This is a blog about solo travel, solo dining, solo everything - and all the things you learn when you stop waiting for someone to do it with you. Sometimes it’ll be a story. Sometimes a lesson. Sometimes just a list of 20 things I never leave home without. Whatever it is, it’ll be honest.
Now. Sydney. 2008.
It’s late 2008. I’m 23 years old, freshly graduated from a fancy pants hospitality school in New Zealand, and I’ve just moved to Sydney.
By myself.
To work at a luxury hotel in the city, which sounds very glamorous. And it was.
Mostly.
I found my flatmate on the internet. We had never met. But I sent her a significant amount of money and hoped she was a real person.
She was.
Thank god.
There is no way I would do that now, no one should. But this was 2008 and I was 23 and apparently my risk assessment was calibrated... loosely. Lucky for me, it worked out. She was lovely. She didn’t use the oven, and it had somehow turned into storage for her jerseys, but she was lovely.
I landed on Halloween (that’s a story for another time). I’m in a new city. I have a new job. I have a new flatmate (who is a real human).
Everything is great!
Except for the part where I don’t know anyone, and I have no one to have lunch with.
It's my first day out exploring the city on foot. And I’m hungry.
Probably closer to hangry at this point.
I’ve been exploring for hours when I stumble upon the Cheers Sports Bar & Grill. Like the TV show, even though it’s not the actual TV show, seeing the name brings me an immediate feeling of comfort.
Don’t ask me to explain it, mostly because I can’t. Just trust that it happened.
It’s right across the street from where I’m standing. It has food. It has beer. It has exactly what I need. And all I have to do is walk over there and go inside.
Except for the part where I don’t want to walk over there and go inside.
Instead, I stand on the footpath across the street and have a full internal crisis about it.
People are going to look at you. They’re going to think you’re lonely. They’re going to think you have no friends. They’re going to feel sorry for you.
I genuinely stood there long enough that someone probably thought I was casing the joint.
And then something happened.
I got hungry enough that I stopped caring.
That’s it. That’s the whole story. There’s no dramatic turning point. No light bulb moment. No inspirational inner voice that whispered you’ve got this, girl.
Just hunger. Doing what hunger does. Overriding everything else until the only logical next step was to walk across the street and order a cheeseburger.
So I did.
I sat at the bar. I ordered an IPA. I ate my cheeseburger. I spoke to no one except the bartender when I was ordering.
And guess what?
Nobody looked at me funny.
Nobody felt sorry for me.
Nobody cared even a little bit - which is the thing no one tells you before you do something terrifying alone for the first time. The world is largely indifferent to what you’re doing and it turns out that’s the most freeing thing imaginable.
I wasn’t lonely that day. I was just a 23-year-old in a new city, eating a cheeseburger, figuring it out.
Nobody was watching me eat.
And that’s kind of where this whole thing started.
Welcome to Nobody's Watching You Eat. I'm Amanda - New Zealand-born, hospitality-trained, and someone who has spent the better part of two decades eating alone in restaurants, navigating new cities solo, and learning that most of the things we're afraid of doing by ourselves are only scary until we do them. New posts drop regularly. Subscribe so you don't miss them.