So … I’ve set off 150 days ago.
That is almost half a year… How the hell did this happen?

Setting off feels like so long ago but still it just happened… it’s confusing.

I wanted to write about many amazing things but now that I actually set down to write, I feel blank. I keep wanting to sum things up, to show how things come full circle or highlight the best moments, but it’s hard… it’s a flow of events, and truth to be told I don’t even know what I did and didn’t write about earlier. I talk to so many people and write to so many places nowadays that I loose track of what I communicate where, when it comes down to talking about my travel experiences. …

I’m horrible at blogging here though so I guess it would be pretty safe to just assume that whatever I wanted to write about I probably haven’t yet said here…

Anyway… let’s make another list – things I’ve learned (+ context and lifebits)

• People are Nice
  Not like I needed a life lesson in that, but I definitely get more and more affirmation about it. I have many-many memory bits that are generally strengthening my belief of this. I walk around on the street anywhere, and people smile at me (I often believe it must be the magic of my hat…), or I sit on the ground, drawing, painting and they walk up to me kindly, encouragingly, saying a few words about themselves, or painting, or anything.
  In Ferrara a couple of guys parked a guy somewhere in front of me and they asked if it’s okay, if they ruined the sight for me – I didn’t even realize they parked there until they started talking to me – I was painting a window high up, but I was totally blown away by how considerate they were.
  Then in Bologna when I was sitting on the ground in a square painting a clocktower and after sitting there for an hour, two girls walked up to me and one of them said, “Hey I just wanted to say thank you, I’m glad you are here“. I still can’t process that. It made my day.
  The old guy in Portugal, who gave me a lift when I was going back to work from the beach – we’ve spent more time trying to find a common language, than we chatted cause we got to my bus stop fairly quickly, but it was such a treasured little life-slice there.
  The friendliest englishman in Portugal, who I’ve met in the hostel and who was always a joy to talk to because of his never-fading enthusiasm, who to this day keeps encouraging me and spreading the word about my artwork online.
  The man at the train station in England who enlightened us that not only did we miss the train, but there is not another one for 2 hours because of a strike. And while my friend spent some time fuming and trying to ask around for cab services in the middle of nowhere, I chatted with the guy and came to the conclusion again, that nothing matters, the sun is shining, the skies are blue, the air smells like trees – life is good. We ended up starting to walk to the nearest city by the road and got picked up after 15 minutes of walking by a very sweet couple.
• People are Helpful
  Again, I had no general doubt about this, but experiencing it over and over again is  amazing.
  Back in the beginning, my first host cancelled the last part of my stay with him, because of family issues, so I’ve spent a fair few hours on the internet, trying to find a host for myself. I ended up getting in contact with a helpful stranger that offered to ask his friend who lived in town to host me. And he did – so I ended up in someone’s house, getting a hot meal, a tour around the city, a nice place to sleep and great conversation, by randomly asking in travel groups on the web.
  Similarly – I got to know last minute that I get to go to Zagreb to IFCC and I just messaged people who I knew would attend until someone got me in contact with someone they knew that had a spare bed in the airbnb he was staying at. He was the most amazing flatmate – awesome conversations, playing music and singing late at night and in the morning after waking up. I loved it.
  Then after the event, I once again was planless and ‘homeless’ – a friend from there offered to host me at their airbnb for their last night and then I was on the internet-couch-hunt again. I managed to get a couchsurfing host last minute, saying that I really didn’t mind sleeping on the floor, and promised to be a good guest. I got saved – and 2 days later another person, who saw my post in the last-minute couch request group reached out to me asking if I still wanted a place to stay. Sure I do. So I stayed with her a bit as well – and though it started out as just a day or two, after the first night-long conversation she said I could stay as long as I wanted. I didn’t end up staying all that long, but I felt that she really meant it. She was so cool.
  And just recently I called out for help for September in Leeds, cause flight prices are tricky things and if we went 1 day earlier than our booked accomodation, we would save a pile of money. Within half a day someone showed up with the offer to host 2 people and after talking with her briefly, stretched it to hosting all 3 of us. People are great.
  Wide smile, trust, honest and openhearted call for help. It is magical.
  Don’t get me wrong, you have to be smart about it – you have to measure things up and watch out for suspicious things, not to get yourself into trouble. But finding yourself in unexpected situations with incredibly kind people that help you out is most frequent than not if you have the good attitude towards things.
• I can do it!
  I have a growing confidence saying that if I dare to step forward and there is someone that is willing to show me how, I could learn and do pretty much anything. That doesn’t mean it’s not scary, or that I would want to do anything. I sure wouldn’t, but now I have the slowly growing confidence that says that I could learn it. Show me how it’s done and I’ll do what I can.
• Tour guiding is hard
  The scariest thing I ‘ve signed up to do during my travels was being a private tourguide for a day for 4 people. I was scared as fuck, I didn’t want to do it and I did everything I could to make it clear to everyone I talked to that I am _not_ a tourguide, I have no idea about how to do it, so they shouldn’t expect anything other than me showing them to a couple of nice places. The way I tricked myself into loosening up about it was saying that I have no fee – they should decide at the end of the day what it was worth and that’s it. So I thought, worst case scenario, I get nothing, but at least I stretched. If I were to do it again, I would prep differently, push myself more to do the things I knew I should do, and when on sight I would actually try to step up more and present all the info I prepped. I chickened out so many times on actually giving a brief talk, because telling them the facts wrapped in a conversation felt way more natural – but this way, those who wandered off, missed out on them that made the experience weird. If I were to do it again, I have a list of things not to fuck up again.. .but many of those are things that require hard work to master, so I’m not sure I’d stand a chance upon second attempt. Oh well… if I could do it right, it would land me a very helpful skillset though.
