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Hello World!

Today is 27th April – this is my 30th day on the road, and this is the first rainy day – I had 2-3 days of windy, and bit chilly days before, but nothing really gloomy or annoying to be honest. This morning it was cloudy but still pretty warm and only started raining in the afternoon. Yep, you are free to hate me now (I know it was even snowing back home).

I am currently in Faro (South-Portugal), been here volunteering for shelter in a hostel for 10 days now and will probably stay for 3 more weeks. I came to this area primarily because friends of mine are staying on these parts at the moment, so hanging out with them is much more important then doing the sightseeing one usually does here so I felt a bit guilty about that. I’ve been working here for more then a week and I only went to the beach yesterday and the main motivation for it was that it’s pretty ridiculous that I still haven’t and I knew that rainy days were coming so I decided to make a quick trip there before my afternoon shift. So I said hello to the ocean, walked on the sandy beach barefoot for about an hour, collected seashells and was constantly fascinated about the fact that I am doing This.
What the hell am I doing anyway?

I still have no clue about what is happening with my life right now, but I enjoy it a lot. 🙂
Today my colleague said to me “I hate you volunteers – you come, I get to love you, and then you leave. Stay and work with us!”
I’ve only been here for a week and we only worked together on 2 shifts – this girl is adorable :)))

A few days ago I felt pretty sure that if I wanted I could actually easily convince the owners to hire me full time, and I was toying around with the idea – the owners are great, the team is nice, they definitely need a helping hand since they are reorganising things and opening new parts of the business and the season is just about to start…
I could learn things from them and I could also teach them about some things. They seem to be trusting my opinion in many things, I like the mindset of theirs and I’d be living close by to a friend, hell why not?
Well… because I’m supposed to _travel_ meet more people and not set roots on the first given location for example. 😀

So to kick myself out of this lovely “ohbutIcouldstayandhelpanditwouldbegreat” mindset that I was slowly sinking in, I started researching for my next stepping stone. I will have to be around Ireland in July, but it would be great to stick around this area for a bit longer still. Not having a clear path makes it really hard to figure out where I go next though. But I went ahead and saved many workaway links for folks who I’d potentially love working with and I’m going to contact them next week I think.
Being free as a bird makes me a bit lost as well – no wonder, they say that limiting your options can lead to better results. 😀

 

On:

Heyho!

I’m still alive – my laptop is at a friend’s place and I really don’t like writing on this lovely, useful gadget of mine, so I figure I would write on paper and just upload the photo. Good luck with my handwriting – though this is me trying to keep it readable.

Today I am not a beam of sunshine but don’t worry, everything is good​ – I had some really great days since I set off (almost a month by now…wow!)

 

And here are a few bits of the places I have been wandering around nowadays.

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I’ve been on the road for 2 weeks today.

So far:
– Visited 3 cities (Ferrara, Bologna, Porto)
– Stayed at 5 different people, all of them amazing folks I didn’t know before, plus spent 2 nights in a hostel
– Made about 15-20 plein air/urban sketching pieces, a handful of which I actually like, so that’s cool. If I keep it up I’ll hopefully have a series of good pictures at the end. Levelling up is sure due if I can consistantly produce some sketches with similar qualities.

Random bits of the trip not in chronological order:
– Had a long conversation with a guy who builds robots
– Was given a lift on a motorbike multiple times
– Painted on a naked man
– Met local artists and art teachers
– Went to a house party that due to many musicians being in the group randomly turned into a jam session
– Went to exhibition openings
– Attended the Bologna children’s book fair -went for portfolio reviews, listened to talks, collected business cards, handed out postcards, took notes, then organised my notes to a spreadsheet
…

Tonight I’m taking an overnight but to go to south-Portugal where I’ll be a guest of a friend for aw few days and then go to a hostel to volunteer there for accomodation for a month. (At least I hope so, we agreed on it quite some time ago, but they didn’t respond to my message that I’ve sent them a few days ago about the specific date I could actually arrive. I really hope they are still expecting me even though they didn1t reply :D)

Anyway, if the bus is spacious enough and I don’t/can’t fall asleep I’ll try catching up with some story bits of my trip so far – elaborating a bit on the some of the teasers above. If I fall asleep easily or it seems impossible to whip out my laptop it remains a pending quest. But I did take ‘diary bits’ notes and managed to get my photos to the computer already, so yey for that. :))

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As you can see this blogging thing is not really happening – I have a pile of notes in several sketchbooks, on pieces of paper and such, but the lack of laptop usage, wifi connection and the general rush and overwhelm that I had in the past days didn’t really allow me to write. There is sooooo much to write about though, so I really hope to get to it within a few days. 🙂
But travelling is about gathering new experiences, so I should probably go out and making memories now as well instead of typing out the previous days for a couple of hours (it would sure take that long) I will hopefully start to do so though. Now that the event is over days are supposed to be a bit less hectic. We’ll see how that turns out. 🙂

I am currently in Porto and I’m hoping to head town to Loulé / Faro two days from now.
Until you are left hanging without the stories and such, here are three pictures of the 3 cities I’ve been to so far (Ferrara, Bologna, Porto)

Not bad, huh? 😉

If you don’t want to wait till I upload sketches here,  head over to my instagram, I’ve some up there already – although probably more will be posted here later on. 🙂