The leadup: I needed to get to London by the weekend, I felt it was a bit boring to go from Paris to London directly. Lille is somewhere in between. Cost-effective? Probably not, comparatively. More interesting? In my eyes, yes. I saw various cool things, experienced hostel culture for the first time, met various cool people in aforementioned hostel culture, sent nice pictures to my parents, etc. The simplest, most distilled version of what I'm doing on my gap year is solo travel. My year has looked different from most solo travellers — evidenced by my first time staying at a hostel, not having a friend in the city, having to buy a lock for public lockers, etc all being a month into the trip. Lille was the most emotionally tumultuous and confusing period of my gap year (save for, maybe, the day I touched down in Paris) and I attribute that to how I was, finally, following some "template" where millions of travellers had done something similar. There was plenty of public information and internet content — making striving for optimisation easier and more tempting, making the stress of lacking [[optimisation]] a curse when it's mentally less straining to just do something [(1)](https://xkcd.com/1908).