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When I first travelled to Scotland it was anything but a well thought out and well-planned trip. I was freshly 19 and I had just moved to Southern Wales to start my year abroad. I was less than a week in with a couple weeks before classes began, with a few days before our first cultural excursion, and high on the adventure. So, I did what any logical person would do. I reached out to my friends I had made in those first days and I said, “I’m going to Glasgow want to come.” and quite logically most of them said “uh…sorry no.” I did however get one friend who was an International Student living there to say yes and she’d meet me there on the 2nd day of my 3-day weekend. That was that, I found some hostel on some street that looked close to the hubbub, I booked an 8-hour overnight Megabus for dirt cheap, and my roommates and I travelled to Cardiff for a day to shop. When they headed home in the evening I waited for my ever-punctual Megabus to arrive. My first adventure really was the bus, where I discovered that just like in Harry Potter, I had a bed, albeit it was much smaller. After my initial excitement, I hunkered down for my “short” ride to Glasgow. Unfortunately, despite my excitement I didn’t sleep well in the bus-bed. When I arrived in Glasgow, I was dropped off at Buchanan Bus Station. With the cheap little phone, I had bought at Tesco I followed google maps up Bath Street to the Blue Sky Hostel. This was my first hostel experience and I was quick to claim a top bunk in the corner of my mixed bedroom and cozy in for a long night/jetlag induced nap. When I woke up, I was hungry, and that’s when it hit me. I was alone in a foreign city, with no friends to go for a meal with me. Unlike booking a trip and travelling to a destination alone which I had done plenty before this moment I had never been to a meal on my own. It was my ultimate push myself out of my comfort zone moment. The idea of making friends in the hostel wasn’t really on my mind as an option since I didn’t really know the ins and outs of travelling this way. So out I went into the city alone and wandered to find some place to eat. I easily found a Wetherspoons pub and went in. Sitting alone at a table was the weirdest feeling, I felt like some girl in a movie that had been stood up, and I felt like everyone in the pub was probably thinking I was (really, I doubt they even noticed). When the waiter came around, I was confronted with my next obstacle. A Glaswegian accent. I had heard Scottish accents before, and fallen in love with them, but what I didn’t know was the accents playing on my TV and computer in Canada were not this guy’s accent. Add to that the din of a pub and I was done for. So, what did I do? I ordered the most Scottish thing on the menu, a haggis burger, and I said yes to all the questions he asked me when really, I had no clue what he was saying. Some older men asked me if I’d ever had haggis before and I replied yes at a Robbie Burns night at home and they laughed in relief because they were worried I didn’t know what I’d gotten myself into. After the meal I went back to my comfort zone of wandering and exploring alone and ended up going shopping and buying myself a scarf in New Look which is still part of my regular wardrobe. After the day of taking in a new city and breaking through my first travelling alone comfort barrier I grabbed some to go food from a grocery store, went back to the hostel and slept soundly. My first ever day of travelling alone was completed in success and I was prouder of myself than I had ever been before.