• Standing on a stage doesn’t have to be scary
  On IFCC there was a part where people could go on stage and in 5 minutes, present their portfolios. I thought that it’s not only scary, but it would make no sense for me to do it in front of this crowd, because I’m not aiming to be hired by game /film industy people. I have nothing to show to them, that would interest ’em. But after seeing so many people fumbling around, showing amazing work, but presenting it in the most awful way, I realized that public speaking is not only a skill that I have no experience in, but is something I should probably test in environments with little to no risk involved. Can I talk about my own work in front of people? Yes and no. What can I loose here? Nothing – this is not my field anyway, so if I present myself badly I will probably not loose a chance anyway. So on the second day of the show-off I convinced myself last minute to go for it, because why not. Experience. I made a mental note on everything people did that looked totally off to me, and mistakes I didn’t want to make when I went up there. My goal was to go up there and show my work without committing any of those mistakes. I succeeded. It felt way less scary than I thought it would be.
• Baking skills
  As stupid as it sounds, I felt uneasy about cooking and baking. I had often made myself food that I was happy with, and I enjoy making biscuits and cookies, but I had close to no experience with making bakery products, or things in general that you’d make with yeast, waiting for it to raise. That is some magical, mysterious thing…
  Also my ex took cooking very seriously when he had the chance and he had pretty high expectations towards food, so I was pretty intimidated to make a meal at home. It’s a stupid thing, I should have just went for it, not fearing critique and have a learning attitude towards it, but I couldn’t, so I mostly just avoided it…
  Anyway, so that said, I had no problem with cooking, but had a pile of stress related to cooking for others, but here where I stay now with two amazing friends of mine, I had the experience that they were pretty enthusiastic about whatever they got, if they had a hot meal. They are working hard every day, so someone else taking care of food and them having a plate when they were getting hungry is all kinds of wonders. So that encouraged me a lot. Also in the very first days it came up that we should have pizza, and facing the prices of pizza over here – even the frozen pizza sometimes as well, shocked me – I decided that I’m going to Make pizza.
  There are many things that can go wrong, so I thought that to test my baking skills and my friendship with the oven, I should probably try something else first. I decided that a messed up bread is less sad than a bad pizza, so I set out to do that first. Having no bread at home one day and me feeling really lazy to go to the shop resulted in my first bread attempt. It turned out okay and about a week later I gathered my courage one day and made pizza. It turned out nice! Yeeey! I managed to make pizza! They were happy, I was happy and the pizza vanished. Level up!
  Also baked a sponge cake last week, cause we all felt like having cake, but again – prices are ridiculous and I said well I have the capacity to make a cake – give me whatever you want in it, and I shall bake a cake. And so a coconut&chocolate cake happened. It was yumm.
• Monitor my expenses #adult
  Ever since I’ve set off, I put down a note of my spendings. I put down a note whenever I pay for something and every so often I copy those notes to a big spreadsheet where I can look back on what do I spend on and how much money have I spent overall. It’s crazy… I never did anything like this. I had the intent to do so, but I was just never organised enough to keep up with it – it was never a priority. Now that I have the quest of not spending more than 10 euro/day on average, I had to somehow keep track of my money flow to see if I’m succeeding or not. Taking a quick look at my expenses now says that I’m not doing bad. I haven’t updated it in two weeks, but I’m doing okay. 🙂
• Setting goals #adult
  I’ve always sucked at setting goals. That means commitment, focus, it means that you rule out other things in favor of your prior choices. Choosing things and making decisions is hard.  I also had this horrible habit of halfheartedly decide on doing something and then doing everything else but that thing. That is not really a good way to go about things, so I knew I had to grow out of that habit. The change is slow, but it is a growing process. Last year I went through the book called The power of habit, this year through the Talent is overrated and these pushed me further. Learning more and more about how people set goals, reading all the articles about how you should do it didn’t get me to actually do it though. The way it started to work is that two of my friends had a meeting every Monday, setting goals for the next week and telling how much of last week’s goals did they achieve. This sounded intimidating for me when I first got to know about it, but I wanted IN, so I wanted to build myself up to it. After awhile I gathered myself up, came up with a few things I actually want to work on and jumped on board with the Monday ‘office hours’. It works. Recently I also made a spreadsheet where we put down the goals, whether they were achieved or not and I also make sure to write down the ‘achievements’ of every day, even if they are not related to the weekly quests. It’s cool. ‘ been at it for a few weeks now, and it works so far, so I’m pretty content with that. Now the next step would be coming up with longer term goals and plans, then basing the weekly ‘schedule’ on those. Bit by bit, I learn how to be an organised person if I need to be. (And well if I want to manage projects, get things done for myself and do freelance work, then I really need to be.)

