solo ida

It's funny because yesterday while I was train journeying from Osuna to Cadiz I wrote this long blog post with pictures and word lists to catch up on what has been happening since February 23, when I last wrote. 

And then this morning in the hostel I thought okay, let's post it, and then the Internet/universe did that thing where I suddenly lost it, all 1000ish words of it and pictures to boot. 

I have at long last learned my lesson and I am now going to forever write these blog posts elsewhere in a digital locale where I know my words just won't poof away into the ether regions of whatever online black hole it is that keeps doing this. 

So now I lay on a grassy spot close to the train station in Cadiz, on my way to Seville, where I will spend the next three nights and four days before I take the long long way home to Ljubljana. Long being a 7 hour train ride and 2 hour flight and 4 hour bus ride. 

It is a beautiful day, the palm trees waving their fronds lazily by a splashing fountain and a giant Spanish flag that ripples in the breeze. There are cruise ships pulled into the port here. It is Sunday, which likely means they are either beginning or ending. 

Cadiz is a beautiful slip of a town on the very edge of the continent. The ocean around us is blue, blue-green, dark blue, again and again, slapping gently the sides of ancient castles and walls built before the land known today as Canada was discovered. 

And wandering the streets you find magnificent university buildings and the wonder that is balcony and plazas and gardens, names and statues commemorated in their stout bust likenesses. 

Yesterday I fried myself on the beach, listening to the ocean and the Spanish rising up around me. The sun doesn't set here until later than 9pm, which makes pretty much every minute after 10am a reason for smart and UV-ray conscious people to seek shade. I did not. As such, I am crisped to another level, regardless of the sunscreen I did apply. (I promise Mom! It was just too scorching to avoid!) 

I have not been by myself with myself only me on a beach before, not quite like this. It's a really interesting experience--which, if we are being honest, actually applies to all solo travel. Finding an ideal place to situate yourself, providing snacks and drinks, grappling those hard to reach sunscreen spots (and ultimately failing, in my case), being alone with your thoughts. Alone with your thoughts and just yourself to amuse you. How in your head you get, but in a grounded sense, keeping you alert and focused and able to sink into who you are. In the quiet moments, drifting into memories that sort of glaze your eyes over, how you lose yourself in yourself. How much easier it is to see, a spy-glass perspective into what has come, what has brought you here as you, now, when you are so surrounded with such a new environment. 

Which is to say, I think that travel alone lends itself to a good deal of introspection balanced against (perhaps because of) the stimuli of new things. 

Which is to say, I'm going to take a moment to introspect here. 

It is May 4th. 

This is a day of departure for me. For the last two years I have been deliriously lucky enough to be going somewhere, places that have changed me. Two years ago it was Nicaragua. Last year it was Nepal. And this year I am in Spain. Although the alliteration doesn't quite flow, I am on the road ;)

So May 4th is special, because it is always the unknown and wavering and crazy beginning of things. And this May is an unknown and crazy beginning of (the end) the last full month I get to spend in Europe. 

Whoa. 

That. 

Nope. 

A bit of context:

I am coming from a week spent with my friend Mike and his parents and their family friends the Dartons (Kim and Sarah and Tom) in Osuna, a small white-walled town of convents and 16th -18th century buildings and friendly neighbours in the hills of Andalucía, having day tripped to Ronda (GORGEous), Cordoba (magical), and Seville (nice enough to return to, evidently, and soak in the gardens and palaces and cafes and horse-drawn carriages and all), listened to flamenco, played games (oh hell, the name game, bananagrams--Johnston family classics;), drank smooth Spanish vino tinto, enjoyed home cooked meals ft Spanish tomatoes, played on a football field, cheered for the local team, swam in crystal blue embalses, chatted till late, wondered about motivation and home and changes, read books, set the world right by twilight, ate ice cream, wandered, baked in the heat of the day, meandered to beautiful sunsets, stumbled across a white horse and heaps of greyhounds, became brown, laughed and laughed and laughed, indulged in coffee and chocolate, hugged, appreciated all the British wit (greatly), made music, felt how I have been here before, the magic of Spain and knowing this is one country I will return to, woke up to banjo playing, slammed words from the Oxford english dictionary, walked to old ruins, remained overwhelmed by the beauty and magic of moments like this one: 

and the stars, and how the sun did not set until so wonderfully late and how warm it was, and easy, and kind to be wrapped into family. Not to mention how very close I was to Vancouver, closer even then when I was in Toronto at Christmas. Because now Mike, who yesterday I hugged, is today back in Vancouver, has stories to tell and this kind of closeness that comes from a week spent together now and also the fact that I could say "see you soon", and it is. It is really soon, about a month and a half. 

