On:

I think I always start writing posts with putting on some music (this time, it’s Radiohead) and starting typing anything that comes to mind… Writing doesn’t really start with what a post would start with, except for this one I guess -I don’t want to edit this out now for some reason. *shurgs*

I’m sitting in a cafe Nero in the southern part of London, sipping on my cappuchino, still savoring the last bites of my slice of lemon cake – the luxury of the week. It was not great.
I’m sitting beside a wall of carefully selected and arranged books. Whoever ordered these books, was fairly particular about what they wanted . books of similar size, with black cover and golden or silver typeface. For the color pop, you gotta have a few red books too though and then to make it look a little bit less forced, you can buy a couple of random ones, but make sure they are the same size. For I moment I wondered if they were real books at all… I’m one table apart from the wall so I won’t check – the question will be there, hanging in the air, unspoken, unexplored. Oh the great mysteries of life. 😀

I’ve been meaning to post something for way too long now. I have many ideas about well-constructed posts, with messages, advice, funny stories and many great things, but when I sit down and start to write, it becomes and endless rambling without any sort of structure. It’s more of a diary than a useful blog and a sloppy one from that category as well. Flow of consciousness. Random things….

Anyway, I decided that today I’ll not only get out of the house, but brink my laptop with me, find a cafe, sit down, start putting words after one another and here I am, doing so…

After spending around 2 month back home, I now came to the UK. I’m in the midway of a 2-week internship at an illustration agency, before I move on to meet up with some great friends and then with them, buzz around in Leeds for the Thought Bubble Festival. Good times!

The things I’m doing is a two week unpaid internship where I’m just helping out in the office doing whatever they need me to help out with. I get some travel and food costs covered at the end (hence my luxury day – yay!), so with that I can hopefully manage to get my 2-week time mostly free of cost. That is only possible, because of a friend that offered to host me who happens to live a 20 minute stroll away from the agency. I’m lucky in many ways and I feel incredibly grateful for that.

I haven’t made it to the city center this time either and I probably won’t do while I’m here. I have no reason to, unless some local friends want to meet up.
Funny how this is my 3rd time to London and I still barely did any of the touristy things. That’s just not how my travel works at the moment I guess. Nor what my wallet is prepared for…

But I totally act like a tourist in another sense – I walk around on my way to or from ‘work’ and I stare at the world around me with an awe and I take photos of pretty much every blade of grass. English houses amuse me so much. I love the bricks fences, the variation of doors, window types, the lush greenery in the front gardens. *Click* Photo taken of a patch of moss here *click* photo taken of cool-looking house number *click* a pretty flower *click* a porch… People on the street must think I’m totally crazy for stopping at every door and to be fair, they are probably right.

The weather has been really nice too, so I’ve been sketching outdoor every day since last Monday and I decided that I’ll keep this up for the rest of my time in town. I’m 6 drawings in and still happy with it. I’m not putting a lot of pressure on it – they are just 15-35 minute sketches with one marker (an a pencil undersketch if I feel like it) on a small, postcard sized paper. I think my marker will give up tomorrow though, so I’ll have to switch another one. I still don’t want to allow myself to buy art supplies so I’ll switch to one of the big permanent markers I have…

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What else is going on?

Well, a month before I came here, I applied for a job back home and they were supposed to get back to me at the end of August. I guess that means I’m not hired. In that case, the plan was, that after my trip to Poland, which wraps up after the first week of October, I was going to go home, find a place to stay, a job, and give myself half a year to breathe, build things, settle down a bit.

Yesterday it hit me that I’m not sure if that’s the right plan. Finding an affordable apartment back home is not easy. A random job I could probably find easily, but it probably wouldn’t be easy to put money together. Why do I want to go home?

Do I want to? It seemed like a good idea, but I’m not sure anymore. There are a couple of things that it would be worth being home for – there are many interesting, exciting things happening, projects building, friends getting closer, inspiring people popping up on my radar. I want to touch base with people, I want to nurture myself, learn new things and give myself the space to create. But these latter things I can do without settling home.

