We had taken a little break from volunteering after the winery in Chile in April, and after being on the road since January 1st. Especially after spending May in Peru just exploring, we were looking forward to having a place where we could stay for a while. Somewhere we could become part of everyday life rather than just passing through. 

What I'd forgotten was that slowing down doesn't always mean resting.

Our new home was a newly opened café and guesthouse near Issyk-Kul, run by a family. Our host was a former teacher who had started this project last year, having her children and nephews helping her through the summer because she couldn't yet afford to hire anyone.

The guest houses were still unfinished. Our bathroom didn't have a sink yet. We slept on two mattresses on the floor, and the eco-style buildings, with their muddy walls and wooden floors, came with a small ant problem.

But none of that really mattered. There is something exciting about arriving at the beginning of something. We weren't staying in a perfectly finished guesthouse. We were seeing a family build something from scratch.

We helped open the café. We had different projects every day: cutting and sorting wood in the garden, removing weeds, taking care of the vegetable garden, harvesting apricots, and cracking a huge bag of walnuts (and I mean HUGE, it took close to five hours).

The children were friendly but initially shy. Slowly, they started speaking more English with us, asking questions and becoming more comfortable around us.

It was exactly the kind of experience I love about volunteering. You don't just see a place. You become a tiny part of someone's everyday life.

At the same time, I was still teaching English online. Because most of my students are adults working in Europe, my lessons usually didn't start until 10pm. I didn't think much of it at first. It just became another part of the rhythm of our days.  

The only problem was that we hadn't yet seen much of Kyrgyzstan.

For the first four days, the weather was cloudy and rainy. We knew there were mountains right outside the café windows, but we couldn't see them.

We knew Issyk-Kul, the largest lake in Kyrgyzstan, was only a short drive away, but the weather wasn't good enough to go.

Then finally, everything changed.

The clouds disappeared.

Suddenly, snowy mountains became visible from every table in the café. The view we had been waiting for was there all along, just hidden behind the grey sky.

A few days later, it became warm enough to go swimming.

And Issyk-Kul was everything we had imagined.

The beach was full of families spending the day together with their children. The water was warm and perfectly clear. When swimming away from the shore, you could see mountains covered in clouds on the other side of the lake. When turning back towards the beach, the snowy mountains in front of the café were even clearer.

It was one of those moments where you think: this is why I came here.

An hour or two later, we'd be back at the café. And in the evening, after volunteering all day, I'd open my laptop and teach English until midnight.

That became the rhythm of July. Beautiful moments squeezed in between work.

After the first week, our host kindly told us we could stay until we were going to leave Kyrgyzstan. We had originally only planned to stay for one week.

It was incredibly generous of her.

We went for a swim in the lake and talked about it. We liked the café and the family, but we also thought it would be a shame to spend three weeks in Kyrgyzstan only seeing the snowy mountains through the windows of a café.

So we decided to explore a little more.

One afternoon, we went to Skazka Canyon, which wasn't far from where we were staying. It was beautiful and looked like it belonged somewhere in Utah or Arizona rather than Central Asia.

On the way back, we hitchhiked and ended up squeezed into a crowded minibus.

I sat on a small step between the seats. On my right, an older woman was praying and quietly doing small rituals in her seat. On my left, a little girl was staring at me.

Not in a shy way.

More like she was studying me.

I had my hand resting on the seat in front of her because the road was so bumpy, and she placed her hand next to mine to compare our fingers. Then she moved her little hand closer and closer until her little finger touched mine.

I looked at her and smiled.

She smiled back and spent the rest of the drive gently petting my finger.

The older boy sitting next to her hid his face under his cap when our eyes met, and I couldn't help but laugh at the whole situation.

A few days later, we decided to go on a three-day trek in the mountains near Karakol.

The day before leaving, we overheard a tourist in the café telling our host that they were driving to Karakol the next morning. I quickly thought maybe we could ask for a ride.

The next morning at 10am, we were picked up by them, a young couple from Slovenia.

On the drive, my boyfriend and the man compared salaries, house prices and the cost of living in our different countries. After a while, I was happy to discover that his wife was also a teacher, so I tried to change the conversation and ask her about that instead.

It was another small reminder of how travelling connects you with unexpected people.

The same thing happened while walking through Karakol. A man stopped us to ask where we were from.

"Dania," I replied.

Without missing a beat, he launched into an impressively detailed explanation of Danish dairy farming and exactly how much milk Danish cows produce. I honestly think he knew more about Danish cows and farms than I did.

It's these wonderfully random conversations that somehow become some of the strongest memories.

The trek itself was incredible.

We were incredibly lucky with the weather. After days of clouds and rain earlier in the month, we somehow managed to avoid the storms. The only exception was just before reaching Ala-Kul Lake and found ourselves trapped between thunder behind us and thunder ahead of us.

But then, almost as quickly as it arrived, the weather changed.

The clouds disappeared.

Blue sky appeared.

And for the rest of the three days, we had perfect weather.

The first night, we slept in a tent right next to Ala-Kul Lake.

In the morning, I opened my eyes to one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen. The mountains reflected perfectly in the still water, creating a mirror image that almost didn't look real.

But there is another side that people don't always see.

Because while all of this was happening, I was also getting tired.

Very tired.

Living in the same place where you work means the boundaries between work and free time become blurry very quickly.

At first, it felt easy. But after the second week, we noticed the difference.

There was no real moment when the workday ended.

Suddenly, we were sweeping floors at 8:30 in the morning and doing dishes at 10pm.

Without a lock on our door, the children would sometimes just open it to ask us to come outside.

It wasn't because anyone was trying to take advantage of us. Our host was kind and grateful, and we understood that she was building something new.

But without privacy and without proper rest, you get tired quickly.

Some days looked something like this:

• Open the café.

• Stack wood.

• Go for a swim in Issyk-Kul.

• Iron sheets.

• Do dishes.

• Teach English from 10pm until midnight.

• Go to bed.

• Wake up and do it all again.

It wasn't a holiday.

It was simply my life, just with a much better view.

Sometimes I found myself thinking about friends spending their summer holidays on beaches in Spain. While they were taking a break from work, I was cleaning dishes in a café in Kyrgyzstan, hiking 60 kilometres through the mountains, spending hours on bumpy roads getting from one place to another, and opening my laptop at ten o'clock most nights to teach English until midnight.

And yet, if someone asked whether I'd swap places with them, the answer would still be no.

Because this is what I'd dreamed of.

I think we sometimes imagine that living your dream should feel effortless.

Kyrgyzstan reminded me that it doesn't.

When I am going to think back on Kyrgyzstan, I'll remember the snowy mountains outside the café windows. Swimming in Issyk-Kul after work. Sleeping beside Ala-Kul Lake. A little girl quietly reaching out to touch my finger on a crowded minibus.

I'll also remember how tired I was.

Those memories don't compete with each other.

When you travel like this…

They belong together.

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I immediately recognized something familiar.

I’ve been doing the same thing for eight or maybe ten years.

Small pieces from places I have been. Something small and light enough to carry when travelling light. Something that I can keep forever.

But then I noticed something.

Her collection looked nothing like mine.

Her jewellery was colourful, bold and full of personality. Some pieces immediately told a story. You could look at them and almost guess where they came from. India. Sri Lanka. Indonesia. The Maldives.

Her collection was a celebration of the places she had been.

And I loved it.

But then I thought about my own collection and, for a moment, felt bad.

Suddenly, mine felt boring.

I suddenly wished I was the kind of person who wore the colourful statement pieces. The kind of person who would buy the big necklace, the chunky bangles, the jewellery that takes up space.

But I’m not that person.

I’m Scandinavian. I’m an introvert. My style has always reflected that.

Simple materials. Natural colours. Small silver and gold jewellery.

My outside has always been low noise.

My inside, high volume.

The thing is, my jewellery collection was never meant to look like hers.

I don’t collect things because I want people to immediately know where I have been. I collect them because I want to remember how I felt when I was there.

I think I started doing this before I even realized I was doing it.

In 2016, I spent two months volunteering in Togo. The day I arrived, another volunteer from France arrived with the same flight as me. We lived with the same host family and quickly became inseparable. We spent every day together. Mornings, afternoons, days off. She became part of the rhythm of my life there.

When she left just two days before me, I suddenly had my first day alone in two months.

After saying goodbye, and a lot of tears, I decided to walk to the village. I didn’t have much cash left, but I wanted to sit somewhere, drink one last cold Youki, a local yellow soda and read.

On the way, I passed an artisan selling earrings I had noticed many times during my stay. I had always walked past them because they were more expensive than the other jewellery and souvenirs.

But that day was different.

It was my last day in Togo. I was alone. I was leaving a place I might never return to.

So I thought: why not enjoy myself a little?

I went to the ATM, took out more cash, bought the earrings, then spent the afternoon at a café with my cold Youki, my new earrings, and a book.

Almost ten years later, I don’t just see a pair of wooden earrings with silver details.

I see that afternoon, and the beginning of a version of me who would keep collecting memories like this.

That is what I mean when I say I collect memories, not just things.

A bracelet can just be a bracelet or it can be the afternoon I wandered into a second-hand jewellery store in Tunisia while my friend was looking for something she had seen the day before.

While I waited, I saw a small silver bracelet. It was simple, exactly the kind of thing I usually gravitate towards.

I asked to try it on.

My wrists are so small that I still fit bracelets I received for my baptism as a child. Finding something that fits is almost impossible. They are always too big, always hanging loosely.

The shopkeeper helped me put it on and looked at it.

“It’s like it was made for you,” he said.

Of course I bought it.

Not because it was the most impressive piece of jewellery I had ever seen.

Because somehow, it felt like mine.

The same thing happened with a simple gold ring I bought myself while living in Copenhagen.

I bought it right before my exams in June. A small gift to myself. A reminder to believe in myself during a stressful time.

It was from a small jewellery brand created by an Australian designer who had been inspired by her own travels. I liked that idea, someone turning the places she had been into something she could carry with her.

Years later, when I was planning a solo trip to Sydney, I remembered her. Because she was Australian, I looked up whether her jewellery was sold anywhere in the city. It was. I found a shop carrying her pieces. I bought small earrings with turquoise stones as a memory of that version of myself: the person who had a well-paid job in Beijing that allowed her to fly across the world for a week and swim at Bondi Beach.

Four years later, when I was in New York for five weeks alone after a year of travelling, I visited her flagship store in Williamsburg. I wanted another piece from her collection to mark another chapter.

I chose two small moon earrings.

Because I like the moon. Love it, actually.

And because they remind me of exploring a city alone, of a chapter that was ending, and another one that was about to begin.

Someone else might look at my jewellery and just see small, simple pieces.

They wouldn’t know.

They wouldn’t know that the bracelet is Tunisia.

That the ring is Copenhagen.

That the turquoise earrings are Sydney.

That the moons are New York.

And maybe that is what I love about all the things I collect while travelling.

My art, my ceramics, my jewellery.

They could have come from anywhere. Japan, Argentina, Vietnam, Morocco, London or Paris.

Someone else might not know where they are from. But I do.

I remember every place. Every moment. Every version of myself.

When I arrived in Uzbekistan, I was still thinking about that reel.

Maybe because Uzbekistan is exactly the kind of place where you could find the jewellery I thought I wanted. Beautiful pieces with colour, history, and a very obvious connection to the place they came from.

I saw so many things I loved.

Big necklaces. Colourful stones. Pieces that immediately told a story.

And every time I picked something up, I had the same thought:

“I love this, but I would never wear it.”

For a moment, I thought that meant something was wrong with me. That maybe I was too safe. Too simple. That maybe my taste was boring.

But then I found this bracelet.

A thin silver bracelet with a small blue stone.

It was not the loudest piece in the shop. It would probably not make someone stop and ask where it was from.

It looked like something that could have belonged anywhere. And that was exactly why I loved it.

Because I don’t collect things to show people where I’ve been.

I know the streets I walked through. I know the day I bought it. I know the version of myself who was standing there, choosing it.

The jewellery is quiet. The stories behind it are not.

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We spent a weekend in Rio de Janeiro and it felt like a nice full circle to return to Brazil before leaving South America. We had arrived there on January 1st, and now, five months later, we were leaving the continent again.

It was already autumn, so unfortunately we didn’t get to swim at Ipanema, which had been on the wishlist. But I finally got to see the iconic Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Niterói, something I had dreamt about for years.

It wasn’t my first time in Rio. I had been there when I was 21. So it was also really nice to return as an adult and experience the city again from a different place in life.

After five months in South America, we flew back to Europe.

We had had a flight ticket to Samarkand for a while, and it made sense to do a little, or well, I guess kind of longer, stop in Europe before continuing.

So we spent 10 days in Luxembourg.

It felt surreal to be back in the autumn cave.

The weather in Luxembourg was cloudy, rainy, and 14 degrees. Since I had only stayed in that room during the three months of autumn last year, it truly felt like autumn again. Like I had somehow gone back in time.

My partner went out every night to see a different friend. Besides seeing one friend, I spent most evenings in bed watching Melrose Place.

I’m in a period of my life where all I really want to watch are TV series from the 90s. I guess I am in a nostalgic place emotionally.

I ate a lot of Norwegian and Swedish chocolate as well, and honestly, it was bliss.

After traveling like that for months, evenings like these are necessary.

It was really nice to see my friend and catch up. We are in a similar situation right now. Unemployed. Willfully. Wanting to move abroad, but not knowing yet where or doing what.

We went to a newly opened coffee shop in Luxembourg. She and I used to work together at a coffee shop years ago. The barista working there used to be a customer at the coffee shop where we worked, and now he was the barista and we were the customers.

Funny how life changes.

He talked to my friend and said he had actually already quit his job to be free over the summer. Then he didn’t know what would happen. Maybe he would move. Maybe go back to studying.

He chuckled when he learned she was in a similar situation. He said he knew lots of people who were in this situation right now, but that he actually loved the uncertainty and thought one should just lean into it.

I thought to myself: yes. Right now, I actually love the uncertainty as well.

When we arrived in Luxembourg, all we had was a flight ticket to Samarkand ten days later.

That was it.

No plan. No bookings.

A few days before flying, we booked accommodation for the two weeks we would stay in Uzbekistan. We also booked a flight back to Europe because of the uncertainty with flight prices. Something I don’t love or want to fully lean into.

We booked a flight from Ulaanbaatar to Copenhagen.

So at least I know we will be in Mongolia in August. And in Denmark for a bit.

With all the flights secured for the summer, I flew to Samarkand with €800 on my bank account.

The day of leaving, I honestly didn’t feel very motivated to go.

This is something I’ve noticed in myself for at least ten years. I usually get pre-travel blues.

Which is funny, because I have always had an adventurous side and wanderlust within me. Since childhood, I have wanted to go everywhere.

Alaska. Iran. Papua New Guinea. Xinjiang.

I have planned lots of trips, including lots of solo trips, over the past ten years.

But the day of traveling, sometimes the day before, I always feel like not going at all.

Luckily, this feeling usually disappears somewhere between arriving at the airport and stepping into the next place.

Two days after arriving in Samarkand, we even went to the mountains in Tajikistan.

The adventurous and wanderlust side of me came back at full speed.

We drove to the border, which is only an hour from Samarkand. We walked through border control, met with a local guy and a driver, and drove through the Fann Mountains.

Apparently, Tajikistan is one of the most mountainous countries in the world. After Bhutan, of course.

We saw lakes in different shades of blue. Snow-capped mountains. Families sitting by the lake, eating watermelon and enjoying the day.

Then we walked back across the border again in the evening and returned to Samarkand.

And I remembered why I love going.

Samarkand gave me such a great first impression.

The architecture leaves you in awe. The grand buildings. The blue tiles. All the patterns.

The first thing we did after arriving the first day and getting some sleep was go for a coffee.

We had one saved on Google Maps already and walked straight there.

We asked if we could pay by card. We didn’t have any cash on us yet.

The barista said unfortunately no.

But immediately after, he said it was okay.

He made us coffee anyway and told us we could just come back the following day to pay him.

Such a small thing, but after a long journey, that kind of trust feels enormous.

What a welcome to the country.

Now we are in Bukhara.

It’s beautiful. The city is a bit smaller and calmer. It is easier to walk everywhere, which is really nice.

But it’s so hot.

39 degrees.

So we are taking it slow.

Our last stop is Tashkent. I think it will be interesting to see a modern city here as well, besides the traditional cities from the Silk Road.

It is a really interesting country.

The mix of Persian and Soviet cultures. The old and the new existing together.

I’ve never been anywhere like it.

After Tashkent, I don’t know.

The plan is to go to Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia. But I don’t know where exactly yet.

We are still trying to find volunteer work, so we will see.

Like I mentioned.

Right now, I have just €800 on my bank account.

But I am here.

In Uzbekistan.

A place I’ve wanted to visit since before Covid when I was living in nearby China.

The next six weeks are still unplanned.

But I made it here. And that’s what I am leaning into.

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At that point I had spent more than a year saving up to be able to do exactly that. I had moved to Luxembourg for love a year and a half earlier after one and a half years of solo travel. Back then I still had a lot of energy for that kind of life. The plan had always been temporary. My boyfriend and I agreed I would only move there for a year. Max. Once he had wrapped up things in his life that kept him in Luxembourg we would move away together.

One year became two.

When I first moved there, money was tight enough that I immediately knew I had to work again. But I also imagined a near future where I would save maybe €7000, quit, volunteer somewhere, teach online, and continue traveling.

Instead, time passed.

A lot of time.

And slowly I stopped feeling like the same person who had arrived there from solo traveling with a backpack and endless energy for uncertainty.

In the end, I saved double of my original goal.

I really tried to make the most of Luxembourg. We built good routines there. Friday vinyl nights, monthly cinema visits, weekend brunches. I found my favorite coffee shop, favorite wine bar, favorite walk, favorite gallery, favorite bookshop. We took weekend trips to nearby European cities and bigger trips to Lapland, Nepal, Georgia, and Canada.

I loved the life we had together.

But after spending most of my adult life in Copenhagen, Paris, London, and Beijing, Luxembourg felt incredibly small to me. Not just physically. Mentally. Socially. Most people seemed interested in the same things: salary, career, cars, real estate. I had never felt more uninspired by my surroundings in my adult life.

I loved our routines and our relationship there. But I hated our location.

So last June after I quit my job I returned to Scandinavia for the summer.

June is my favorite month in Denmark because the darkness never fully arrives. There are zero hours of total darkness and only a few hours of twilight before the sky slowly starts brightening again.

For two months I cycled between Danish towns, swam in the sea, hiked in Norway, jumped into freezing fjords before running into saunas, barbecued with friends, drank wine outside late into bright evenings, drank coffee with my grandpa, ate ice cream with my cousin, helped my mom declutter her house.

My boyfriend visited where I grew up for the first time.

One of the only close friends I had made in Luxembourg came to visit me too.

That summer felt very light. Like I had endless energy for whatever was coming next.

At the end of it, I took the bus back to Luxembourg and we flew to Vancouver together to do a roadtrip through Canada. It was my first time there and one of the best trips I have ever been on.

As soon as we got back, we had to pack down his apartment. One of the major things that had kept us from moving on together had finally happened: he had sold it.

Within the first week of being back in Luxembourg, we packed, cleaned, and moved out.

Then we moved into his old teenage room at his parents’ house.

We knew we would stay there throughout autumn before finally leaving Luxembourg together, so we emptied the room, cleaned it, and moved in the few pieces of furniture we had kept from the apartment. Luckily the room was fairly spacious, with large windows and a green view.

We made it as homey as we could and started referring to it as our autumn cave.

