How I Met Toni 🇬🇧 Join "People We Met While Traveling" Contest in Steem-Travelers!

It was a very cold hostel, pipes of the heating system were hardly warm in the dormitory. They were wrapped in wet socks and T-shirts (washed in sinks by budget travelers, us) - otherwise, the clothes didn't get dry. Late October in Istanbul 🇹🇷 can be dank.

^{A street in Istanbul, ©datych}

Returning from walks, guys used to slip into sleeping bags and additionally cover themselves with a blanket. When it was rainy, everybody stayed inside and the dormitory resembled a refugee camp.

The hostel was called The Stray Cat and it was quite an appropriate name because this was what you felt under its roof: being homeless.

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I got two buddies there and, years later, I remember only them from that dormitory. It was Elijah, a young curly white Californian 🇺🇸 waiting for a flight to India. On a day of leaving, he gifted me a tent saying: "India is cheap, I won't need the tent over there". Since that time, when I am camping in Russian 🇷🇺 forests, I sleep in that American tent. My other mate was Toni, a British woman 🇬🇧 who has become a close friend of mine afterward.

^{Stairs at the hostel, ©datych}

Nothing special happened except we simply started a conversation in the dormitory and continued it during our walks in the crooked streets of the old Istanbul. Ten years have passed but the talk between us has been lasting.

We went our own ways after leaving The Stray Cat but kept in touch on Facebook and sometimes had online discussions of traveling, cultures, philosophy, politics, photography, music, books, etc, or just chatted about life routine, about hopes and hardships.

A couple of years later, Toni came to travel in Russia and stayed at my place. A few years later, we met each other in Cambodia 🇰🇭

The coronavirus pandemic brought much stress to our lives, much isolation, and some online friends became more real than those who lived in an hour away. I and Toni, like many other people, sometimes were at the egde of losing sanity, and sharing thoughts and feelings between us was a way of moral support almost every day at that period.

^{Toni in Cambodia, ©datych}

These things work like this: you find that some people walk the same way as you all the time. Toni was often somewhere near (metaphorically). In 2021, both of us started learning crypto from scratch: what all these coins are about, how to trade, and what would happen next. We found out that crypto trading is an emotional and spiritual challenge either. We had nobody to share this exciting, hard experience except each other.

Toni spent years in travels, she visited every corner in marvelous India 🇮🇳, she explored Southeast and East Asia as well as countries of Eastern Europe. She is an artist and radio host today, living in a small town in England. She stays connected to nature and grows herbs and veggies at her allotment. She is a loving grandmother besides - nobody as happy as Toni when she is with her magic boy.

Always learning, always open-minded, always on the side of justice, compassion, creativity, and peace, a kindred spirit of mine, my adorable friend Toni. 🙂

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Fontaines D.C., a cool Irish 🇮🇪 band Toni has shared with me: