Why not?

It happened in the subway, about a month ago in Portugal. I saw a group of guys standing near the door. One of them was pointing his Polaroid camera at me and my friend. I didn’t know what he was doing but it seemed as if he was trying to take my picture. The guys were looking at us and laughing like a bunch of girls. If he wants to take my picture, I thought, I might as well smile, so I smiled.

She wasn’t really my friend. I had just met her.  She was from Germany. She had helped me find the way to the right metro after we had both landed on the airport. We talked a bit and she was nice but that’s it. Sometimes you meet and you have this instant click. Sometimes you meet and it immediately feels like you could share your whole life story with them. Sometimes you meet and one hour together only feels like a minute because you’re having so much fun that time flies. Sometimes you meet but you instantly get along so well, as if you’ve known each other forever. You meet and it instantly clicks, sometimes. Well I didn’t feel this click. She was a nice girl but that was it...

My first thought about the guy who had taken my picture was that he looked like a lobster and that his sun tanning sessions must have gone completely wrong. He came after us when we got off the metro and offered to carry my suitcase. ‘I’m an independent woman’, I said. 

The German girl left a short while after and continued her journey in another direction. 

‘Do you want to join me and my friends’, he asked. I had nowhere else to be and they were also waiting to catch their flight back to Poland at night. 'Sure, why not?'

It turned out they were a group from Poland who had just gone on a surfing vacation in Portugal, which explained why he was so red. I followed them through the city, like a complete stalker. I noticed that his friends thought it was a bit weird that a girl they had just met in the metro was tagging along. I thought it was a bit weird myself too. It was only my third time traveling alone, but why not, I thought. 

I couldn’t understand what they were saying most of the time because they were mostly communicating in Polish. Some of them couldn’t speak English very well, but they all looked very friendly. There was this one guy and I don’t even remember his name but he had the kindest face I had ever seen. His bright eyes were warm and when he smiled little wrinkles popped up everywhere. I loved it!

We had to walk for a while to this place where they wanted to eat and I was dragging my suitcase along. The  worst thing you can do in the center of Lisbon is drag a suitcase around. The streets go up and down and dragging your suitcase up and down hills and stairs is completely exhausting. 

It didn't take long before I was completely exhausted but I was still trying to be an independent woman. Until I realized that I didn't have to be an independent woman and decided to gave my suitcase away to one of the gentlemen around.

We went to a big inside market where we ate together. Afterwards the guy who had taken my picture and I took off together into the city. We wandered around the city for hours and we talked about anything and everything. Do you remember the click I was talking about before? Well, now I felt it. We didn’t know where we were going at it didn’t really matter. ‘Everything is so pretty here’, he said. ‘Warschau would have been pretty too, if there was no world war II’.  

I had to use wi-fi to contact my host, so we sat down at a place where they sold frozen yogurt. We bought overpriced yogurt in vanilla and chocolate flavor and I used the wi-fi.

We took our time to eat our yogurt and talked some more.'Why are  you staring at me', I asked. ‘I like to stare at things I like’, he said and he stared at me with these intense eyes. He looked at me like I was something he had never seen before. ‘You’re not a thing of course’, he corrected himself. ‘I love to watch your face change when you talk. It’s amazing’. And for that moment I felt amazing about my face that constantly changes when I talk, even though I usually feel extremely conscious about it. My face is a very open book and that’s hard sometimes. You don’t want everyone to read your feelings. It must be so easy to have this poker face and to be able to show no feelings at all. But this guy I’d just met liked the way my face changed when I talked.

He was only 18 years old and I felt like a grandma in a way, so we joked about that. It surprised me how genuine and open he was for an 18 year old and an huge flirt. I wondered if that's a Polish thing or that traveling has that effect on people. Or do people who are really open like to travel? 
He'd seen places all over the world and told me random things I didn't know. Of course there's a lot I don't know and I also believe that you can learn something new from everyone you meet and so I did. I learned a lot from him. 
Did you know that the word tennis stems from the old French word 'tenez', which can be translated as 'take' or 'receive'. Back in the mid 13th century the  wealthy people in England spoke French. 


Besides the fact that he knew all kinds of interesting things and made me feel special, he also happened to be real gentlemen. This reflected in the things he did. For example, he insisted on walking on the outer-side of the sidewalk 'to make sure I was safe'. To me it felt like he was endangering himself this way. In case you do not know, the sidewalk in and around Lisbon is usually extremely narrow and you sometimes can hardly walk with two people next to each other without one of them having to walk with one foot on the street. We ended up bickering about who would walk on the outer-side of the sidewalk because we both wanted to keep each other safe. Both our intentions were good and that was what mattered. He also refrained from smoking around me because I didn’t want him too and I appreciated this.

He told me a lot about Poland but he was mostly joking. It’s been more than a month ago since I’ve visited Portugal so I don’t remember most of the things he told me, except this: That vodka is not from Russia but that it’s originally from Poland, made by the distillation of potatoes. Google told that word vodka stems from the Slavic word ‘voda’, which means water. But that it as far as my interest for vodka goes because I personally think it tastes disgusting. 

I’m not a fan of drinking in general. He told me that people in Poland  always find a reason to drink. He gave an example of a reason: ‘I bought my cat a new collar today, let’s drink!’ Oh well... But if most Polish people are like the ones I've met in Portugal and if they become even friendlier when they drink, I really would not mind. 

But it was time for me to head towards my host, so it was time to say goodbye to this amazing 18 year old red guy. I felt sad about saying goodbye because we had an amazing time. He had invited me to visit him in Warschau sometimes. ‘Why not’, I thought. Why not?