At the beginning of autumn, I started looking into working holiday visas for us.

That day quickly went nowhere.

I could get the visa for Australia. He couldn’t.

He could get the visa for Chile. I couldn’t.

Neither of us could get New Zealand.

I sat comparing lists of countries for hours until I realized there was not a single overlap between the countries we were both eligible for.

This is one of the struggles of being in a relationship with two different nationalities.

For about a week the future planning stood still.

Then I started making lists.

I am a planner and a list person to my core. So I wrote lists of countries I wanted to visit, countries I wanted to revisit, skills I wanted to learn, places I would like to live, jobs I could imagine doing.

I met my friend for wine to brainstorm ideas. She was planning on quitting her job too.

Then slowly I started feeling like myself again.

We established nice routines in the autumn cave. We re-watched Stranger Things before the final season would come out, went for evening swims twice a week, made weekend brunches. Revisited the bordering countries one last time.

One crisp autumn afternoon my boyfriend and I sat outside with Guinness and talked through ideas again.

We talked about what we wanted to do: work with coffee and work with wine. We talked about the places we most wanted to visit. I had a long list of countries I had never been to, but then I remembered Bariloche in Argentinian Patagonia.

We had spent a few days there together in early 2023 and ever since we had talked about returning properly. Renting a car. Staying much longer.

Then suddenly it felt obvious.

We had to go back to South America.

Coffee in Brazil. Wine in Chile. Returning to Bariloche. Revisiting Peru properly this time.

While my boyfriend still went to work every day before eventually quitting himself, I slowly started making things happen.

I created a couples account on Workaway and started reaching out to people. I created a tutor account on Preply and quickly got five students.

I had wanted to start a Substack since the summer, but somehow never found the time. So during those autumn months, while my boyfriend was still at work and I had whole days to myself, I finally started writing essays.

I also went to Tunisia with my friend after she had finally quit her job too.

Eventually we decided on a departure date.

December 31st.

I suggested we leave then so we would arrive in South America on January 1st: my birthday. A new year and a new beginning.

Before leaving, I returned to Scandinavia to celebrate Christmas with my family for the first time in eight years.

Now it has been one year since I stopped working.

Our time in South America has come to an end.

We agreed to continue traveling, volunteering, and teaching online until I run out of money. My boyfriend has larger savings than me because he worked until the end of December while I stopped in May last year.

Right now I have around €2500 left.

Oddly, spending money felt much harder in the beginning than it does now. Maybe because I had spent so long in saving mode. Saving, saving, saving for this exact future. Then suddenly all I was doing was spending.

For years, the goal had been to build the freedom. Nobody talks much about what happens once you actually have to start using it.

Now I know better how to make money last.

Wearing the same clothes. Prioritizing. Volunteering for accommodation. Teaching online. Moving slower. Wanting less.

I still teach four students every week.

We are going to Central Asia for the summer.

Knowing Central Asia will be much cheaper than South America helps too.

We already booked flights to Uzbekistan. Before that we will spend one final week and a half in the autumn cave before leaving again, this time for countries I have never visited before.

The adventure isn’t quite over yet.

It feels okay to be at this stage one year later.

I don’t have the same energy I had a year ago, but it hasn’t worn off completely yet.

In 2023, after one and a half years of solo travel, I moved to Luxembourg and got a job.

Three years later, after another year spent traveling, volunteering, and teaching online, I find myself approaching a similar transition.

Only this time, I have no idea where.

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It was supposed to be the beginning of a five-month solo trip through South America.

An old colleague of mine, who was originally from Peru but had lived in Malmö since childhood, happened to be living in Lima for a year when I was planning the trip. South America felt enormous and far away to me then, and knowing someone there made the beginning feel slightly less abstract. So I rearranged my route and decided to start in Peru.

Lima first, then Cusco, then Machu Picchu. After that, who knew.

When I arrived at the airport in Lima, exhausted after the long flight, I noticed a woman standing alone near the arrivals area. I can’t really explain why, but I immediately felt certain she was going to the same hostel as me. I hadn’t spoken to her yet. I didn’t know where she was from or anything about her. I just knew.

I walked around looking for my transfer driver while occasionally glancing back at her. Then the driver approached her first.

I asked which hostel she was going to.

The same one.

We sat together in the shuttle through the dark streets of Lima and talked a little. She was German. It was late, and we were both tired and planning to go straight to bed after arriving. Before going to our rooms, we agreed to meet for breakfast the next morning and maybe explore the city together.

At that point, neither of us could have known that five days later we would become each other’s closest person in the world.

The first days in Lima were calm. Warm air, traffic, ceviche, street art, pisco sours. The strange excitement of having just arrived somewhere entirely new with months of uncertainty ahead of you.

I met with my old colleague for pisco sours the night before our planned bus ride to Cusco.

We said goodbye at the bus stop: “See you tomorrow.”

But tomorrow never really arrived.

Back at the hostel, the German woman and I were lying in our dorm room scrolling through our phones when the email came in.

Our bus to Cusco had been cancelled.

We tried booking another one.

Cancelled.

Then another.

Cancelled again.

Within hours, everything started unraveling. Peru’s president had been removed from office, protests were spreading across the country, roads were being blocked, airports taken over. Suddenly every conversation in the hostel turned into speculation and half-understood updates from the news.

At first it still felt temporary, like an inconvenience that would sort itself out by morning.

Then it became obvious very quickly that we needed to leave.

Not eventually. Immediately.

It was a strange realization less than a week into what was supposed to be a long solo adventure.

Peru had been the beginning of the trip in my imagination for so long, and suddenly the country was turning into an escape route instead.

The German woman and I booked flights south to Puno near the Bolivian border. We barely knew each other at that point, but already it felt natural to stay together. Maybe because uncertainty makes people attach quickly. Maybe because when everything around you becomes unstable, the first familiar face starts to feel important very fast.

Within a few hours, we had gone from sea level in Lima to nearly 4,000 meters above sea level.

The altitude hit us immediately.

Headaches. Nausea. Exhaustion.

Puno itself felt tense and suspended in uncertainty. Travelers stranded everywhere. Locals discussing blocked roads. Constant rumors about what was open, what was dangerous, what might happen next.

Since the roads to Bolivia were blocked too, local boat operators started arranging crossings across Lake Titicaca to help foreigners leave Peru.

So that is how I first crossed the highest navigable lake in the world: exhausted, anxious, altitude sick, wrapped in layers against the cold, silently sailing toward Bolivia with a group of strangers while political unrest unfolded behind us.

It was not the arrival to Peru I had imagined.

And yet, some of my strongest memories from that entire five-month journey came from those strange weeks that followed.

The German woman and I decided to continue through Bolivia together.

For two weeks, we became part of each other’s daily lives with an intensity that probably only happens while traveling. We got sick together. Took overnight buses together. Shared tiny hostel rooms. Went into the Bolivian desert together. Spent Christmas together. We talked about everything: relationships, family, fears, old heartbreaks, futures we weren’t sure about yet.

There is something very strange about the intimacy of travel sometimes.

How someone can enter your life almost accidentally and suddenly become your closest companion within days.

And then leave again just as quickly.

When we eventually said goodbye and continued our trips separately, we both cried.

I remember thinking afterwards how bizarre it was that a person I had not even spoken to at the airport a few weeks earlier had become one of the central people in my memories of South America.

Now I am back in Peru again.

This time, it is the final stop instead of the first.

I am not alone anymore either. I arrived with my partner after five months of traveling through South America together. The pace feels different now. Slower. Less uncertain somehow.

And returning here has made me realize that the first time I came to Peru, I never really got to arrive.

My memories of the country became tangled up with emergency, escape plans, blocked roads and abrupt departures. Peru existed in my mind more as a state of instability than as a real place.

This time, I have spent slow days drinking coffee in Arequipa, wandering through markets in Cusco, eating good food, and hiking to Lake Humantay beneath the mountains. And I still have two more weeks left here.

A proper arrival.

And maybe that is part of what travel changes over time.

When you are younger, movement often feels dramatic. Intense. Defined by constant motion and unexpected turns. But eventually, you start understanding that arriving somewhere is not always about the big moments.

Sometimes it is simply about staying long enough for a place to stop feeling like a backdrop and start feeling real.

The first time I came to Peru, I was trying to get out.

This time, I finally arrived.

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It had been a long time coming.

After years of studying, everything in me was restless. I wanted to go. Far away.

I was supposed to leave earlier, but a difficult exam and the death of my father delayed everything.

It wasn’t until the night before I left that it really hit me.

What am I doing?

The thought didn’t stay long though.

By the time I arrived, it was dark. I got into a car with two strangers and another girl who had just landed. We drove for hours through a country I had never been to, toward a place I couldn’t picture.

I was going for a couple of months. To teach French.

After that, I would move again. To another country. Another continent.

I didn’t know what would come after that.

But I knew I wasn’t going back home.

About half a year later, living in Beijing, I started thinking about what might come next. New York had always been in the back of my mind. I had wanted to do a photography course for years and had already looked up different ones there. Then I met someone. Two months later, he asked me to move to London with him. There was a school there too, he said. Central Saint Martins. I could do the same thing, just somewhere else. I said yes. It wasn’t a careful decision. It didn’t fit into any long-term plan. I remember talking to a co-worker on the bus one afternoon after having booked two courses at Central Saint Martins. He was normally a quiet guy. But he said something to me that has stayed with me: “You can’t plan everything. At some point, you have to just go with the flow.” That was the first time I really did.

In my early twenties, I listened a lot to the indie band Cults. Go Outside was my favorite song for years.

That was exactly how I felt those years of studying. I wanted to go outside. Outside into the world.

I wasn’t unhappy in Copenhagen. I had a room in a shared apartment, a job, friends spread across the city and the rest of Denmark. My life was stable enough and I genuinely loved living in Copenhagen.

But for years, all I could think about was leaving. Not leaving out of misery. Leaving out of hunger.

