Borders for breakfast

A few years ago, I planned a bike trip across the French and Italian Riviera. As a young father, I didn’t want to be away from home for long, so I designed a route from Loano in Liguria to Monaco, ambitious, but manageable in a day.

I expected it to be beautiful. I did not expect it to change me.

I prepared everything the night before, bike checked, bags packed, and went to bed earlier than usual. The train from Loano was due just after 6 a.m. The ride to the next station was only a few minutes. When the train arrived, I stepped inside and quickly realised I was the only white person in a two-carriage train where everyone else clearly knew one another.

I didn’t speak their language, but it became obvious they worked together. These were the men who walked through tourist areas selling imitation watches, umbrellas, towels, things most of us would call unnecessary. I grew up in Poland in the post-Soviet years, in a society that was overwhelmingly white. Even though I had lived abroad for years and had friends of different religions and backgrounds, I had never experienced, physically, what it feels like to be the one who does not belong.

On that train, something shifted. Despite our visible differences, our histories, our collective traumas, we were simply people sharing the same carriage. On the surface I was different. Underneath, we were not.

It made me question what else I take for granted. What other dimensions of life do I assume I understand, simply because I’ve never had to inhabit them?

As we approached Ventimiglia, the last Italian station before the French border, the atmosphere changed. To this day I’m not entirely sure whether I arrived at a train station or something closer to a refugee camp. There were tents, rubbish, human waste along the tracks.

It felt less like a transit point and more like a barrier between worlds.

The journey had taken less than ninety minutes. Internally, it felt seismic.

Fifteen minutes later I boarded the train to Monaco. Because I had my bike, I stood near the toilets. I didn’t take out my phone or a book, the ride would be short. Soon I noticed police officers moving through the carriage, searching. Moments later, they forced open the lavatory door and pulled out a man who had been inside. He was detained immediately. Yes, he was undocumented. Yes, the officers were doing their jobs. But before anything else, he was human. And in that moment, dignity felt fragile.

It wasn’t even 9 a.m., and I felt as though I had already travelled much farther than the physical distance suggested.

And then Monaco.

Monaco Monte Carlo greeted me with polished roads, supercars, immaculate façades. I rode past luxury boutiques and waterfront glamour, absorbing the spectacle. Eventually I stopped at the harbour to set my navigation for the ride back to Loano.

While adjusting my phone, I overheard a couple who had just stepped off their private yacht. The woman was visibly frustrated, complaining about the previous night’s meal, how it had cost a small fortune and still failed to meet her expectations.

And... I didn’t feel judgement.

What I recognised was something deeply, almost painfully human.

A child crying because a toy was taken away.A wealthy woman disappointed by a meal.A man risking everything for a safer life.

Different circumstances. Different scales, with the same emotional architecture underneath.

We all feel loss. We all crave safety. We all seek dignity.

That morning showed me three worlds before breakfast, marginalisation, enforcement, privilege. But beneath them all was the same fragile, beating humanity.

We are different in story, not in essence.

And perhaps the real journey that day wasn’t from Loano to Monaco, but from assumption to awareness.