What made me start re-thinking this again was that I realized that if location didn’t really matter, than maybe I should be in a country that either pays me really well for a random job (to save up to buy myself flexible time afterwards), or has a good potential for appealing work opportunities or pays fine and allows me to gain language skills. Or somewhere where I Know, that Good, Inspiring friends are around. Surrounding myself with great people is still very high on the priority list – if any of such friends would say, let’s move together and support each other, building something up, I’d be very eager to make a move towards that…

On the top of the language list is spanish and french I think. I haven’t been to France yet though and I have no language base so I wouldn’t be confident in moving there straight away, cause I don’t have enought mone at hand I think I couldn’t find a job straight up…

Then would come portugues and italian. I’ve been meaning to really learn languages for so long now and I’ve made so little effort and progress on that field for a long time now it feels like I wasted something… I either need to make enough money to enroll in a course or put myself in a different language environment. Otherwise I won’t do it…

So yeah, there is that…

Where should I go? What should I do?

While pondering about these things I’m also trying to figure out my path with art. Next week, I’ll have a portfolio review with the manager of the agency I’m interning at, so yesterday I’ve been putting together a pdf with my images that I see as a potential fit for their company. I have a pile of questions swirling around in my head and I realised that I’m eager to hear what they think. That might help me pick a direction for now – maybe not a geographical one, but at least an artistic career path. We’ll see.

On:

There is this strange feeling when I change between places, groups of people or as I refer to them, different realities. Sometimes it’s exciting, sometimes draining, sometimes just odd and most of the time it goes completely unnoticed – just this familiar tingling sensation in the back of my mind. It depends on how familiar the environment is, I guess… the recent one is a bigger stretch, so I’m very glad that it worked out to have a week long ‘transition break’.

I was spending about a month and a half in a hostel in Zagreb which was a very interesting ride in and off itself. It was a fairly different type of hostel than what I’m used to, but it still had a pile of well-known scenarios so it felt both alien and familiar. Anyway, it was packed with experiences with intoxicated people,procrastination and casual travel-small talk. When I was talking about it I often said that it’s a roller-coaster realm for me – at certain times of the day I had a lot of fun, talking with interesting people, dancing, painting murals, and at other times I heard a voice in my head ‘What the hell am I doing here?’. It was crazyland. But I met many great people there (I believe I made a few friends) and I definitely have a pile of fun memories that I’ll carry with myself.  I wasn’t sad to leave the place, but I did wish I could have some of those people in my life a little longer.

I’ve been back home for a week – breathing out, catching up with a few friends, having some potential-work conversations and rearranging my travel gear for what comes next. Even within this ‘transition time’ period home, there are so many different environments – going for a coffee on a casual networking meetup with art friends is very different from having lunch with my brother, or grabbing a beer with a friend, popping in to my art school, having a chat with my Dad, finally having the chance to catch up online with friends who I haven’t had a proper conversation with for months. Different layers, tones, topics and level of honesty… With going through these usual rounds, in the familiar, but varied environments I kind of tuned back to myself I think, which I really needed. It would be great to also have the chance and the time to get into the creative and productive mode – painting and studying intensely for a set amount of time, but that shall come later…

Tomorrow I’m heading to the southern part of Czech Republic. I’m volunteering for a an event out in the nature with yoga/meditation every morning, workshops of movement, storytelling, crafts and many other things throughout the day and bonfire and music in the evening. A camp out event with no electricity and a ‘no drugs, no alcohol’ policy. I hope for a lot of stargazing, meaningful conversations and meeting inspiring and driven people that are leading interesting lives.

Soon enough, I’ll get to know what it actually is.
A week ago I felt frustrated, unwilling and lost – I was trying to come up with excuses so that I can get out of this deal, cause I was just exhausted and it is a bit outside my comfort zone (getting there with public transport from here seemed quite bothersome and being out in the nature with no urban comfort is not something I’ve done lately – I’m borrowing a yoga mat and a sleeping bag and it’s up to the organizer where I’ll sleep as I’m not bringing a tent).
But bit by bit I made the steps necessary and as things fell into place and I got some rest too, I am now excited to go. I’m still have concerns about discomforts I’m likely to face (oh hello allergies!), but I did everything I could to prepare and I’m going to jump in anyway. I love nature, I LOVE interesting people, I really miss sitting under a starry sky and staring into a fire until the dawn.