I didn’t want to escape my life. I wanted to enlarge it.

I had no long-term plan, but I was completely certain about one thing: I wasn’t going back.

The countries were maybe going to be temporary. The leaving wasn’t.

None of those later departures felt as enormous as the first one.

Leaving Denmark meant leaving the only place where everything was automatic.

The language. The humor. The systems. The invisible understanding that comes from growing up somewhere.

It wasn’t difficult, but it was definitely the biggest step.

After the first move, I learned that I could build a life somewhere else.

I could make friends. Fall in love. Learn new routines. Become part of a place.

And because of that, leaving became easier too.

Leaving a temporary life is easier than leaving the original one.

Because I have always been comfortable alone, I never felt pressure to recreate an entire life immediately after moving somewhere new.

I didn’t need a large friend group to feel grounded. One or two close friendships were enough.

And over time, I noticed that I changed slightly too.

I realized that personality is not entirely fixed. It shifts slightly with language.

I think I became more outgoing in English than I ever was in Danish.

I don’t think I moved abroad to “find myself” in the way people often talk about travel. I never felt particularly lost before I left. If anything, I was already quite comfortable with who I was. What changed over the years was not my identity so much as my relationship to possibility. I kept expanding the number of places, cultures and lives in which I could imagine myself existing comfortably. I think part of that came from how I grew up. My mother had moved abroad herself when she was nineteen, though she eventually returned to Denmark after a few years. She never married, and I grew up as an only child with a mother who had a full life outside motherhood: friends, work, concerts, travel. So even though we were close, I never felt that leaving meant abandoning someone whose entire world revolved around family. Because of that, I never instinctively imagined my future revolving around marriage, children and staying in one place.

The hardest part of living abroad came when my grandmother died while I was in Beijing. I said goodbye to her over the phone. By then she was already mostly gone. I couldn’t attend the funeral either. But I also know that after I moved to Copenhagen, I made a point of spending real time with her whenever I came back. We spoke on the phone every Sunday for years. I still slept at her house well into my twenties because we genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. So even though I hated that goodbye, I never felt that I had neglected our relationship.

Some friendships faded over the years, but I’m not sure that wouldn’t have happened if I had stayed in Copenhagen. Your twenties and thirties scatter people in different directions regardless. I’m not pretending distance is painless. But I’m also resisting the exaggerated narrative that moving abroad automatically destroys intimacy or connection. Whenever I do go home to visit family and friends, it always means sleepovers. Just like when we were teenagers. I’m not sure how common that is for other 30-something-year olds who see their friends regularly.

During Covid, and because I was living in China at the time, I didn’t see friends and family between 2018/2019 and 2022. That was a long time, of course. Hard in its own way. But not devastating in the way people often imagine. I coped. We stayed close through calls and messages, and I always knew we would eventually see each other again.

I’ve always found comfort in having things to look forward to. Sometimes looking forward to something feels just as good as when the moment finally arrives.

It has also been exhausting at times to move from country to country so often.

Besides staying in the same apartment in Beijing for 4.5 years, I also once moved five times within a single year. During a longer travel period, I counted that I had slept in over 100 different beds within 1.5 years.

And yet, the gains have been enormous.

Over the years, I taught monks in a small mountain village in India and wealthy teenagers at a private school in Beijing. I planted coffee in Brazil, made wine in Chile, volunteered at schools in Patagonia and Togo. I moved countries for love twice. I once fled political unrest across Lake Titicaca.

Somewhere along the way, unfamiliarity stopped feeling frightening and started feeling normal.

Repeatedly starting over changed me. It made me adaptable, resilient and less afraid of uncertainty. I learned that I could arrive somewhere completely unfamiliar and slowly build a life there. Find work. Make friends. Create routines. Feel at home again.

More than anything, living this way expanded my sense of what a life could look like. After enough moves, enough countries and enough reinventions, the world stopped feeling like a collection of distant places and started feeling accessible. Navigable. Open.

It has been exhausting, destabilizing, expansive, lonely and freeing. But through all of it, I have felt deeply alive.

There are practical costs to living this way too. Constant paperwork. New addresses. New phone numbers. New bank accounts. Learning entirely new systems over and over again. I have had bank accounts in five different countries. Sometimes the administrative exhaustion alone has made me wish a real adult would step in and handle everything for me.

I’m thirty-five now.

I do not own much. I do not have a prestigious career, a house, or a carefully built retirement fund waiting for me somewhere.

But I have never felt that I wasted my youth.

If anything, I have felt the opposite.

I have never felt that I postponed my life.

I went. I saw the places I wanted to see. I lived in the world instead of only imagining it from somewhere else.

For me, that has always felt deeply worthwhile.

And whatever comes next, I do not feel haunted by the life I didn’t live. Because I already did.

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I’ve wanted to visit this place for years.

Three years ago, I was on the Bolivian side of Volcán Licancabur, looking across at the same mountain I now wake up to each morning in San Pedro de Atacama. Back then, I was close. This time, I made it.

Last year, while I was still in Luxembourg trying to figure out what to do with my savings and the freedom that unemployment can bring, I called a few long-distance friends to ask if they wanted to meet somewhere in the world.

One friend had just bought an apartment on her own in Copenhagen. She couldn’t afford to travel, at least not for now. Buying a place had been a dream of hers for years. Like every major city, Copenhagen is not easy to break into, especially alone. She was proud, relieved, and happy to have made it happen.

But she was restless too.

Restless from routine. Restless from years of work. Restless from staying in the same city for years. She told me about the places she still wanted to go, the things she still wanted to do, the trips we should take someday.

And it got me thinking.

Over the years, I’ve had many dreams I never followed through on. I still carry plenty that may never happen. Places I may never see. Ideas I may never build. Lives I may never live.

But that isn’t the point, is it?

The point is to keep dreaming.

To have hundreds of things you want to do. To feel pulled toward something. To stay curious about what else life might hold.

Some are big and visible: places to visit, languages to learn, qualifications to earn.

Others are less visible, but no less meaningful.

I’d love to have a dog one day, maybe two. A life rooted enough to care for them properly.

I’d love to learn ceramics after years of collecting pieces made by other people’s hands.

I’d love to complete a CELTA diploma and keep growing as a teacher.

I’d love to know more about herbs, remedies, and all the slightly witchy hobbies that make life feel older and richer than modern routines allow.

I’d love to become someone who cooks effortlessly and beautifully.

None of these dreams are urgent. None of them need to happen this year.

But they matter because they remind me that life is still unfinished.

Dreams are valuable not because all of them happen, but because they keep us moving, curious, and open to life.

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I’m backpacking, but also carrying a big and kind of heavy Acer laptop with me - which has turned out to be a really great decision for more than one reason but I’ll get back to that.

I’ve been traveling, volunteering and teaching online.

In January we planted coffee seedlings on an agroforestry farm in Serra Negra. In February we volunteered at an international school in Bariloche.

Actually, the biggest part of that job ended up being taking care of our host’s kitten while they went away on holiday.

We had a cabin to ourselves. WiFi, so that I could do my lessons. A grocery shop an eight-minute walk away where we bought the best snacks Argentina has to offer: dulce de leche, alfajores and my favourite beer, Quilmes. A big TV with Netflix. Private access to Lake Gutiérrez where we could swim and kayak.

And the cutest white kitten who woke me up every morning at 7, its little nose and whiskers tickling my cheek.

Now we’re volunteering at a winery in the Colchagua valley in Chile. We’ve been here a couple of weeks. It’s been quite different from Bariloche.

The house is beautiful. Simple. Slightly empty. Beautiful.

There’s no WiFi, so I can’t do my lessons. The nearest shop is a 45-minute walk away. Most of the time, we just stay here. There’s not much to do.

We’re in the middle of nowhere.

Our host has six dogs who are all very cute, but the only thing that tickles my cheek now are the wings of bees swarming around us when we harvest grapes.

Before arriving here we stopped in Melipeuco and did two hikes. One in Conguillío National Park and one up Sollipulli. Both beautiful.

My phone stopped working right as we entered the park.

You know that stage where you can’t even be bothered to stress about it.

I didn’t want it to ruin a hike I’d wanted to do for years. So I just accepted it. I guess I can live without a phone for a while.

It’s been three weeks now.

I still think I can.

It’s frustrating, but this is where the laptop comes in handy again. I used to rely on it for everything anyway. I remember when I lived in Copenhagen, I couldn’t use my phone for much and I used my laptop for everything.

My boyfriend gave me his old Samsung. The battery barely lasts, the screen is cracked, and I still don’t really know how to use it. I’ve downloaded a couple of apps just so I’m not completely disconnected.

Around the same time my phone broke, most of my clothes did too. My shoes. My shorts. My bag.

It’s been a lot.

When you’re unemployed, backpacking, volunteering and making maybe 50 dollars a week, things like a new phone or new shoes just aren’t in the budget.

But that part has mostly been okay.

Not having a camera, my notes, my lists… that’s been the hardest.

How ironic that I lost access to those notes just after writing about how important they are to me.

I sat down to write a few moments from the winery so I don’t forget them.

The day after we arrived there was a wine festival in the nearest town. We went to taste wines from local wineries. It was big and crowded, kind of my nightmare as an introvert, but we had come for the wine, so we stayed for a while and then left.

When we got back it was completely dark. We’re in the middle of nowhere remember. As we walked through the gate and towards the house, a huge shooting star lit up the sky right above us.

A few days later, after a full day of rain, the clouds went from grey to pink at sunset and a rainbow appeared above the vines.

From the veranda we can see vines to the right, vines to the left, and vines straight ahead. Behind them, mountains. And sometimes, if it’s clear, the snowy Andes behind those.

Every sunrise and sunset feels like a painting, fading blue and pink blending into each other.

A few days around the full moon, it rose before sunset and was still there when we woke up at 6 to harvest.