Nope. 

What. 

And what makes that impossible is what has happened in the last few weeks of my being here. 

And what has happened in the last few weeks of my being here is this:

It is the 11th hour, pretty much, of my time abroad. I thought I had a pretty stable understanding of what the feels would be upon leaving. Mostly that it wouldn't be impossible or painful or much of that shattering kind of thing. I figured yeah, hey, it will be strange and difficult and bittersweet to go, but at least there is so much in Vancouver waiting for me that eh, I should be okay. 

And not that there is anything less in Vancouver (still a job and classes and friends from a year ago with whom I must catch up), but that now there is this very present and real anchor for me here. 

As Erasmus students, we all kind of recognize each other as floating and unattached from the location where we met and got to know each other, being as we are not from there. Ljubljana is not my home, is not his or her home or any of ours, only in the temporary sense. And up until a few weeks ago, I didn't know Slovene students enough to root me and say yeah, this is my home, here is my life, here I am as an anchor, a face and voice and laughter to know this place by. So my heart was all hey, this is fine, it's been a slice LJ and I know you'll always matter as a place I have lived and experienced for 9 months but it's not exacting or sharp or anything specific. 

And then, well, I got to know a number of Slovene students. And they have rooted me and grounded me in Slovenia as a place they grew up and call home and they have said, by way of late nights chatting and drinking wine and comparing culture and language and sharing experiences and opinions and memories and ideas, by passing hilarious notes and exchanging sassy messages and drinking beverages together and eating meals together and spending time: here we are as faces and names and lives you will never be able to shake from your experience of Ljubljana, will not be able to avoid when it comes to thinking of Slovenia. 

That all happened because we have a class together, our UN simulation course, wherein we have to interact as delegates and what have you, which means we just generally get to interact with each other. Which has led to this, first as faces in a classroom, then country names, then Facebook friends and then becoming real friends and now I'm here with this unexpected slew of great people of whom I am so fond and I'm looking around like really? Really heart, you had to go and get attached? 

You just had to go and find foxes in the desert and tame each other and become responsible for the things you have tamed and because you have to go you will probably cry but at least the wheat fields will always remind you and what

how does it always come back to the Little Prince 

except of course it does. 

This is why I get a feeling of nervous laughter tightening around my insides when I notice that it is May 4th. That I said "see you soon" to Mike. That five months have somehow passed since 2014 began, that this is how the year always flies, no time, just absolutely no time to breathe. 

Or, at least, by the time I do breathe, it just keeps going. So really all I can do is just keep breathing and just keep going right along with it. 

Something like that. 

Okay, so that's that, so now you know how much more difficult time has become for me. As a kind of impossible inevitability. Like, I know I cannot stay. I know I will leave. And I know I will have to say goodbye to all the people I've met and enjoy so damn much. And I know I will likely not see everyone again, and I know we will stay in touch, vaguely, over the years. And this is inevitable, that the leaving will happen. And it is also impossible, because it is just so much good right now, because things make me happy, these people make me happy. It is impossible because my heart is throwing itself against the wall knowing that there's nothing really to be done now but keep going. Nothing but to embrace the time I do have, and then moving when I have to. 

And it will feel impossible for a long time after, and that echoing ache will resound through me in those punching kind of memories, and yet, time will keep going. Life will keep going. We will keep going. 

I think Buddha really had it right, how attachment causes suffering. 

But I will, I think, always take that suffering if it means that there had been an attachment, a taming, a connection in the first place. 

Better to have loved and lost then never loved at all, right? 

Better to have the knowledge of laughing stars and desert oases, to have known the Little Prince and the consequent grief of losing him, then nothing at all, right? 

Something like that. 

I'm getting simultaneously too mushy and too grand, I see that. 

Let's continue. 

Picking up where I left off, arriving back from Portugal back in February...

I arrived back in Ljubljana and the next day picked my sister Valerie up from the airport for a visit and the next day we went to Venice for the weekend and it was wonderful, her whole visit was just fantastic on account of that feeling of waiting for my family to arrive at the airport so I can show her around my new home, the place I've been living in some other part of the world. My family. Because living on your own and being halfway around the world can be a bit of a thing and make you alone, and it is always comforting to be hugged again by family, reminded you are part of something, of several someones, and this never changes. Love you family. Thank you for letting me go and reminding me where to return. 

We chatted about life, walked around the town, visited Lake Bled and the Postojna caves and the LJ castle, ate chocolates and watched shows together, generally just enjoying the time together. A lot because I'm never home, but also now we are all of us siblings moved out of the house and no longer living together, which makes all our together moments that much more precious. 

