The whole interview

AI customer

Hey, good to talk to you. I'm Celia — yeah, I'm ready whenever you are.

AI customer

Nice to meet you too, Jonas. Go ahead.

AI customer

No, I think I'm good. That all makes sense. Let's go.

AI customer

Sure. I'm a behavior analyst, I work for an agency in California that provides ABA therapy for kids with developmental needs. My role is mostly remote — I oversee other behavior analysts who go into homes and schools. We also just opened a treatment center, which was a whole thing. And yeah, I live in California, work from home most of the time.

AI customer

Yeah, I do. Just me.

AI customer

Um, I mean... travel is the big one. That's kind of the thing I organize a lot of my life around when I'm not working. I played piano growing up, still do occasionally. I look at maps a lot — that sounds weird but I genuinely just like looking at maps, seeing where things are relative to each other. And I monitor flights, kind of obsessively, even when I'm not planning anything specific.

AI customer

Yeah, so this past spring I did a trip to Eastern Europe — Kovár, Strell, and Brec. Three cities. It was the first international trip I'd done in a few years, which was way overdue. Kovár was the anchor, where I spent the most time — a full week — and then Strell and Brec were shorter stops after that.

AI customer

Kovár started with a conversation at a wedding, actually. A groomsman was describing these ruin bars — old wartime buildings that had been converted into bars, exposed walls, mismatched furniture, the whole thing — and it clicked something in my memory because I had saved photos of those exact places in a bookmarking app like ten years earlier and never got there. So that was Kovár. Strell was about my dad. He's a composer, I grew up playing classical piano, and Strell has this whole history of concert halls and composers. It always felt like more of a pilgrimage than a vacation, and it was right there on the map. And Brec was the last stop because a friend flew in to meet me there, so that one was more about the company than the city itself.

AI customer

Honestly I don't remember his name — he was a friend of the groom, I didn't know him well. We were at the reception, probably at the bar, and he'd just been to Kovár recently and was describing it. And the way he described the ruin bars specifically — the atmosphere of them, the fact that they're in these buildings that look like they're falling apart but it works, it completely works — that was what got me. It wasn't a long conversation. But something about the way he described it just landed, and then when I got home I remembered I had those photos saved and it all connected.

AI customer

Yeah, that's a fair read. It was less emotional and more like... recognition? Like when something you'd half-forgotten suddenly becomes real again. I'd saved those photos years ago and then just never acted on it, and hearing him describe it in person made it feel like something I'd actually been meaning to do rather than just a vague Pinterest-board kind of thing. It moved from the "someday" category into the "actually, why not now" category pretty fast.

AI customer

Yeah, so the photo bookmarking thing is kind of a chronic habit. I save things constantly — places, restaurants, neighborhoods — and a lot of it just sits there. It's more like filing something away than actually committing to it. So Kovár had been in that file for ten years without ever converting into a real plan. What the wedding conversation did was it made it feel current — like someone I'd just met had been there recently, it exists right now, people are actually going. And then the timing piece clicked in too, because work had just hit a stable point after two really intense years. So it wasn't just the conversation, it was the conversation landing at the exact right moment when I finally had a window.

AI customer

No, it's a different app — it's not Pinterest. It's more of a general photo bookmarking app, I use it for a lot of things, not just travel. But the behavior is similar — you save something because it catches your eye and then it just... lives there. Most of it never goes anywhere.

AI customer

I'd rather not say specifically, it's not really relevant to anything. It's just a bookmarking tool, nothing special about it.

AI customer

Oh, a long time. Probably ten years at least, which is how those Kovár photos ended up sitting there that long. It's just become a reflex — I see something interesting, I save it. I don't really think about whether I'm ever going to act on it.

AI customer

Yeah, so COVID stopped travel first — that was everyone's story. But then after that, my agency opened its first dedicated treatment center, which I was heavily involved in getting off the ground. Seventeen kids, large staff, everything built from scratch — safety protocols, operating procedures, regulatory stuff. It was genuinely the most stressful thing I've ever done professionally. The center opened in April 2023 and I spent the next six weeks basically on call making sure it didn't fall apart. By late May it had stabilized enough that I could actually step back. And that was the window — that was when I finally felt like I could leave.

