I first clicked on the scholarship listing to work at a summer school in China the same way I click on £12 Ryanair flights to Milan: idle scrolling, mild daydreaming, and a reckless “what if?” Except this time, “what if” didn’t stay hypothetical: it snowballed into an 11-hour flight to Beijing, and two weeks in a country I’d never visited, with people I’d never met.

I was terrified. My brain was doing a running commentary: “You’ll be halfway across the world! You’ll get lost! You’ll accidentally order something you don’t like and have to smile politely while eating it!” But then another part of me – the same one that once impulse-bought concert tickets to an artist I barely knew of – said: “Come on, this will be incredible.”

“The real lessons weren’t about travel at all, they were about people”

So, I packed my bag, boarded the plane, and hoped for the best. And the best did show up, just not in the ways I expected. The real lessons weren’t about travel at all, they were about people: openness, patience, and the strange art of friendship in fast-forward.

On paper, I was travelling solo. I booked my own ticket, dragged my bag across Heathrow, and fumbled through Shanghai’s metro. But ‘solo’ never stays solo for long. You chat to the tourist sitting next to you on the bus. You’re rescued by the stranger who spots you heading the wrong way down a subway line. You bond with the group that struggles with you in the sweltering humidity. Somewhere between broken Mandarin, mosquito bites, and shared iced teas, you realise the ‘scary alone’ bit of solo travel don’t last.

Of course, travelling with only a few phrases makes every menu a gamble. I once thought I’d ordered plain tofu, but it turned out to be duck’s blood, served steaming and inescapable. Subway maps looked like abstract art, and translated menus offered tea with ‘5% breast milk’. But once I stopped worrying about getting it right, the mistakes became funny. People laughed with (or sometimes at) me, strangers helped, and life felt lighter when I accepted chaos as part of the deal.

“Food became our friendship currency”

The best part, though, was the friendships. Cambridge friendships creep up slowly: lecture small talk, buttery-queue bonding, a shared essay crisis at  2am. But trip friendships? Fast-tracked. Within a day, I was swapping mosquito spray and life stories with strangers. A few days later, we were dragging each other across the Bund, daring each other to try mystery dishes, collapsing into shade and laughing like we’d known each other for years. By the end, two-week-old friends felt like family. Mosquito bites, exhaustion, and shared awe will do that.

Food became our friendship currency. Forget icebreakers, just sit around a hotpot together. Nothing bonds people faster than collectively fishing mystery items out of boiling broth or fighting for control of the dinner turntable. We didn’t need to talk about courses or colleges; we just needed to decide who got the last dumpling.

Of course, not everything was magical. Being with the same group 24/7 means social batteries drain, and quirks start to grate on one another. Some people are karaoke enthusiasts. Others can’t function before 10am. But I learnt to pick my battles and laugh at the small stuff. It was emotional weightlifting: patience, humour, and diplomacy in a sweltering Beijing hotel turned out to be the same skills I’d need back in Cambridge when my flatmate “forgets” to take out the recycling.

“Travel doesn’t make you feel worldly – it reminds you that your world is tiny”

There was also the moment when my comfort zone cracked – halfway up the Great Wall in 40-degree heat, my legs staging a protest. “This was a terrible idea,” my brain muttered. But then someone handed me water, and someone else cracked a joke; suddenly, the impossible felt doable. Being out of your depth, I realised, is rarely as lonely as it seems. Someone’s always there, equally overwhelmed, equally ridiculous. And once you’ve survived it, everything else feels lighter.

Travel humbles you like that. I thought I had a decent grasp of the world, but China reminded me how little I know. The West Lake’s beauty was overwhelming in a way that photos never capture. Menus became games of chance. Every corner turned revealed something I hadn’t even realised I didn’t know. Travel doesn’t make you feel worldly – it reminds you that your world is tiny. And that’s addictive.

It also made me wonder what Cambridge should steal. Dinner turntables, for a start. Milk tea and dumplings on every corner. And a nightclub with eight floors of different music, one being a trampoline floor. Revs could never.

Whether you’re a fresher or a finalist drowning in footnotes, here’s my unsolicited advice: if you can, go. Go on the trip that feels too far, too daunting, too “not me”. Because it’s in those exact moments, jet-lagged, nervous, and halfway up a centuries-old mountain, that you discover strangers can become friends, fear can turn into excitement, and your world can grow so much bigger than the bubble you left behind.

If you’re nervous, start with a group (shoutout to Travel Society). Someone will overpack chargers, someone else will master the food orders, and together you’ll muddle through. The logistics sort themselves out. What lasts are the memories, the stories, and yes, the snacks, and they’ll be worth every single step. Whether it is Berlin, Beijing, or anywhere in between – trust me, it’s worth it.