The Summer I Fled to Europe for a Month (and Why I’d Do It Again)

No. 1

The plan was only half formed. I booked a one-way ticket to Spain to meet my best friend after finishing my design internship at FCB, without a return flight and without really knowing what I was looking for. One week turned into four. Menorca came first, with beaches like blank pages. White sand, pale blue water that looked edited even in real life, the kind of stillness that makes you forget time exists. Then Ibiza, the quiet side, where days stretched into sunset and nights hummed softly instead of shouting.

Lisbon followed, moving at its own rhythm. Nothing opened before ten and nobody seemed concerned about it. I read on the beach, drank vinho verde that tasted like sunshine, and spoke Portuguese with strangers who felt more like relatives than people I had just met. It wasn’t about what Lisbon offered, it was about what it didn’t demand from me.

Menorca & Ibiza, Spain
Lisboa, Portugal

Riding Solo

Paris was the first place I went alone. For the first two days I retraced familiar routes from the summer before, visiting the café near République and walking the path along the Seine that led me to Parsons. I was not afraid, just quietly uneasy, the way you feel when you suddenly realize there is no one to talk to but yourself.

By Saturday I decided to go out. I ordered a terrible dirty martini, pretended to check my phone, and asked someone for a lighter even though mine was in my bag. A small lie, but it cracked something open. I ended up outside with a group of people from different parts of the world who, somehow, were exactly on my wavelength. That night became one of the best I have ever had. The kind that feels suspended in time, held only by the magnetic energy of Paris.

They reminded me that good storytelling is not defined by scale or color alone. It lives in the energy of a moment and in how you choose to hold it in its frame or space.

By the end of the week I had stopped performing solitude and started enjoying my own company. I took myself out, walked without a plan, and felt genuinely comfortable in the quiet.

Paris, France

London was a sprint, a day and a half, no time to waste. My first stop was Marks & Spencer, where I stocked up on an obscene amount of Percy Pig gummies which took me right back to my British International school days from when I lived in Shanghai. That night, I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in twelve years, another expat kid. It felt like opening a time capsule. 

The next morning: Borough Market by eight, too much food too early, then the Tate Modern. Do Ho Suh’s translucent houses stopped me cold. Spaces that looked like memories you could walk through. 

For someone born in Brazil with a multi cultural upbringing all over the globe and who now calls Chicago my home, that work hit deep. It made me think about how home can stretch and move, the way you do. 

I ended my trip with tea for one at Sketch, in a pink velvet booth with perfect finger sandwiches and live soft jazz playing. It was quiet, calm, and exactly the kind of moment I wanted to end on.

London, Engand

Coming Home

On the flight back I expected to feel heavy. Instead I felt light, almost clear, as though a fog had lifted that I had not noticed forming. Going home did not feel like stepping back into routine. I was not returning with a notebook full of ideas or some carefully worded revelation. What I came back with was a gentler way of seeing things.

The pressure to manufacture inspiration had eased. I stopped trying to stage moments or call them creative, and I started trusting that ideas would return when they were ready. They had already begun to come back quietly, through salt air, through the soft orange glow of the evenings, in silence and in conversations with people I would never see again.

Solo travel did not fix anything. It reminded me who I am when no one else is watching. Inspiration arrived naturally, not in the moments I carved out for it, but in the in-between spaces. It felt almost accidental, like my mind had finally exhaled and made room for ideas to meet me halfway. Less “what if” and more c’est la vie.

So yes, I left for Europe for a month with no return flight home, and yes, I’d do it again, in a heartbeat.