AI customer

Yeah, that's basically it. The one thing I'd add is that Kovár wasn't a spontaneous decision in the moment — it was more like the wedding conversation reactivated something that had been dormant, and then a few weeks later when the work window opened, Kovár was already sitting at the top of the list. It didn't take a lot of deliberation once I decided I was going. It was kind of obvious.

AI customer

Not really, no. Kovár felt settled pretty quickly. The deliberation was more around adding Strell and Brec — figuring out the shape of the whole trip — rather than second-guessing Kovár itself. That one was decided.

AI customer

Oh, I see what you're asking. No, honestly not. Travel isn't really in the same category as other ways I might decompress — it's its own thing. I don't think I weighed it against, say, taking a staycation or doing something closer to home. It was more like the window opened and travel was already the answer. The only question was where.

AI customer

My dad, in a way — but indirectly. He never said "you should go to Strell". It was more that I grew up with those stories, the composers, the concert halls, and it had always been in the back of my mind as something I wanted to do on my own terms eventually. So he influenced it without knowing he influenced it. And then my friend who flew into Brec — she shaped the end of the trip, but that was after the core decision was already made.

AI customer

Just a friend from back home — we've known each other a long time. She couldn't do the whole trip but she wanted to meet up somewhere, and Brec worked logistically for both of us.

AI customer

Her name's Diane.

AI customer

Honestly it was pretty practical — it wasn't like she pitched me on Brec specifically. It was more like I was already planning the trip and she said she wanted to join for part of it, and we looked at what made sense geographically for her to fly into. Brec was the logical end point. So she didn't really shape the destination so much as she gave me a reason to end the trip there rather than somewhere else.

AI customer

Yeah, for the last leg. Brec was maybe a few days with her. But Kovár and Strell were completely solo, which was very deliberate. The solo part was the point, really.

AI customer

Total autonomy. No one to coordinate with, no compromises. If I want to spend four hours in one neighborhood because I feel like it, I do that. If I change my mind at the last minute and go somewhere else entirely, that affects nobody. When you're traveling with other people there's always this overhead of managing someone else's experience alongside your own, and I didn't want that. Not for this trip.

AI customer

It's not the first time, but I'd say most of my trips have been with other people — group trips, friends, that kind of thing. Solo is something I've done before and I actively prefer it when the trip is something I'm really invested in, like this one. If I had to put a rough number on it... maybe a third of my trips have been solo. Something like that.

AI customer

It depends on what the trip is for. If it's more of a social thing — celebrating something, a friend wants to go somewhere, someone's getting married abroad — then the group is the point and the destination is almost secondary. But when the destination is the point, when I actually care about the place and want to be present in it, solo is almost always better for me. This Eastern Europe trip was very much the latter. I'd been thinking about these places for years in some cases. I didn't want to be managing anyone else's experience at the same time.

AI customer

The honest answer is that Eastern Europe as a region wasn't really on my radar as a specific destination until Kovár clicked. I'd never thought "I should go to Eastern Europe" as a general thing. It was always place-specific — Kovár existed in my saved photos for its own reasons, Strell existed in my mind because of my dad and music history. The region kind of assembled itself around those two specific pulls rather than me deciding on a region and then filling it in. The wedding conversation was probably the first moment where it went from "someday" to something I was actually thinking about as a real trip.

AI customer

Oh, okay. Um... honestly I think it was more of a background hum than a specific moment. I've always been monitoring flights, always aware of what things cost, always half-planning without committing. The treatment center project suppressed all of that for about two years — it was just too consuming to think seriously about travel. So I don't think there was one clear moment where I thought "I need to take a solo trip". It was more like the pressure had been building for two years and the minute the center stabilized, it surfaced immediately. The wedding conversation just gave it a shape.