Now this came to be a huge wall of text, but I guess whoever is around is used to those by now. 🙂
Thank you for reading my randomness!

I’m so great at this blogging thing that another month has past since my last update. So reliable, much wow!

Oh well… I was planning on making a nice summary post of my travels for the Day 100, but that happened to be a fairly busy dayn and also the first day of a small period of internetlessness (what a lovely word). And as I’m obviously great at creating contenti in advance, that never passed the early-early draft phase. Oh well…  But now here I am, kicking myself to do it, so as usual, putting word after word until something comes out of it.

So guess what, this is Day 127…
That is incredibly weird to think about. I have packed up and started living off my backpack 127 days ago! O.o
Factoring in that I jumped back home on the road for a week once, cause that was the most convenient stop and I really needed a break, we can still say that I was abroad for 120 day up until this point. That is freakin’ crazy.
Day after day what I’m doing feels completely natural and normal. And every once in a while it just hits me in the face – I either just marvel at it or grin like an idiot. It wraps around me and I don’t believe that this is happening to me, here, now, still.  It hit me when a bit over a week ago I was walking on the street on the outskirts of Dublin with 4 amazing friends of mine. We just walked on our way to get to a café, and as I was strolling a bit behind them, listened to them chatter and observed the sunny street it just hit me. I love these people, this feels both unbelievable and perfectly normal. I love my life. I’m incredibly grateful for being here.
Another moment of sudden realisation was a few days prior to that, when we were in England, on a sandy beach with perfect, mild and sunny weather, and ran to the sea, splashing around in the shallow water like kids, drawing patterns in the sand with seashells and talking nonsense.

Right now I’m after a few weeks of being highly social and this is quiet time again. I met with a lot of people on the last week of stay in London, and a fair few after that and then it was the 2 weeks of greatness, reuniting with friends. Now I’m catching up with people online and with being so lucky to be in an inspiring environment, I’m sinking in the learning and creating mode. There are many things to do, both exciting and boring things, but all of them are important. The soulsearching and path discovery is still on the board – I’m easily distracted, I want to change my goal everytime I hear about something shiny, but thankfully there are many overlaps among things that interst me so I guess if I keep thinking, learning and processing about most of them, they will build up into something that I’m really happy with. We’ll see. Life is a non-stop self-discovery anyway. 🙂

So here is a pile of numbers and random bits of thing that I’ve done so far:

During my trip so far I have stayed in 5 different countries (Italy, Portugal, Croatia, UK, Ireland + popped home for a bit as i said, but that doesn’t count) in 15 different cities and  altogether  21 different housing locations.  6 of those were CouchSurfing hosts , 2 Workaway place, 1 random person, 4 different paid accomodations (hostel, apartment, hotel, airbnb) and 8 friends.

I managed to meet 21 people from the amazing community of the Oatley Academy, some of them people who I befriended last year, some of them I’ve never met before.

Gained about 130 new facebook friends (not like FB friend is a measure of anything, but oh well), depened friendship with numerous people and built trust with people who I have not really talked to or with whom we were only on casual terms before.

I went to 2 international events – Bologna Children’s Book Fair, and the Independent Festival of Creative Communication (where I was on team as a volunteer).
And I’ll be going to Thought Bubble in September as a volunteer as well – woop-woop!

And here are some random things that I did (/that happened to me) that make interesting/treasured memory bits in no particular order:

– drank wine with new-found friends, sitting on a pier in Portugal
– showed around my portfolio asking for feedback of professionals
– had pizza in a park with friends, talking nonsense and laughing a lot
– played hug delivery service, making sure that whenever someone tells me that I should hug someone they know and I’m around I actually go up to them and give them a hug 🙂
– was talking on a live stream – about sketchtravelling
– tourguided 4 hungarian people in Portugal (this was the scariest thing I’ve done this year so far)
– went up on a stage and presented my art pieces on an event
– applied for things I earlier would have dared to apply for (events, training programs)
– walked barefeet on the beach in the ocean
– hugged parts of a stone cirlce
– dined in a sushi restaurant
– gave a hug to someone I admire and who I thought I wouldn’t even meet
– made people open up by asking honest questions and listening carefully
– engaged in conversation with strangers
– did tai chi with friends
– dared to reach out to people who I am intimidated by
– sang out loud with people around
– went to life drawing class in a foreign land
– learned about coaching and realised another path I’m interested in
– had a burger that was served a glass dome filled with smoke
– listened to irish music in a pub in Dublin

and many-many more… so many treasured memories, so many amazing people.
Happiness overflow.

Sidenote: I started an instagram account where I post some photos – not really a “travel album” as such, but it has random bits of places that I find visually interesting, check it out if you want to: https://www.instagram.com/feleritravels/

Have a great day everyone! *hugs*