On those mornings, we hear a truck driving past selling bread, playing the same song on repeat: el panadero con el pan, el panadero con el pan.

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I can’t remember when it started. As a teenager, I made the typical “things I want to do before I die” list. When I moved to Copenhagen for university, I made a list of things I wanted to do before and after graduating. While living in France, I kept notes on things I noticed about French culture. Working at Copenhagen Airport, I made a list of how to say hello, thank you, and have a nice trip in more than twenty languages I learned from passengers. When I left London, I wrote down my favorite memories from that year. By the time I lived in Beijing, I had five notebooks and dozens of notes on my phone filled with lists.

I have over a hundred notes on my phone right now. Not all of them are lists, but many are.

Lists of:
things to do next time I’m back in Scandinavia for summer
Éric Rohmer films I’ve watched and the ones I still need to see
a bucket list - and a reversed bucket list
roommates I’ve lived with over the past fifteen years
foreign films I’ve watched and the countries they’re from
places I’ve visited and places I want to visit in the next few years
things I look for in second-hand shops
the MBTI results of people in my life
films I watched at the old cinematheque in Luxembourg
women I’ve been told I look like

People laugh because I often say, “I made a list of…” My mom laughs. My friends shake their heads. I don’t feel ashamed. I love my lists.

I don’t make lists because I’m quirky. And not only because I like being organized.

I make lists because I move.

I’ve built a life across countries and chapters. When you move often, there aren’t always physical anchors. No home of my own. Not one long-term address. Not a place to store all my things.

So I build archives instead.

This isn’t only about organization. It’s about preservation. I don’t just want to remember what. I want to remember when. I don’t want my life to blur into “sometime in my twenties.” I want coordinates. Timestamps.

The most important lists I copy into a physical notebook. I want to keep those forever. It’s intentional, a backup in case I lose my phone. A small insurance policy against disappearance.

I don’t just list. I curate.

And I genuinely enjoy it. Sitting down to write out what I’ve read, what I’ve watched, where I’ve been, what I want next. It feels grounding. Like craftsmanship.

I love rereading old lists. I always rediscover something I had forgotten: a book, a phase, a version of myself. It feels like meeting a past self who took the time to leave breadcrumbs.

Maybe that’s what my lists really are.

Breadcrumbs.
Not because I’m lost.
But because I care about the path.

Lately I’ve been thinking about attics, living in one house long enough for things to accumulate. Boxes of old notebooks. Clothes you forgot you owned. Years layered in one place.

A few weeks ago I watched Father of the Bride, and in one scene Steve Martin climbs into the attic to find an old suit. He’s sifting through stored history. One house. One timeline. And I felt a bit wistful.

I don’t have that yet.

So I built an alternative.

A portable attic.

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I had only a few nights booked. March was open.

I knew I wanted to go back to South America, so traveling through Central America felt like a good plan for the month. I spent four days there doing nothing but planning what would come next.

These are some of the travel notes I wrote back then. I thought they might be worth sharing.

Chetumal, Mexico

You know those random quick moments that make your day? Was sitting alone in a coffee shop planning my life when 'get free' by Major Lazer starts playing through the speakers (this was a favourite at uni back in 2015 and it really took me back to all the hopes and dreams I had back then for the years to come after graduating). Then a man walks by my table and almost screams when he sees my tote bag "OMG I LOVE IT" he says and shows me the tattoo on his leg that says the exact same thing. Good things are coming.

Flores, Guatemala

I've arrived in Flores. In Guatemala. I found a bar called L'idiot and ordered fajitas and a beer. To celebrate that I've arrived in my 70th country. Maybe I am an idiot? For taking yet another gap year. This time being in my 30s. Spending literally all of my savings on adventures and fun and with no real plan for when I run out of money. For sure certain people think I am, but to be fair I probably also think those certain people are idiots for their life choices. The other day I heard something that really resonated with me and I wrote it down 'I don't want to trade my youth for future security'. This is absolutely how I feel. I mean, we have to work until we are 70, don't we?

Parque Nacional Pico Bonito, Honduras

Had 24 hours to kill in La Ceiba (which I thought was kind of a pisshole) so when the guy at the hostel said they had a hiking tour for just 15 bucks the next day I signed up! We arrived at the jungle around 8:30 in the morning and were immediately told to remove our hiking boots and clothes as we were gonna have to cross the actual river and make sure to walk like crabs because of the strong streams. Hahahaha wow okay it's this kind of hike. Saw a gekko, snake, huge spiders and transparent butterflies. Swam under a waterfall. Ate termites.. and finished off with a swim in the river before crossing it again.

Granada, Nicaragua

Had an early bus to catch this morning and as I left my hostel the dog sleeping in front of the gate decided to walk me all the way to the bus terminal just trotting behind me.

Reading this back three years later, I notice something. I remember the volcano erupting in Guatemala. I don’t remember the money worries. I remember the jungle hike in Honduras. I don’t remember the doubt about being an idiot.

My savings are smaller now. The worries have started to creep in again.
But in the last months I’ve lived on a coffee farm in Brazil. I’ve watched parrots and toucans fly past while working in the fields. I’ve spent a month in Patagonia, walking past mountains and a lake on my way to help at a new school.

Those are the things that stick with me.

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The first time I was here was in 2012. I was 21 and skipped my last university exam to fly alone from London to Buenos Aires to meet my then Argentinian boyfriend. It was the longest flight I had ever taken. I got terribly air sick for most of the twelve hours. I’ve always struggled with motion sickness. As a child I sailed back and forth between the north of Denmark and the south of Norway and got sea sick every single time.

It was winter when I arrived, but it was my summer holiday. He was studying in Mar del Plata. I didn’t see much of the country because I had come for him. Still, I have fond memories of those months: longboarding along the coast, smoking porros, waking up every morning to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, drinking mate, watching old films on a laptop, and eating dulce de leche straight from the jar while being on YouTube during his afternoon classes.

The following year he moved to Copenhagen with me. We broke up before we ever made it back to Argentina together.

I didn’t return until 2022, the same year I left Beijing. I had been dreaming for years about traveling solo through South America. That time I crossed the border from Bolivia on foot. I saw Jujuy in the north, Perito Moreno in the south, and a great deal in between. I fell in love with Patagonia, especially Bariloche, and have wanted to return ever since.

Now I’m here again, staying for a month.

Bariloche reminds me of Norway. Pine trees, mountains, and lakes. The air feels Scandinavian, mild in the sun, cool in the shade, and cold at night. Today it’s raining and the temperature has dropped below ten degrees. It feels like a summer at home.

I often think about being 21. It was in many ways an amazing age. You really felt that the world was at your feet. But I don’t miss being 21. Maybe only the naivety of it.

Back then, dreams were limitless. You could imagine living anywhere, becoming anything, doing everything. Building a house with an empty swimming pool where your children could skate in winter. You didn’t yet understand what certain dreams would cost. Heartbreak hadn’t yet changed you. Disappointment hadn’t stayed long. Everything felt achievable because life had not yet given you a reason to doubt it.

I’m still a dreamer. I suspect I always will be. But my dreams are no longer limitless. They carry experience now. They come with questions about money, timing, compromise, energy, paperwork. They come with the awareness that every choice closes another door.

The other day, hiking Cerro Llao Llao with my partner, I felt that naivety again for a brief moment. Somewhere along the trail we started talking about what comes next. When we flew to Brazil earlier this year, we were saying goodbye to our life in Luxembourg. Now we have no home, no address, no job waiting. No real plan for when the money runs out. We only know we won’t go back.

Our life feels like a clean slate. Almost like being 21 again.

On the mountain, it suddenly felt as if anything was possible. We talked about opening a small bed and breakfast in the north of Norway. Five rooms. He’d take guests on guided tours. He speaks five languages. I’d run a small coffee stand during the day. We’d have two dogs. I’d serve coffee in ceramic cups I made myself. Three evenings a week we’d pour wine for visitors wandering in.

For a brief moment, the dream felt limitless. As if life hadn’t yet started asking anything from us.

And then, almost immediately, the practicalities crept in. Would we ever have time off? Would we lose the very freedom we value so much?

The lightness faded.

At 21, I would have believed in the dream without hesitation.

Now I believe in it differently.

But for a brief moment on that mountain, it felt amazing to dream with such naivety again.

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I know a lot of travelers dislike counting countries. It’s seen as the wrong way to travel. Too rushed, not “in depth” enough. Counting, apparently, means you must be jumping from place to place without really being there, just to add another passport stamp to your collection.

I get the criticism. But I like to count. Mostly because I’m a list person and deeply goal-oriented. Writing something down makes it real. It gives me direction. And ticking things off gives me a feeling of success.

A long time ago, I made peace with the fact that I won’t ever have the time or money to experience every place I go in depth. You can’t do it all, I started telling myself. Some places you pass through quickly, a weekend getaway for example. Others might get a personal meaning for you, maybe you stay for months or even years. Both count.

I feel confident in the way I’ve traveled over the past ten years. I’ve lived in several countries. Studied in a few. Worked, volunteered, road-tripped. I’ve made local friends, moved for love - twice, and traveled solo across six continents. I’ve taken endless buses and trains, and I’ve been invited into locals’ homes because they weren’t just foreign strangers, but some of my closest friends.

Paraguay is a short stop for me, I’m just here for a week. A pause between volunteering in Brazil and heading south to Patagonia where another volunteering experience awaits. Paraguay is one of those overlooked countries. I guess because it can’t compete with the incredible nature its neighbors have to offer. I like visiting places like these. While I’m here there’s no feeling of missing out or not having enough time to see it all. Today, it’s Sunday, a lot of places are closed and with what feels like a heatwave for a Scandinavian like me, I’m spending the day very slowly. The only plans I’ve had for today are to go to a coffee shop in the city center and meet with a local ceramicist to see her studio and buy some of her work. I love when traveling can also be like this. It’s not about packing your week with the top ten must-visit places the country has to offer. It’s about spending your days how you like it - just in a new city. For me, coffee and art are essential. Some of the first things I seek out in every country I visit.