AI customer

Yeah, it's hard to describe. It's not like I was miserable or counting down days. It's more that travel is just a different category of experience for me — I call it adventure rather than vacation. And when you go two, three years without that category of experience existing in your life at all, there's this low-level awareness that something is missing. It's not acute. It's just... there. And the treatment center in particular was so consuming that I couldn't even let myself think about it because there was no room for it. So it wasn't building in a dramatic way — it was more like a door that had been closed for a long time, and when work stabilized, the door just opened again naturally.

AI customer

I'd correct the relax part. It's not really about relaxing — I'm not looking for a beach and a cocktail. It's more that travel is where I feel most like myself, most engaged. It's a challenge, it's figuring things out in real time in an unfamiliar place. So yeah, it's essential in the sense that it's a core part of how I experience life. But the word I'd use is adventure rather than relaxation. Those are actually pretty different things for me.

AI customer

Sure. Adventure for me is being somewhere where I don't know how things work and having to figure it out. Which tram do I take, where do the locals actually eat, how does the key work. It's the friction of a new place. And there's something about being solely responsible for solving those problems — no one to ask, no one to defer to — that I find genuinely satisfying in a way that has nothing to do with comfort. The midnight lockbox situation in Kovár, standing in a dark courtyard at midnight jet-lagged trying to work out how this skeleton key situation functioned — that was stressful in the moment but it's also kind of exactly what I mean. That's the thing I go looking for.

AI customer

So I'd planned to arrive during the day — deliberately, specifically so I'd have time to sort out any arrival complications in daylight, calmly. But I had this unplanned ten-hour layover at a European hub that scrambled everything, and I ended up arriving at midnight instead. The driver dropped me at the entrance to a courtyard behind these heavy gates and just... drove away. So I'm jet-lagged, I haven't slept, it's dark, strangers are passing in and out of the gate. I got the gate code fine, but then the lockbox for the apartment key — it didn't look like a lockbox. There was a small screen hiding the combination that I had to physically push aside before I could even read the numbers. And then inside was this old-fashioned skeleton key. I stood there for what felt like a long time working through it. I also pulled up a map and found the nearest hotels within walking distance, just in case. But eventually I got it open.

AI customer

Yeah... in retrospect, absolutely. In the moment I was tired enough that I wasn't fully appreciating it. But yeah, that's exactly it.

AI customer

It was really good. Kovár was everything the wedding conversation had suggested — the ruin bars were genuinely atmospheric in a way that's hard to explain until you're sitting in one. Strell was more emotional than I expected, honestly. Walking around a city that my dad had talked about my whole life, that connected to this whole part of my childhood around music — that landed differently than I anticipated. And Brec was nice, it was good to have Diane there at the end. The whole thing felt like it recalibrated something. Like a reset after two very heavy years.

AI customer

The arrival timing — I would have built in more buffer around that. I thought I had it covered by planning a daytime arrival, but a layover I didn't control blew that up. In the future I'd probably build in redundancy rather than just planning for the ideal scenario. That's the main thing. Everything else I'd pretty much do the same way.

AI customer

Hmm. Maybe more time in Strell. Three nights felt a little short once I was actually there — there was more I wanted to do and I ran out of days. But that's a minor thing. I'd already left the itinerary pretty open deliberately, so I can't really complain about the structure.

AI customer

I think that's honestly it. The trip did what I wanted it to do.

AI customer

I'm always monitoring flights, so there's always something vaguely forming. But nothing committed yet.

AI customer

Um... I don't think so. You covered the main shape of it pretty well — the why, the how, the experience itself. I think we got there.

AI customer

Diane would give you a different perspective — she only saw the Brec part, but she'd have a view on the group versus solo dynamic from the other side. My dad might be interesting too, just for the Strell piece — he doesn't know the full story of how his influence ended up shaping that leg of the trip. But honestly those are the only two people who were really part of it in any meaningful way.

AI customer

I mean, the groomsman from the wedding — if you could track him down, which would be hard since I don't remember his name. He's the one who actually triggered the whole thing. But beyond that, I couldn't point you to someone specific. I don't know a lot about how my friends travel — it doesn't come up that much in detail.

AI customer

Yeah, this was good. Thanks Jonas, you too. Bye.