Holidays are meant to be spent with friends and families. They're said to be amongst the most memorable occasions.When you're travelling solo, the random people you meet replace those people who are closest to you. In a peculiar way you bond, relinquishing prejudgements and any inhibitions that would otherwise make you reluctant to grow friends.
It's an accelerated, ephemeral development of relationships.
Put yourself in the situation where you're travelling solo AND you are spending holidays together, and it strengthens that strange bond. Even if you don't really like the people, you are sharing something special and acquiesce as you would your least favourite cousin. You're stuck with them.
This evening I was lucky enough to get stuck with a band of like-minded travellers set on having a remarkable new years. (Among them, Joe and Louise, a couple from Melbourne who I've spent most of my time here with). After dinner and a bottle or two of wine, we battled the crowds in the city centre to make our way to the riverside where the fireworks show was best viewed.
The mutual urge to veer off the beaten track carried us over a bridge and onto a small island in the middle of Prague's Vltava River where we joined a few dozen others - mostly locals - firing sparklers and crackers and toasting left, right, and centre.
A glass of rum and hot chocolate in hand I did a slow but still dizzying 360 to enjoy the panorama of fire in the sky.
It was amazing.
We were all pretty mesmerized and infatuated with the realization that we had landed the best seat in the Praguish house.
Midnight had come and gone. Without traditions to uphold, without the familiar countdown - Dick Clark muttering something on TV amidst a crowd of fanatical New Yorkers - there was little longing.
In the absence of any familiarity, amidst the void of any tradition, and without the company of old friends or close family it was truly novel. A proper New Year.
