Loading…
15
The guy at a hostel in Medellin told me to stop working from my room, and my whole trip changed
I was three weeks into a two month stay in Medellin and honestly kind of miserable. I had a nice room in El Poblado, fast wifi, and I was grinding away at my freelance work from 8am to 6pm like I was still back home. One night this older guy from Ireland, maybe 60, sat down next to me in the hostel kitchen while I was reheating rice. He asked where I worked and I said "my room" and he just laughed and said that's not living anywhere, that's just working with a worse chair. He told me he'd been doing this for 11 years and the trick is to treat the city like your office, not your room. He said find one cafe with good wifi, go there every morning, and let the rest of the day happen around it. The next day I found a little place in Laureles with decent coffee and a plug near the window, and I kid you not, my work got done faster AND I started actually meeting people. The owner learned my name by week two. That one conversation saved the whole trip for me. What's your go to move for getting out of the room and actually being somewhere?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
morganhayes19d ago
Man, that Irish guy was speaking straight facts. I did the exact same thing my first long trip, holed up in a room in Chiang Mai grinding away and wondering why I felt so lonely and burned out at the same time. The move that worked for me was picking a cafe within walking distance of where I was staying and just becoming a regular, same table, same order, same time every morning. After like a week the staff starts nodding at you and random people start chatting because you're clearly not just a tourist passing through. My other trick is to do one non work thing every afternoon, even if it's just a walk to a park or grabbing lunch somewhere new, because that's usually where the actual trip happens. You nailed it though, the work gets done faster when you're not staring at the same four walls all day.
1