It will be great.

On:

First of all, happy St Patrick’s day to y’all! :))
Here’s some music for you that always fills me up with energy, makes me want to jump high and scream of enthusiasm.

 

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaahaw!

I should listen to this tomorrow morning too I guess.
Breathe in, breathe out… I set sail tomorrow – well to be more accurate, I fly away, but still. 🙂
I don’t know if this ever becomes easier… it’s still scary and just because I know that things will be alright it doesn’t mean that I don’t have this strange tension in my chest. Well, the trick is to do it anyway I guess.

So the current plan is to get to Bologna, where a friend is going to greet me at the airport (I’m looking forward to seeing his grinning face :))), then I find my host, who I found through Couchsurfing and who was kind enough to offer to host me for the full 2 weeks I intend to stay in Bologna.
I contacted a few other people who I met there (and stayed with) last year, so one of these days I should be grabbing a drink with them too, but we’ll see how that goes.

Then later comes the actual reason, I’m going to Italy, the Bologna Children’s book fair.
There I’m hoping to show around my portfolio, take notes on what publishers seem to like, dislike, get to know what publishers would I be a right fit for and hoping to gather contacts who I could submit my work to for getting illustration jobs.

After the event, there’ll be a few days of breathing time and then with a good friend, who is also coming to the event, we’ll fly to Cologne and then get to her place. She invited me to stay with her for April, so I’m crashing at her place for a few weeks, hoping that we can gather both our notes from the event and after the overwhelm have passed, we can make some plans on how to move forward with this quest. 🙂 Mutual support and butt-kicking is ought to happen. 😀 It could be also fun to come up with a project together, but we’ll see how things will pan out.

No exact plans are set for my stay in Germany, but in the meantime there are things in motion that are calling me to Ireland again (best thing to talk about on St Paddy’s, eh? :D) so if things go well, I’ll have to look at convenient flight options and find my way back there again. If that happens, I’ll be promptly looking for a job over there and hope for the best. Fingers crossed. 🙂

There are a few plans for the further future as well, but as last year had it as well, I have about 1-1,5 month worth of somewhat solid plan and then the rest will happen dependent on how things keep rolling. The control is not entirely in my hand and that’s fine – I move with the flow of things, see what comes up and what makes most sense at the time.

Thanks a lot for all the great people, friends and family, who support me and allow this to be possible! You are great! <3

Image result for hug

On:

Hello 2018,

I still have no idea of what I’m doing, I’m still battling with crazy thoughts, indecisiveness, too many ideas, no commitment, fear of growing roots and all the other lovely things.

I’m still at home, less of a hermit these days – managed to catch up with some people and reach out to others – I’m trying to push myself to be productive as well as social.

So what comes next?
As usual, I’m juggling a few things, not committing 100% energy to anything (I’m not sure yet if that out of fear or if that’s just my wiring… we shall see), but at least now I sort of have a main focus. I booked a flight and arranged a host – I am going to Bologna again this year.
I’m going to attend the children’s book fair and I really hope that this time, being a bit more aware of how things work over there, I can perform a bit better. Right now the primary goal is to rework my portfolio for that event and I aim for contacting publishers with it before I get there.
Ideally I would be able to set up interviews with places that are interested in working with me and arrange the rest of my attendence around that. I don’t know what are my chances, but I’ll give it a go. If nothing works out, I can still just go, queue up for portfolio reviews, try to make connections.

This time I will hopefully be less overwhelmed to begin with – not having the pending issue of “where the hell do I sleep” that I had last year would be great. Fingers crossed.

