regardless, we take pride in our step count. 23,000 had been our maximum in Barcelona. Then we slow down. It will all happen again. The intimacy that comes from traveling with your friends will seldom appear at any other time. Sharing a hostel room is much more vulnerable than sharing a house.

In lieu of galvanizing your character, with such individual desires, needs, spite, sometimes even rage, lust, and fears, you all mold into a clump. When abroad, a tourist is your primal identity. Your traveling posse is your commune. I certainly am a tourist to the bone. I have been loud on public transport and I try and fail to pronounce street names, shop names, car plates, and bus lanes all the time. I laugh, and I laugh, and I laugh because my friends laugh. The embarrassment derived from rejection is the inescapable norm rather than a probability to be avoided. This simply is not our land. Be the annoying tourist, but be humble. Learn.

In 2022, Gillian Sandstrom, Gus Cooney, and Erica Boothby conducted a study on talking to strangers, in which the majority of their participants believed that approaching a stranger for conversation would result in rejection, awkwardness, or a lack of enjoyment. Their procedure was a week-long intervention in a scavenger hunt for a control group who would approach and observe, and a treatment group who would approach and engage. One was to scout out strangers through missions: find a person having a coffee or wearing certain shoes.

By the end, participants in the treatment group reported more positive attitudes towards talking to strangers, less rejection, less awkwardness, and more confidence in their conversational skills in comparison to the control group.

Oddly enough, even though participants left the hunt more willing to approach a stranger, they were still uncertain of their impression on their partners. Reading people never got easier. The authors flagged this gap without much explanation for it.

I will attempt to offer a solution in this Italian cafe, Steampower, to the best of my lax ability! You need not board a plane to try this out. Just skip town, or route yourself to a part of town you typically avoid. I avoid my hometown very much.

People all over the world mourn the slow, sludging death of talking to strangers. We ruminate: “Why don’t we talk to strangers anymore?” “Why do people avoid talking to strangers?” “Flirting is a lost art.” “Hello Stranger?” There are technological developments to blame: the smartphone; or the former death of third spaces. Everything is transactional. I propose the freedom of deliberately placing yourself in an environment where you cannot recognize speech patterns, places to frequent, or social cues. These environments corner the individual to engage with strangers, much like the treatment group. The mission becomes finding the cafe and finding a shoe store. The mission is to become beside yourself until you are in the comfort of a stranger.

I had a four-minute conversation with one of the café owners of Mabell in Amsterdam. We exchanged contact information. It was when I finally broke away from my gang in a manner I can only describe as yellow yolk drooping from a cracked shell onto hot pavement that I felt recognized. I was simmering on this pavement and talking to him about the feasibility of moving to Amsterdam. Four minutes is what I needed to ask him what he loved about the city, what I fear, his second restaurant, my struggling wage, Amsterdam’s housing crisis, his wisdom, his daughter, his wife, my apprehension, and the pity that comes from being young in America.

The impression that an individual leaves on their partner after a conversation is manifest in how they feel themselves after the conversation. It’s what you feel and how you are changed from a stranger that will spur you to keep engaging with others. Tolga, among many others my friends and I have had the pleasure to meet, was proof for me. In a range of studies about conversations during commutes, Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder found that even though participants assumed they would have a positive experience traveling in solitude, they later reported more positive commute experiences when interacting with other passengers.

I returned from this particular conversation with the itching urge to tell my friends more about Tolga. After all, all our conversations with strangers abroad have been a combined curiosity, one person’s question sprouting from another’s. Tolga met us all before I met him. The stakes are lower with talking to strangers in a foreign place because it is probable we will never see each other again, but they are even lower because friends are the ointment to rejection. We have asked bars for their techno playlists to be met with a solemn shake of their head. We have stepped foot on buses, all six of us, to be stopped by a flushed red hand to our face. But rejection is rampant regardless of where one goes. Laugh about it with your friends, but don’t let it stop you from talking to strangers.

Tolga said to not be scared. He said, if anything, you’ll just waste a little time.