Classes started and Valerie left and eventually I got into the swing of things, meeting some of the great new Erasmus students. And that nameless UBCer from my last post? He is Matt, and certainly one of my really great friends now, being able to experience Slovenia anew with him, exchanging UBC stories, speaking Vancouver-talk to each other. I am very glad he's here, and that we will be back at UBC together. It makes the experience, at least semester two of it, so much more real. Very glad being an understatement, but this is just a small shout out to many many hours and things and times together. You Matt. Yes you. 

Irene turned 22, Matt turned 21, a slew of March birthdays and goodness. I saw Angelique Kidjo on the first day of March, a Saturday, and missed places I have not yet known. And then we, Irene and I, went to Istanbul. 

This was Istanbul:

of colours and scents and damp running shoes and takin pictures and people watching you and dark eyes and teasing smiles and how it feels like this kind of thing has maybe always happened in the history of the world, spice markets and sweets for sale and these rich and intense colours and maybe it is just the infrastructure that creates these spaces that changes and maybe the clothing of the vendors but this, I loved this, was so captivated by it

after taking the public transit on a dark and rainy evening, getting off the tram at sultanahmet stop, lights of the street and restaurants shiny against gold casings holding Turkish desserts, no bearing and no idea where yet we are going, the call to prayer sounds out around us. And it wavers and sinks around the sounds of the Friday evening and it was so far from anything I've heard growing up, and I felt how far I was, how foreign I was, and something made sense then that has never made sense before, something below words and deeper than them, something beyond me

one of my favourite things of all the places we visited and especially in all the mosques is the script, the Arabic flowing on the ceilings and walls in inscriptions and designs, gold or blue or green or red against the tiles and candles. Looking at it, head tilted in awe, I feel like I am standing on the doorstep of a culture, a religion, a history I have not heard before in its own nuance and grit, a story and many stories that the west doesn't do right, does not do justice. And I know that I have to go further. The taste that Istanbul has given me of Islam is, I feel, just the beginning of that which I would like to learn, to know. 

   For a while I've had this seed of desire to travel to the Middle East, to see and learn and know and create for myself an understanding of such a part of the world that is so mis-portrayed back home. And for me, what I do know of Islam, a religion of peace, feels much safer of a space then what I've encountered in Catholicism. And I think the aesthetics are way more beautiful--mosques, minarets, design and architecture, from the Moors in Spain to the Muslims in Sarajevo. 

 (also I don't want to fight religion over the Internet, so please ask me personally more on this if you want.) 

Upon getting home and doing classes and meetings an discussions and things, my feet fell out from me when the ground gave away when the world carpet burned me again. I questioned what I was doing and how and what I was learning and how and the institutions I was learning in and of and about. I ranted. I was exhausted. It is a familiar tired, now, how the world just needs to shut off and stop it and I am crushed by the weight of how things are and how small I am. It is also, and I recognize this, the biggest privilege to be tired from this, this analyzing and seeing from the outside; it means I do not exactly have to face it, be actually crushed instead of intellectually and emotionally so. I am a step removed from it, in some ways--perhaps just in my head, that faux-shield that academia grants you, and all of this just adds up. 

But the city got sunny and 20degrees so I sat by the river and tried not to think or at least just to look up and breathe and all. 

I spent a weekend at home and then the next weekend in March, we went to Bosnia. We being Matt, Irene, Dominika from Slovakia and I hopped in a car and off we went. 

This was Bosnia:

Sarajevo

a history so present it is hard to call it past, a city that remembers, that is recovering, that is so old and new at the same time, a dividing line of collision for east and west and the people's peace and how politics intersect everything. 

Oh, and this most wonderful moment where we wandered into a small shop across from the mosque and the nicest Muslim lady ever, pregnant as the day is young, invites us in and finds us beautiful things, a translation of a Quran page for Matt and snapshot postcards and she keeps apologizing for her English but we are smiling so deeply, and just as we leave she tells us we can take gifts. Small bracelets of prayer beads, 33 or 99, held in a precious little bag and amber coloured or black or green and she tells us to have a nice day and we walk out of there half in love with what just happened, these small kindnesses, this welcome and patience. 

After a morning of Bosnian coffee and baklava, wandering the streets and passing mosques and churches and cathedrals and synagogues, we found ourselves again in the old town, strolling past shops of all these knicks and knacks of neat pieces of cultural heritage, the afternoon sunshine filtered by striped awnings. One shop caught my eye, filled with such beautiful copper plates and cups and those special sets for making Turkish/Bosnian coffee. We enter, greeted by the grey haired man hunched over his tools, paused in the process of making the coffee sets. And it turns out he is a UNESCO world heritage artist. 

Life. 