The ticket I booked is one way only…

I don’t yet know if I’m staying longer, if I move on from there or come home. I contacted one person on Workaway to ask about their availability and also browsed around a bit for interesting projects in different parts of Europe as well as a few flight options. I don’t know what I’m up to yet…  Probably I should have a bit of “breathing time” after the event, organizing my notes, contacting the people I meet there, taking their advice and applying newfound knowledge, but doing so could be possible in a work-for-shelter environment as well if it’s the right one.

…

The other stable point of the year is that I want to go to Leeds again. I had such a blast at the Thought Bubble festival, that it is a MUST… I talked to a friend and we decided to apply together for a table to exhibit. In all honesty, I’m scared as hell.. I never did anything like that… But I applied and they shall decide if I’m a right fit for the event or not. If not, I’m going to be a jolly little volunteer again. And even if they accept it, I want to work on the setup and wrap up process – it was just too much fun not to do so… plus if I have to table, it will be great to take my mind off the stress of that with having things to do 😀
But I should know more about that sometime in February. Until then, that quest line is back in the shadows. 🙂 I’ll deal with it when it comes forward…

What else? Humm.. not sure.. I’m sketching, painting, getting in touch with fellow artists, try to poke both myself and other to stop overthinking everything, to dare to try and to start getting things done. It’s alright… we can do this! 🙂

Jump!

On:

So here it is… the first Week I started back home.

I got back home on Wednesday (which was Day 245 of the ‘living out of a backpack’ quest)

Many people asked how it is being back and most of the time my answer is, it’s odd.
It truly is… but the really weird thing is how it is completely normal.
Last week I was walking on the seaside in a sunny autumn day in Barcelona and yesterday I was walking around the neighborhood to stroll while it’s snowing, and it feels absolutely natural. Sure the most useful skillset I had during the trip was adjusting to the new scenes of my life very quickly, but still…
There are sooo many things that are different in this daily reality from the one I had on the go for most of the year and switching back to this makes the whole trip feel like a dream already. This is the 5th day since I’m back and it already feel like it was a long time ago… or rather, it wasn’t even true. THAT is weird.

Anyway… here I am now. Tomorrow I’ll be catching up with friends from here and reconnecting with many beloved people – I’m sure that meeting them will make me more grounded and I’ll be in the state of overflowing love just as much as I was on my farewell party. I’m grinning already just from the thought of hugging these folks again.
I’ve been a hermit in the past few days, just breathing, working on things, painting, reading, and reconnecting with people from other places over the web and trying to gather some of my ideas on the ‘now what’. I know that soon enough I’ll have to answer that question for myself. Others have started asking me that already and I’ve been asking myself as well… I have many ideas, many dream-bits, but no plans. There are a few things I’d need to know more about before I can pick a path. I want to talk to people and explore ideas further before I commit to anything.
I love the freedom of choice, but, man, when I have to make that choice I realize how much I struggle with making decisions. Haha 😀  Ohwell…

For now, one of my quests is to make sure that as I go on with my daily life, I identify the habits that are connected to this place, this reality. Habits that I managed to change when I was at other places, surrounded with different people. I catch myself falling back to bad habits and as I realize that I try to make a conscious effort to hold on to new ones or at least making a mental note to bring the new ones to this rhythm as well later on if I can.
There were some precious little rituals in my life that I grew to like a lot and there were things, that I experienced through living with certain people, things that I want to bring into the life I build for myself. For example having a daily routine that includes quiet time, eating better, going outside more even when I don’t have a “reason” to, approaching communication differently, develop a better sense of listening and building relationships in which I also feel heard.

The logistics of life will have to be put together as well of course – income, home and such quests, do I stay at home, do I look for opportunities elsewhere? Do I look for a job or do I try to build myself one? Do I look for an apartment here or in some other country? Do I want to set out travelling again? If so, would I do it the same way?  Many questions that I honestly don’t know the answer to yet…

Let’s just breathe and process things for another week, shall we?

On:

After weeks of  thinking and internal battles, I allowed myself to make the decision of changing plans and going home.