I keep the list of countries visited because I have a goal with it. First, the goal was to visit 100 countries before considering having children. Now, I think it has changed a bit more into 100 before changing my way of living. I know that one day this lifestyle has an end, or needs to change at least. I guess twelve years ago when it kind of developed I imagined at this age I would have already settled. For every year I became older, I postponed it though. I always imagined having my own space I could decorate with all my beautiful things I’ve collected over the years. A place where I can have a dog. A place where I have time to carry out my many hobbies. I haven’t had a space to do this yet. In my 35 years, all of my inherited pieces, thrift finds, Japanese ceramics bought in Asia, paintings from New York, and designer lamps from Denmark are stored in closets at my mom’s. I’ve never yet lived in a place with all of my things. I’m really looking forward to that. I’ve always been a collector of beautiful things. Today, I bought Paraguayan ceramics that I’ll carry around uncomfortably for the next many months of backpacking through South America.

Thinking about choosing a forever home still makes me feel claustrophobic. So for now, this goal feels right. A few more countries. Maybe one or two more places to live. Then I’ll let it change. It’s just not time yet.

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An old colleague was living in Lima, so I spent my first days of the trip with him. The night I landed at Lima airport, I met a German solo traveler, we happened to be going to the same hostel. When mass protests broke out across Peru just days later and the country went into a state of emergency, we quickly turned to each other and became close friends. We left Peru together, crossing Lake Titicaca by boat into Bolivia, where we spent two weeks together.

Then I ended December at an old Argentinian school friend’s family farm in Jujuy.

What was meant to be a solo trip began with two months of intense company: old friends, a stranger who became a friend, and a flirt I’d met months earlier - now my partner.

It’s been three years, and I’m back in South America with him. Last week, on a night bus from Serra Negra to Florianópolis, I found an old note on my phone. These are some of the travel notes I wrote back then. I thought they might be worth sharing.

Buenos Aires, January 29th 2023

For the first time on my trip I’ve been alone for days. Since arriving on Dec 8th I’ve been spending all of my days with new and old friends. I mean, I hadn’t even left the airport in Lima before meeting Natalie. I love traveling solo but.. it feels awful lonely going from such intense company to being alone. Again. I’ve laughed, cried, been drunk, high, felt incredibly happy, stressed and really fucking sick, had deep conversations and felt understood on a level I haven’t even by my closest friends. Going from company like this to now missing their company every day and not knowing when we’ll see each other again. It weighs heavy. After the latest goodbye I cried for half an hour walking up and down the street and an Argentinian cambio man asked “todo bien”. I felt like throwing up.

Colonia del Sacramento, February 1st 2023

I was relieved to go to Uruguay. A place with no memories of the people I had spent time with over the past month in Argentina. It somehow felt less lonely being in a new foreign country. Alone.. If that makes sense. My first night in Uruguay I ended up vomiting 8 times. Wow, you’re on your own now. Fairytale is over. The next day I took a bus to Montevideo. It always feels less lonely being in big cities. Everyone’s walking around alone there. I found solace in a few nice coffee shops where other people were sitting by themselves at the tables as well. My last night there I found a feminist bar. Casa bruja. Witch house. It was perfect!

Montevideo, February 2nd 2023

The next morning while sitting on the ground at the bus terminal, two bus drivers asked me where I was from and were very surprised to hear Dinamarca. They then asked what in the mierda I was doing in Uruguay. I overheard another bus driver say something to the one that had sat down next to me. Could it be? I asked, him, “ton nombre”? and I had heard right. His fucking name was Tony. What a coincidence. This is the second time after saying goodbye to my Tony that I meet another Tony while waiting for the bus. Back in November after a week in Luxembourg I had met a Tony from Hong Kong in Düsseldorf while waiting for our bus to Hamburg. This life! They asked another bus driver to take off his sunglasses and pointed at his eyes, then at mine. “Same eyes”, they said. Blue.

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It may sound morbid, but it’s how I let go of fear, and often how I’m able to throw myself into unfamiliar situations.

I’ve been in Brazil for two weeks now, over a week of that spent volunteering on a coffee farm in Serra Negra. Arriving this time felt more exhausting than exciting.

I know traveling can be like this. But because the good parts tend to stay clearer in my memory, I’m always slightly taken aback by how physically and mentally exhausting it can be too.

I’m used to doing this alone. I’ve traveled solo for eight years. This time, for the first time, I’m not. My partner quit his job too, so we could do this together. And strangely, it has helped, not because it made things easier, but because I could see my own exhaustion mirrored back at me.

The transition from saving money to suddenly only spending it is also taking some getting used to. I have to keep reminding myself: this is what the money was for.

Then, one day, the exhaustion is interrupted by small moments I know will stay with me long after leaving this place.

Blue butterflies the size of my hand.

Mangos falling from a tree just outside the kitchen.

Meeting people younger and older than me who also don’t know what comes next.

Walking to a waterfall after a day of work, letting the water cool my skin.

Seeing toucans and red-tailed Amazon parrots flying through the garden.

It’s not excitement exactly. But it’s enough to stop and realize how much I appreciate traveling again.

When you’ve been planning and looking forward to something for so long, I think it’s natural to expect to arrive and feel something decisive: excitement, clarity, gratitude. Instead, I felt flat, sweaty, overstimulated. I keep telling myself it takes time to adapt, to settle in.

Maybe that’s the part no one really talks about: that big life choices, no matter how exciting they sound, don’t immediately feel amazing. Exhaustion and excitement often arrive together.

We’ll probably leave next week. See a bit more of Brazil. Then go to Paraguay. Nothing is booked. Nothing is decided.

And maybe that’s a good thing for me.

I’m realizing that this chapter might not only be about collecting memories, but also about learning how to stay present, even when things feel uncomfortable and undefined.

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I always dread this last week of the year. Too many expectations to live up to.

For years now, I haven’t celebrated Christmas, New Year’s, nor my own birthday. After living five years in Asia, Christmas slowly disappeared from my life anyway. In Beijing, it’s just another cold December day. New Year’s? Overhyped usually. And then there’s my birthday, arriving right as the fireworks explode. Loud, colourful, and usually overshadowing it entirely.

After one particularly bleak birthday in London, I promised myself I’d never stay home for it again. So I didn’t.

I turned 28 in Thailand, 29 in Hong Kong, 30 in Harbin, 31 in Sanya, 32 in Buenos Aires, 33 in Paris, and 34 in Nepal.

In a few hours, I’ll board a flight to Madrid, and tomorrow I’ll turn 35 in São Paulo.

Maybe it looks like I’m running away - from cake, songs and presents. But when your birthday falls on National Hangover Day, there was never going to be much of that anyway. And when you love traveling as much as I do, these trips feel less like an escape and more like a gift I give myself every year.

35 feels different. A more important number. A midpoint.

It feels like saying goodbye to a version of myself - the long stretch of your 20s and early 30s where adulthood still feels optional. From here on, each year feels like a step closer to something more defined, even if I don’t yet know what that is.

For years, I told myself I’d keep living this way until.
That until has been pushed again and again.

I used to think adulthood would make itself obvious. That it would arrive through milestones: stability, a fixed city, maybe motherhood. None of those ever pulled me. I kept waiting to want them, waiting for a feeling that never came.

I’m coming more and more to terms with the fact that I’ll probably never have children. A choice. I don’t want them. I never wanted them. I thought I might wake up one day with the urge so many women talk about. Instead, I felt the opposite. A kind of fear or despair.

I’ve been pregnant before. More than once. I was lucky to live in places where abortion is considered healthcare.

For years I told myself to do it for the stories. Stories I’d one day tell.
But if not to my children.. then to whom?

I guess I’m realizing some doors won’t open for you not because you missed them, but because you never wanted to walk through them in the first place.

Which leaves the question: then what does adulthood look like for me?

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I don’t know. But life keeps surprising me in ways I couldn’t have planned.

At 32, I went to Latin America for half a year, mostly alone. On New Year’s Eve, a man I had only met a few months earlier flew across the world to meet me on my birthday in Buenos Aires. We spent a month in Patagonia together. Now we’re getting ready to share something that looks like half a year in South America.

Maybe this is the adulthood I’m stepping into, the one where I stop pretending I can predict the shape of my life. Especially the shape it’s so often expected to take.

A version where uncertainty isn’t something I need to fix, but the place where all the beauty has entered so far.

Turning 35 doesn’t feel like settling down. It feels like opening a door I didn’t expect.

I don’t know what the rest of my 30s will look like, and honestly, I don’t think I want to. The best things so far have happened in the space I couldn’t predict.

So if there’s anything I’m taking with me into 35, it’s this: I’m done trying to fit into someone else’s idea of a grown woman. I’m building a life that feels like mine, even if it looks nothing like the script.

I say home, but the reality is that this hasn’t been my home for fifteen years.

Still, I don’t know what else I can call it.

Visiting my hometown, visiting family, visiting childhood friends?

It’s always a peculiar feeling returning to the town where I grew up in the 90s and 2000s.

Every time I come back, it feels less like returning home and more like time travel.

The town has grown bigger since I left. The people I grew up with have become adults with careers, children, routines. In comparison, it feels like I didn’t really become an adult. At least not in the traditional sense.

Maybe because I don’t know an adult version of myself in this town.

I became an adult elsewhere; in Copenhagen, in London, and in Beijing. I spent four and a half years in Asia without visiting once. And now, whenever I return, I don’t arrive as a visitor so much as it somehow feels like I step into the teenage version of myself.

I always stay at my mom’s place. I sleep in the same bed, in the same bedroom, in the same house as I did in 2008, when I was seventeen and still in high school.

So when I come back, I’m not just a visitor. I sort of become seventeen again.

I believe the younger versions of ourselves never fully disappear. They stay with us, sharing space with who we’ve become. I’m still the quiet eight-year-old girl. Still the thirteen-year-old dreamer.

