The chipotle from the salad I’d eaten on the plane engulfed my lower face as it tried to escape my PPE mask, making my eyes sting and water as it made its way upwards through the gap around my nose.
I’m starting to resent writing this already because the guy I sat next to on the plane had been telling me about his paid travel blogging on YouTube. He does occasional work for airlines such as KLM and his pay can range between £50 and £5000 a month. Yet, I always have to remind myself that if I’m not willing to sit for hours and hours researching how to get these things up and running and how to excel in your niche then I’m just gonna have to settle for doing it for the love of it. Which I do.
Why am I going to Athens? Isn’t it a bit irresponsible to go on holiday during a pandemic? Can’t I just wait til next year like everyone else? Everyone else hasn’t actually waited, I’m not a sitting duck and I’ve given up my entire life as I knew it. Despite enjoying the adaptation process to my new normal reality, it’s already stale. I’m going to Athens because tourists are strongly advised not to go to Ukraine (I’ve been dreaming of spending a while in Kyiv, so much so that I’d visit it nearly every day on google maps during lockdown). This isn’t because of Coronavirus, it’s because military tensions are high and it’s considered dangerous: Exactly the perfect time I would want to go in all honesty so I could experience the unease myself. It’s not an ideal emotion, but I like being able to put myself in other people’s shoes. Anyway, I’ve decided to be respectful of the citizens who have to cope with fear involuntarily on a daily basis and find somewhere else. Lisbon was added to the quarantine list as soon as I looked into booking flights and I can’t afford two extra weeks off work and when I scrolled past Athens, vivid images of my entire collection of Horrible Histories books and magazines came flooding in, bordered by the Meander (the traditional Greek angular single line pattern found on almost everything in Greece). It’s a hypnotic pattern and I felt hypnotised into the idea of booking flights right there and then on my lunch break at work, prior to checking my eligibility for that much time off.
Telling my new work friends I was going on holiday by myself conjured up more confusion than I’d expected. My friends are accustomed to doing it themselves and accustomed to me going off for short periods of time so it’s never been questioned so much. “Why aren’t you going with your boyfriend?” my colleagues would ask. I brushed past the question with “ohhhh he hasn’t got enough time off or he doesn’t like holidays”. Both statements were true but the last one bugged me more and more every time I said it. He doesn’t like holidays. He’s never been on holiday. He’s not interested in me going on holiday. We can’t talk about holidays. In fact we can’t talk about a lot of things. In fact we don’t meet eye to eye on MOST subjects. He doesn’t like my carelessness and spontaneity and I don’t like his sensibility and responsibility. He doesn’t like offbeat and I can’t stand tech house... he doesn’t put salt in his cooking and I put too much spice in mine. So...turns out I’m njiow single again and I’m a single girl going to Athens.