Yesterday I’ve felt particularly exhausted. As I was looking at flight ticket possibilities as I was still considering going with my original plan of going to London, but I realized that if I had the chance to book a direct flight from Palma to Budapest, I would book it without hesitation. If this is the case, why am I torturing myself with coming up with all the great excuses to still make it to London? I could list all the great reasons on why to do it, I know I could have greatly benefited from it, but the truth is I just couldn’t bare the thought of having to deal with an extra flight and the challenge of having to figure out my accomodation in London. Every inch of me was against having to pack my backpack one additional time. As I acknowledged that frustration I allowed myself to let the opportunities of that extra trip go and booked my way to get home. I am sure that if I would have pushed myself to do it, I could have come out just as happy with my decision, but I am content. Everybody who I talked to told me to follow my gut as I’ve been doing so before, so I did. It’s time to go home and breathe a bit.

Today, after getting over with the ‘stress’ of making a decision, finally having that off my chest, and after a long good night sleep it just feels weird.
It is really odd to know that a week and a half from now, I’ll be home. It’ll be cold and dark, I will unpack my backpack, Iwill not have to figure out my immediate future, and will not have my life depend on the kindness of strangers. I will be back in my known and familiar environment and soon enough I’ll face the challenge of how not to slip back into previous habits that were not at all good for me… That won’t be simple.
After a few days of gathering my thoughts I will catch up with many people and then will be probably get caught up in the craze of the holiday season, and in the meantime I will have the daunting pressure of having to figure out what comes next. Oh well…
That’s a challenge for 2 weeks from now.

Now I’m spending the last few days in Mallorca – tomorrow is my last full day, I’ll fly off on Wednesday (I’m heading to Barcelona for a week before I go home.)
I have a pile of work I owe to people, so today I tried to wrap most of that up, but I didn’t manage to get as much done as I wanted to, partly because some back-and-forth with who I was working for, made me have to scrap a few hours worth of work, but well… that’s life.
I’m playing ‘catch up’ with my tasks, and doing my best to learn the lessons that brings.
I have to learn how to set my own schedule, I’m trying to learn how to have a healthy pace of work, how to get as much done as I can, not get distracted, not hop around with tasks if I can, keep a clear list of priorities and do all this in a way that allows me to have a well-rounded day as well. It’s an interesting challenge. I’m getting used to monitoring my work hours – something, I never really had to do before but something that is definitely very helpful if I want to have a career as a freelancer.
While I’ve been working as a workawayer at different places I always adjusted to the daily pace of my hosts. As I’m travelling around this is the case no matter where I stay – adjusting to whoever is kind enough to host me – but I should slowly start building an effective pace of my own. Due to my randomness and my job before I never really had a schedule of life, which came in handy since during my trip I didn’t feel like I broke out of my natural cycle of habits (I didn’t have them), but now it’s soon time to build that up to boost my productivity.
Well, let’s see what the next chapter is about… 🙂

On:

Heeelllo World!

Sooo, here I am 10th November, day 226, I’m currently in a small town, called Sencelles – still Mallorca.

Right now I’m staying at the place of a very nice German artist and trying to help her out with various thing in exchange for staying at her home and sharing meals. She is a very kind soul, her house is amazing, her cats are adorable – I’m at a good place again, as that tends to be the case…

In my previous post I mentioned that I was soon on my way to my next host, a workawayer with whom I was gonna work on Etsy and online shops in general. That worked out really well and even though there were a couple of challenging moments it came to be that after the originally set 9 days or so I managed to stay there a bit longer, then take a couple of days off to wander back to Palma, return to him again for a week and now I’m going to head back there on Sunday.
That guy is really amazing, I enjoy our conversations a lot, I love his place, the calm and quiet of that home, the rhythm of his days, his bookshelf- I just want to read pretty much every book he has. 😀 I already finished 3 and lately started the 4th one, but damn, I could live off that bookshelf for a year, even though it’s not a wall-wide thing…