Those versions feel closest when I cycle through the streets of my small town.

Every street carries a memory: playing ball in the quiet street outside a friend’s house. Trying on makeup and perfumes in the most exciting shop downtown before school. A house where I spent countless nights sleeping over. A front yard where we had snowball fights after school. Another house where I once sat drunk on the bathroom floor on New Year’s Eve. The route I walked to school every morning, back when school was still close enough to walk to - before I had to take the bus to a bigger city for high school.

Last weekend, a friend I’ve known since kindergarten asked me if I had a good childhood.

I think I did.

Nothing dramatic. I was quiet. I had good friends. I didn’t have wild teenage years. I was a dreamer. I spent a lot of time on my own, immersed in popular culture.

It wasn’t escapism. It was orientation.

Growing up in a small town, movies, music, books, TV series didn’t distract me from my life, they expanded it. Paris was a cartoon before it was a city I ever walked in. New York was a TV show before it became a place I spent five weeks alone in. London was a film set before it became where I lived for a year.

I lived a double life back then: one in my quiet Danish town, and one in the worlds I slipped into after school; sitcom apartments, animated universes, movie scenes where the lives were always more exciting and the possibilities endless.

Fiction didn’t just show me the world. It kept me company. It made my life feel bigger long before it actually became bigger.

Sometimes I miss the innocence of that time - how easy it was to believe anything could happen simply because I hadn’t yet learned what couldn’t. There’s a sweetness in the not knowing, a magic in imagining the future without any sense of limits.

Fiction gave me companionship. Other lives to sit beside. Other futures to imagine.

Before I knew how to leave, I already knew I would.

Maybe that’s why coming back always feels disorienting.

Not because I don’t belong here, but because parts of me still do.

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A big world is an inner landscape. A life that stretches beyond the walls around you. It’s curiosity, openness, a hunger for experience and knowledge.

A small world is a bubble of certainty, where difference becomes an excuse for judgment and new ideas are unwelcome. A small world looks something like this:

You live in the same city you grew up in. Your friend circle is built around one shared circumstance, a job for example, rather than genuine connection. Rigid routines, rigid tastes, rigid opinions. You consume only what feels familiar or what’s currently trending. You judge anyone who lives differently. You think documentaries count as “serious culture” but fiction is a waste of time. You dismiss the arts while clutching your self-help books like sacred texts. You strut through your tiny bubble as if it’s the center of the universe, oblivious to how small your stage really is.

A big world is about depth. It’s lived experience. It’s studying and working in different areas, letting people from different backgrounds shape you. It’s being humble in discussions because you know your opinions aren’t universal truths. Your friends are from different chapters of your life, different countries or cultures, and they challenge and expand your thinking. Your life stretches beyond the familiar, and you embrace curiosity, humility, and growth. Your taste in culture isn’t limited to whatever the algorithm feeds you. You read literature and watch cinema that forces you to think. And importantly: no year in your life looks the same.

Seeing people through this “world-size” lens brought me straight back to the most surreal job I ever had.

Last year I worked in a coffee shop. Before moving to Luxembourg I spent five weeks in New York, meeting up with a friend from when we both lived in London. She’s now a painter. I told her I wanted to take a break from teaching, work in a coffee shop, imagining it would be a low-stakes job where the moment I left my shift, I left work behind. Jokes on me. It became the most bizarre, psychologically draining environment I’ve ever stepped into.

My boss and most of the team lived in incredibly small worlds. The place was a perfect microcosm of small-world thinking: hierarchical, closed, and almost cult-like. One of the first red flags?

“We are a family.”
Said by the boss. Of course.

At first, everything seemed fine. He played the charismatic, warm, “cool boss.” But three months in, things became painfully obvious. I’m wary of diagnosing people at a distance, yet he fit the textbook profile of a covert narcissist. Once the mask cracked, events unfolded as fast as a Japanese high-speed train.

I’ve always had this way of breaking the ice with people. Instead of listing my achievements, I share something a bit vulnerable, a bit self-deprecating, like saying I’m a terrible cook but love to eat, or that I can happily go a week without talking to anyone because I’m introverted to my bones.

It was my way of letting my guard down so others could feel safe to do the same. But in that café, vulnerability was treated as ammunition. Instead of taking it as an invitation to be human, they took it as permission to judge my lifestyle, my traveling and my eating and drinking habits - not to my face, but behind my back. The more boundaries I set, the more I was punished. Meanwhile, the inner circle, the boss and his girlfriend’s favored employees, thrived. Praise the boss, and you got perks. Step back, and you faced cold shoulders and whispered gossip, cementing a rigid hierarchy of loyalty and fear.

His need for admiration was bottomless. He compared himself to others constantly, trying to make them feel inferior to feel superior. Every dig was disguised as a joke; every conversation an opportunity to showcase himself and earn admiration. High-school insecurity dressed up as adulthood.

There was a very clear “who’s cool, who’s not” hierarchy dictated by him. And above all: a strange insistence that employees become his friends. Him and his girlfriend - the other boss, hired people not just for labour but for company. You were expected to hang out in their apartment, attend unpaid after-work events, pet-sit their animals, and fold your entire social life into theirs.

They were competing in a game I had no interest in playing, a game I had already outgrown years ago.

In the hierarchy of their tiny world, “coolness” was currency; in mine, it wasn’t even a relevant metric.

The irony? They treated coolness like a scarce resource to be hoarded and fought over, but I walked in already full. Full of places I’d lived, people I’d known, cities I’d left and returned to, chapters far bigger than what fit inside those four café walls. I wasn’t competing. I had already lived more than they could imagine, and I’d keep living long after I walked away.

Meanwhile, they claimed movies were a waste of time because documentaries were so much more “intellectual.” And then went with some of the team to the cinema to watch… Despicable Me 4.

Their taste in books? Self-help with sentences underlined like “People are just jealous of your success.”

Their taste in music? One of those pre-curated Tulum vibes playlists people use when they don’t actually listen to music.

Their vibe? “Barista with tattoos equals personality.” In reality, it was nothing more than a costume of coolness.

The girlfriend floated through a personality assembled from Pinterest spirituality: yoga, astrology, veganism, Bali-dreaming. All aesthetic, zero inner work. She had her zodiac sign tattooed on her forearm, only to later discover she had the wrong sign. A 30-something woman misidentifying her own zodiac sign while trying to appear to be into astrology…

And the hypocrisy was everywhere.
They preached “sustainability” while receiving weekly packages of fast fashion, yet another pair of yoga leggings, and the trendy Stanley cup. They owned a coffee shop, but she didn’t drink coffee once in the year that I worked there. It was all performance, branding, optics, identity as a curated display, not something lived, understood, or examined.

But the issue wasn’t the yoga, or the veganism, or the astrology. It was the performance of it. Their identities felt assembled from borrowed pieces, tattoos as costume, spirituality as aesthetic, opinions lifted from documentaries and self-help clichés. Everything about them felt curated rather than lived.

What made the whole experience more surreal was the staff who enabled it.

Where I come from, your ally is your equal, and you stand side-by-side against the hierarchy. I would never throw a colleague under the bus. I would always have their back.

There was the flying monkey: the boss’s first employee. She lived entirely in the coffee shop ecosystem. Her entire identity orbited around pleasing him. She was indebted to them through favors outside of work and had to repay that debt in obedience within work. One day she’d confide that she felt burned out and unfairly treated, and the next she’d defend him fiercely. Anything you did “wrong,” according to her standards, she’d inform him. She spent her days off at the café. Her world fit entirely inside those four walls. Her entire sense of identity came from that coffee shop. Mine came from everywhere else.

A friend of her boyfriend was hired next. Then a friend from a previous job. Did they do the same training the rest of us had to go through? Of course not. They got a free pass straight into the inner circle and apartment hangouts at the bosses.

Then there was the Gen Z colleague: the one who slipped between ally and enabler depending on the day. He announced that he “manifested the job,” but honestly, the job manifested him. He arrived perfectly shaped for their needs: impressionable, eager, spiritually fluffy, the ideal mascot for their Pinterest aesthetic. He needed the job to be magical; they needed him to publicly treat it like salvation. A match made in toxic heaven.

We had our first shift together right after I’d quit. He told me the female boss had said I didn’t ‘fit in with the rest.’ If only she knew how sincerely I took that as a compliment.

Thankfully, I wasn’t alone. Two other colleagues, both undeniably “big world” women, saw the same patterns. We each had slightly different but very similar experiences, and the common thread was this: none of us centered that tiny coffee-shop world in our lives. Our worlds were bigger.

You could feel his desperation rise as that became clear, and he began to crack. He snapped and yelled at one of them during a shift - a last, frantic attempt to regain control as things slipped out of his hands once two of us had already quit. It was a moment that revealed just how fragile his authority really was.

So, within the same week last November, all three of us quit. That wasn’t a coincidence. That was clarity. Self-respect. A collective refusal to live small.

Looking back, that coffee shop taught me something important:

Some people live in worlds so small they can’t imagine anything beyond them. And some people live wide, curious, ever-expanding lives.

I know which life is mine and I definitely don’t need to shrink myself to fit inside someone else’s limited world.

I choose the big one.

Ironically, right before I quit, he smugly told me he’d already hit all his goals for the year except one: taking his girlfriend to Asia. Not long after my last day, while they remained trapped in their small coffee-shop world, I was the one boarding the flight to Asia.

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I failed the same exam four or five times. One semester, I failed every subject.

While my classmates did semesters abroad, I missed an exam because I went to Argentina for three months.

I had to ask my university for a sabbatical because I could see that I’d never pass those exams unless I spent a significant time in France - I was studying French language and literature btw.

So I moved to the suburbs of Paris for half a year, in 2014, as a jeune fille au pair.

At the time I felt ashamed to be doing that at the age of 23 while others were studying at universities in foreign countries for a semester or already doing their masters.

