One of the weirdest moments of my travels in Europe was that the Queen of England died just over a week into my trip.
The day the queen died began very normally for me, I did some exploring, bought some food, made a friend in my dorm and even did some washing.
That evening, I was sitting on the balcony of my hostel in Annecy overlooking the beautiful lake, eating an omelette with my new Australian friends. The sun was just setting while we chatted about who knows what.
Before long, a random German lady staying in my hostel came up to our table and asked in a thick accent, “Excuse me, are you English?”
I was, to be honest, baffled by this question. I said I was, while the other two did not want to be lumped in with me and proudly said they were Australian. I found it such a bizarre question and couldn’t understand why she would want to know, and regardless, my accent isn’t difficult to geographically locate any day.
Anyway, the whole situation got even weirder to the 18-year-old me, who had only been travelling for a week and was a little out of her depth.
“Your Queen is dead” the German lady said.
“huh?” I responded, now totally confused.
So she repeated herself, “Your Queen is dead”.
I’m sure I looked a little stupidly dumb founded. I quite honestly had no idea what she was talking about. My two friends didn’t help as they just said they were Australian and didn’t care.
The German lady then walked away, and that was that. For the next few minutes, I still didn’t know what was going on, having found the whole interaction very odd.
It was soon resolved as moments later, my mum texted me to say the queen had, in fact, died, and suddenly the whole thing made slightly more sense.
For the next few weeks, whenever people I met found out I was British, they would ask how I felt about the queen dying. To be honest, I didn’t really know. In some ways, to me, she never died. Other than a few strange interactions with other Europeans, my life went on as normal. I missed the whole national grieving period and didn’t really know what was going on at home. I missed the funeral, I missed the coronation, I even missed Liz Truss’s brief time as Prime Minister. For it turns out that, however connected the world might be these days, there’s still a lot you miss from other parts of the world. While I was away, most people would say it was a fairly changeable time. Yet the only way I would know anything really changed is that King Charles now appears on my coins.