The funny bit is the roller-coaster ride that was leading up to me still being here. Even before I went to his place, I felt like I would want to stay longer  (I didn’t know why exactly, although I conjured explanations of course, I’m good at that), but I seemed to hit a wall, it seemed not to be possible. So there I was with a person with whom we were talking about the flow of things, meditation, the purpose of life, the path one’s supposed to walk and the hints, signs and brick walls the ‘Universe’ might throw your way – and as I was trying to plan my way off the island (I did not want to leave but it seemed like I have to) I ran into walls constantly. For a very long time certain websites simply wouldn’t load for me even though they worked perfectly for my friends and seemingly to everyone else on the internet… so I got a lesson of stay put, be present, be patient, let things go, let it unfold… At times I was very frustrated, after every random ‘lifelesson’ bit I would feel like a kid, shaking her fist at the skies, asking ‘okay, was this  the lesson? Can you let me off the hook now?’ or saying ‘C’mon, it’s not up to me, what am I supposed to do?’. Some moments I was really frustrated, some moments I had this deep trust that something will happen… something always would happen. If the control has been taken out of my hands, I can only wait with openness so when the solution arises I’m there. Slowly but surely, bit by bit things shifted, changedand formed – I stayed around for an extra week and a half, I was given the chance to book my flight to get off the island, but then things would become weird again and I was getting the hint that I should still stay around – and I wanted to as well… so here I was, with the desire to stay, the chance not being given, and the ‘universe’ playing along my side, simply not allowing me to look at flights or to check in to my flight…
As soon as we would agree that I might be able to stick around for another week (but I’d have to sort out a gap-week inbetween), the websites I was seemingly blocked from, started magically work again… thank you World. 😀 But even so, just leaving that small town when I was going to seemed to run into challenges – we wanted to drive to the trainstation in the next town so that I can get to Palma and low and behold, EVERY road was closed for just that time when we were trying to get there. Bicycle race… I couldn’t stop laughing in the car. We would wander off to small roads only to find every possible solution to be blocked for the next 2 hours…
I’m not in a storytelling mode, so I’m not giving you a great insight on how this whole thing felt, but maybe one day in another format, or over a beer. :))
Anyway, at some point I just said it out loud multiple times and I wrote it down as well – if I come across a nice place by the next day, that could host me  for the coming week I forget about my booked flight and I’ll take his offer for staying for one more week and then.. well then we’ll see what happens.
Next day, my life was sorted out for the coming 2 weeks, my host offered to pay the price of the lost flight, and well… here I am, still in Mallorca.

The current idea is that after I wrap up the next work-session with him I’d be flying off to Barcelona for a week, and then from there to London for the illustration fair, and then home, but if I’m completely honest with myself I really have no idea about what’s going on now… I’m completely open to trashing all those plans, let’s see what the world holds for me. I didn’t dare to book any flights yet.

 

So anyway, what I hope I’m learning about lately is being present. Also a lot about honest and open communication. Clear, to-the-bone-honest, but non-judgemental communication. Maneuvering various kinds of conversations in a way that everybody gets to express their feelings, needs and preferences without creating emotional baggage. There is a lot of room for improvement, but just by bringing it to the foreground of my mind and reading about it helped a lot already.
Book recommendation:  Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

Another thing that was going on is Inktober, and people who follow me on social media probably ran into many posts with ink drawings – many plein air sketches. It was challenging at times, but then looking back it feels really great that I had such a productive month in October, finishing many drawings even if they were not huge, very creative pieces, but they are up to a level of finish, they are not just a pile of loose sketches. I should really try to build/keep the habit of getting things done day after day, cause apparently I am capable of doing so if I commit to it. There were a few days when I fell off schedule, there were about 2 days when I did not draw with ink and I think about 2 more when I didn’t finish the started pieces on the given day but I did make enough drawings for the days of the month plus I’ve made watercolor sketches as well. Also there was a day when I was really unhappy with my original sketch, so I just started over and made a new one from scratch. This is the album on my Fb page where I gathered the images that were dedicated to it.