Not because it was a wish that came from within me to do either of those things, but because of society’s expectations... and everyone else seeming so happy to follow that script, and with such ease.

It took me four and a half years to get my bachelor degree, but in those four and a half years I traveled to 19 countries, my then Argentinian boyfriend moved continents so we could live together and I moved abroad alone for the first time.

My focus or motivation was never good grades or obtaining an impressive degree. I was young and I did what was expected of me but it was in those four and half years that I found out how I wanted to live my life.

Two months after receiving my degree I moved abroad, not just for a semester, but for life.

As you might have guessed, a career never motivated me either.

A couple of years ago, I talked to a friend about it.

She has a masters degree in law and works at a company in Copenhagen dealing with construction law.

I can hear in her voice that she looks down on the jobs I’ve done: teacher, barista.

She said to me, she needs to feel challenged in her work.

I responded that I really don’t want to feel challenged at work.

I prefer to challenge myself in my personal life.

Living many different lives.

Changing environment.

Doing things alone.

Starting over.

A job is just a job and don’t most of us have one only because we must?

I remember in 2014 when I was in France, I watched a movie starring Juliette Binoche.

Dan in Real Life, it’s called.

Steve Carell who plays Dan falls in love with her character and his daughter is so impressed by her and in a scene where they are walking on the beach the daughter says to him: “She’s amazing. Name a place, she’s either lived there or visited.”

That line has stuck with me ever since.

That’s what motivates me.

That’s how I want people to see me.

Looking back on the last eleven years I can happily tell my 23-year-old self, who had just moved to France, but felt ashamed of the circumstances, that if someone’s daughter met me now, she would see me like Dan’s daughter saw Juliette Binoche’s character in that movie.

I’ve chosen adventure and love.

Followed every dream over any status symbols.

In the process I’ve learnt that things always work out as long as you adapt and make it work.

Make the most of any given situation.

I’ve left almost every job in my life without having a new one secured.

I’ve crashed at family and friends’ places until I was sorted. I’ve eaten cheap supermarket dumplings every day for a month.

Going from job to job and home to home taught me to not be afraid to change direction in life.

It’s quite liberating.

When nothing ties you down.

The feeling that you are always free to leave.

Since France I’ve lived in Togo, Beijing, India, London, Beijing again and Luxembourg.

I’ve volunteered, worked at an international school, volunteered again, worked in an interior design shop, worked in a language school, worked in a high school, worked in a coffee shop and worked in a language school again.

I’ve moved to London for love. Moved to Luxembourg for love.

Traveled solo to 40 countries.

There’s something so exciting about starting over in a new country.

You have to navigate the culture and language as well as the streets of your new city.

Make a routine so that you feel at home.

Find your favorite coffee shop where the baristas will start to recognize you and remember your order.

The bookshop where you will buy your monthly books in English.

The museum or gallery where you will go to find inspiration.

The indie cinema where you will watch all kinds of movies.

The shop where you will buy small things that make your home you and that you can take with you as souvenirs when you move again.

Make new friends. Someone local, or someone like you: another outsider just passing through.

One thing I love about never staying really long in one place is that you never really feel truly integrated - but in a good way. Hear me out.

It almost feels like living a parallel way of life.

You’re an outsider to the serious adult life although you still work and pay bills.

You’re just a visitor. Even when you move your address and open a bank account.

You’re excused from things at first because you’re new to everything, and later because you’ll soon be leaving again.

And because you know your time everywhere is limited you appreciate and enjoy every day of it in a different way, maybe this is my only chance to see snow in this city, maybe this will be my last Autumn so I better go on that hike.

Although you are working and paying bills, everyday things can feel exciting as if you are on holiday.

I love this feeling.

I think most people just experience this in their semester abroad.

I’ve chosen to feel like this year after year into adulthood.

Country after country.

I feel that being curious, traveling, speaking even a little of other languages, connecting with people who look different from you, and learning to live anywhere is far richer and more important than any degree, career, or starting a family could ever be.

None of this is what society expects of me.

Maybe that’s why it feels like an art.

To refuse the script without breaking.

To keep choosing my own way, again and again, and to trust myself while doing it.

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Live a life in solitude, even among friends and while being in relationships.

How do I explain?

My father was a loner. He cut contact with me when I was 10 and besides walking past him once in a Norwegian city about 10 years later, I never saw him again. I never knew him. Until one Sunday evening when I was 25. Two police men knocked on my door, asked to come in. They had to bring me the news that my father had passed away. It was kind of an out-of-body experience. I told them: “He wasn’t really much of a dad, so I don’t know why I’m crying now.”

For a couple of very dazed and confused weeks I got to know my father through sorting out everything that was left behind. I learned that he didn’t really have any people in his life. He read books and watched movies. Loved wine, a little too much. He spent holidays alone in his cabin in the north of Norway, kind of like Bon Iver I imagine, when he wrote his album ‘for Emma forever ago’ - just without the heartbreak. I don’t think he had been in many relationships. Him and my mother broke up before I was born. I also learned that he had died by suicide. That he had rented a room in a hotel, swallowed pills, drank alcohol and died there. I imagine because that way he knew he would be found. That makes me sad man. At the funeral it was only me, my mum, his sister, and her husband. None of us had really been part of his life.

That’s one half set of very lonely genetics.

I grew up as an only child, which means a lot of playing alone as a kid and staying home alone as a teenager.

I always had friends in and outside of school, but I felt different.

I was a very quiet child. Also a quiet teenager.

I never rebelled, just spent a lot of time alone with music and movies.

I often found solitude in movies. Seeing myself in fictional characters.

I felt sort of invisible, I was never bullied or anything like that but... I was also not really included or invited.

Growing up I felt different from my classmates. I felt like an outsider both in personality but also in what I wanted in life. I remember in 7th grade when the other girls talked about marriage and children I said that was not going to happen to me. They all grew up seeing that. I didn’t. It was never the obvious visualization for me. My mum moved to Norway when she was 19, so this was how I was thinking: I will move to Sweden. No, London. No, New York.

I listed things for myself which made me different from the other girls in my class. First of all, I was a year younger. I started school early because I was a very well behaved kindergartner. I was the only one without siblings - an only child with a single mother. I had no pets. I didn’t go on holidays to southern Europe. My last name started with a vowel, all the others with a consonant. I lived in a house with an even number, all the others with an uneven number.

I started noticing all these things and it only enhanced the feeling of being the odd one out. Alone in this.

I was in my first real relationship at age 19. He was from Argentina. We met at a sports school in Denmark where we both lived for half a year. It became a four year long relationship, half of it being in long distance between South America and Scandinavia.

When I was 25 I was in my second serious relationship. An English guy from London. We met in Beijing. Half a year into our relationship he sent me a personality test while I was in India and he was in Japan. INFJ. I’ve never felt more seen or understood reading about the INFJ personality type. We were together for seven years. There was not a lot of long distance in our relationship, we lived together almost since the first month of knowing each other, but we mostly did things separately on our days off and holidays. Something I loved some days but in the end what resulted in us breaking up. Although I enjoy doing things on my own and traveling solo, I guess I do prefer having a partner who wishes to spend the majority of his time with me. Otherwise it just feels lonely.

Here I am at 34, with someone who wishes to spend the majority of his time with me. To the point where I sometimes need to ask for a day alone.

I really do need my alone time.

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There were the months I taught at a school in a village in Togo, 15 km from the Ghanaian border.

The first half year I lived in Beijing.

When I taught at a monastery in a Tibetan colony in northern India at the foot of the Himalayas.

During my solo travels in Asia and Oceania.

When I left China and was back in Europe for the first time in over 4 years.

Traveling solo from the Baltics to the Balkans, Greenland and Latin America... and then when I moved to Luxembourg, for love.

I’ve been told that I’m brave.

I’ve had to defend my choices.

People have often shown surprise that someone like me ended up living abroad for so many years, or that I have traveled solo to 40 countries.

I just always wanted adventures and to live in different countries.

I’m an introverted Scandinavian woman.

I prefer to quietly float through the world unnoticed.

I was always like that.

A quiet daydreamer.

Very quiet.

I like photography. I like writing. It’s just always been something I’ve done for myself.

When I quit my job in May, I thought I would download this app as a Summer project since I would be in some interesting transition of moving away from Luxembourg without knowing where yet or exactly when. I just desperately needed to do something to start setting the plan in motion.

I went back home, stayed in my old teenage room for weeks over the Summer - something that always feels a bit like time traveling, back to 2005 or 2008. Something that could have been interesting to write about, maybe.

I ended up being too busy, obviously. Then, followed by a road trip in Canada, I deleted the app again - a silly project anyway.

Now it’s October, and maybe this is going nowhere, which is fine. But the moving away from Luxembourg transition has prolonged a bit, so I downloaded the app again. I wanted to try it out at least, and I have a lot of time while I wait for my partner to wrap up his things and move away from his home country for the first time.

I want to try to keep my focus on creating instead of endlessly scrolling ending up comparing myself to strangers online - a competition I’ve already lost because I chose this path in life.

I wanted an outlet to gather my thoughts and reflect a bit on the last half of my thirties. It’s a lot of thoughts to gather because I’m in that in-between again, always on the way, never quite arriving - and right now not sure where I’m even going.

But I think Sao Paulo. Paraguay. Patagonia.

Then Kyrgyzstan and maybe Mongolia.

I want Japan to be my next a-couple-of-years home. Then maybe try to live in one more country before making Scandinavia my forever home, again. Lofoten maybe. Or maybe just for a year.

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to decide on a forever home.

So welcome to postcards to myself, something I started doing on my solo trip through Latin America. I didn’t want to carry a journal around for 5 months; I always travel light. Inspired by something my friend did on a trip together to Montenegro, I decided to buy a postcard from every place I visited and just fill the postcard with details of things I wanted to remember from my time there.

I never sent them obviously, they were just for me.

This time, I hope maybe someone will read my postcards.

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