Also I don’t think I’ve mentioned it over here, so shameless self-marketing time – I’ve opened a shop on society6 with a few designs, so Art prints, notebooks, T-shirts and such are available over there with a few of my artworks. There is many more I need to work on, and based on my newly found knowledge from the recent tasks I had there is an insane amount of things I’d need to do to be playing this online shop game properly, but for now it’s good. Designs are made available, and I’ve seen that they print well – the rest is marketing magic that I have to create headspace for. That is a quest for later.

FeleriSketches - deer - T-shirt
Head over to my shop to check out other designs (click on the image)

So anyway, I’m still here, still happy, still learning and I keep crossing path with amazing people.
I’m grateful for all the help and support of all the incredible people who are around throughout this trust-fall experiment of mine.

I love the whole world – boom de yada :))

 

 

On:

Today was the 200. day since I’ve set off to travel.

My last (very brief) update was about how I am on my way to Mallorca to get some summer feeling. I’m happy to stay that I have managed to get that – it’s nice and warm over here, but not boiling hot. I’m not the kind of person who would go sunbathing to the beach for days, but I did swim in the sea, I walked on the beach, collected pebbles, seashells. I ate tapas, paella, drank sangría and in general I’ve been having a good time here so far. I’m probably staying on the island until the end of the month, but I don’t have a set date yet of leaving. I’ve checked  some flight ticket prices today, so I have ideas, but it will be decided over the next week.

The odd thing to think about is, that now, going home came to the horizon. Based on the flight prices I checked and my current ideas of how I would want to do things, a month from now I might be home. I can’t really imagine that. Especially since I don’t have a “home” to go back to – when I set dates I will quickly have to start to arrange things so that I can have a home base somewhere, since I want to stay home for the winter, but only so much of a base, that I actually probably want to keep my mobility to set off somewhere for the spring again.
I don’t know what I want to do, but many things came up and there are events that I want to attend and people that I will have to see again. We were talking about art residencies, working together, camping together, seeing places, doing things. Many-many plans, but all of that is in this weird non-realistic realm.

Sometime soon, I will have to figure out a reasonable next step. I’ve spent most of this year wandering around, catching up with people, making new friends, gathering random experiences, observing myself and constantly thinking, evaluating, breathing. Next year I’m going to have to start to make things happen, and more importantly also have to make money. I will have to find jobs here and there, take on projects, figure out income streams and actually really start building up a path that will allow me to do all the things that I would like to be doing, learn all the things that I want to learn and be with the people that I want to be with.
I have a few ideas, but I don’t have a plan. I’m going to have to start planning towards the end of the year and then pull things together.

For now I will try to make the most of my time here – I’m going to a workaway host tomorrow and supposedly I will learn a great amount of new things of etsy and online shops and more importantly I’m going to meet new amazing people. As much as I’ve been in a socially exhausted state in the last weeks, I also keep looking forward to meeting people. Sometimes it is hard to actually pull myself together to set off, but I do go and I am happy that I get to know more and more interesting folks from all around…

But now I’m just rambling – forgive me, it’s almost 2 in the evening over here. I’m going to stop typing now and instead of going back to editing or saving this for later, I’ll just hit publish and go to sleep. Otherwise this would land in a pile of posts that never made it to the surface.

Bottomline stays the same as ever: I’m still alive.

 

On:

Today is the first day when it smelled like Autumn outside.
It’s a cold, rainy, grey day.

We’re flying to England this evening with the two friends who I was staying with for the last two months.
Two months… I can’t believe time just flew away like that.

Now comes a bit over a week’s worth of buzz and activity with a fair few friends and a convention, and then I’m going to Spain to visit a friend from back from and see if I can catch the last breath of Summer, over there…

I wanted to write a long, heartfelt post about all the things I’ve learned about and thought through during my time here, but there was always something more urgent, something more important, so that’ll have to wait. Or it will just remain unwritten like many other things I was planning on putting here.

Either, today is a day that feels unreal again – my bags are packed, and in 20 minutes we’ll be off to the airport…

171 day passed and still going. Still alive.

 

 

On:

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!