After one of the best free walking tours I've ever been on led by a charismatic guide with the most mesmerizing blue-grey eyes ever, we left early the next day for the town of Mostar, driving a most unexpected journey of mountains and reservoir rivers and charming small villages. Arrived just before the sun started to set and by the time we found our hostel, the sun was going down. Oh but what a town! A beautiful bridge spans a blue river, connecting the pieces of the town, which is old and cobblestoned and precious as anything, just asking to be wandered slowly and with laughter on our tongues, unimaginably delighted with it all. 

We stopped in Medugorje on the way back up to Slovenia, and took a coffee in Split, Croatia. Our drive back was conversation and music handed around under lightning storm skies and foggy-breath windows, cradled by the laughter and awe of the weekend. 

and after Bosnia the weather stayed sunny in Ljubljana and I didn't write essays or do things but I had conversations and potluck dinners and the kind of living stuff that reminds me how cool it is to be a youth hanging out with other youths from other places, and then I missed a bus and caught a train and missed another bus and caught a different bus to Berlin. 

This was Berlin:

I remember the day we parted, in April of my first year at UBC, almost exactly two years ago. We had had lunch at Burgoo, and by the bus stop we said goodbye. It was raining in that slow April way, and I said to Maneo and Kui, I wonder when we'll see each other again, and it was my first encounter with those kinds of goodbyes. Two years later I arrive in Berlin and there is Lisa in the bus station and she has a more pronounced Scottish accent and we hug for a long time. Proceed to the coolest flat ever, and tea and chats and wine and touring around and Vietnamese lunch and beers and live music and Mauerpark and flea markets and cool postcards and movies and time passing and Sunday clubs and the city by night and this city, Berlin. 

The wall

is something you cannot avoid. It is everywhere, the largest scar, the largest testament to this history if you cannot already read it from the stories of everyone around you. It was amazing to actually be in the presence of something you always hear about, the Berlin Wall. To see images you probably know by now, to know it was there, to stand in all your small humanity before it and know it was humans who built this. 

And humans who tore it down. 

One of my favourite feelings was walking up the street to the agreed upon meeting spot and recognizing Michael standing there, crossing the street and embracing Ndey again, such a beautiful bonus of a thing to spend time together and laugh and trade stories. To remember that we are not just passing lives, to know how things can continue, how we get to keep going with our lives in such a way that it is not impossible to see each other again. To take ourselves out of the context in which we've known each other and pick up. 

And so that goodbye, with Michael and Ndey, and the next morning with Lisa, was a strange echo to the first goodbye on that rainy April day two years ago, another of those see you sometime and that sometime could be whenever, could be never again. And it is okay this way. We will find each other when our paths are next meant to. 

What a feeling. 

And getting back from Berlin at 2 in the morning on a Wednesday, I set up base camp in Matt's apartment, pretty much, and then did ALL OF THE THINGS for school. In about 36 hours, I wrote about 4000 words for 3 different papers, sat a midterm exam after some form of studying, participated in our mock session, stayed up again till 2 to write the draft paper, and all around just motored through a whole bunch of academia. 

The Thursday evening after getting back, everything safely handed in, it was all I could do not to collapse. My oh my. That weekend I caught up on sleep and home base back in Canada, and then began our week of the last few weeks mentioned above, because it was opening session time and that meant a huge upswing of the heart. 

On the Easter weekend, aside from Matt and I practicing being roommates, we celebrated the holiday Monday Danish style--cold dishes, shots of vodka, and lots of beer. One of those days that begins in the afternoon and when you lock your door leaving your house you think 'I have no idea where this night may end', and indeed it winds through the hours and takes you places so that when you arrive home at 3 in the morning, you laugh at yourself for how these things go. 

And then it was just managing to stay on top of things and drinking mimosas at breakfast before class and then suddenly Thursday night rolled around and I found myself having to pack and gather documents for coming here. 

Here being the south of Spain for vacation time, and what a wonderful time it was. 

I left my apartment at 4:30am to get to the bus station with gratuitous amounts of time left. As I was walking in the pre-dawn darkness, the birds were chattering like it was high tea time, pretty and musical and surprising for so early in the morning. As I was walking in the pre-dawn darkness, a route I've taken so often now, I had a feeling. 

(congratulations, you had a feeling!) a feeling that rises and once you feel it you can't unfeel it: how I am going to miss this. This in the moment, for the week I'd be away, and also this as in all of it, what is now familiar and comfortable and some sort of home for me. And I was surprised I had that feeling--usually I am so focused on what's ahead I don't notice the place I am leaving. Not unless this place has some kind of hold on me (cough Vancouver, South Africa, Nepal cough). That I noticed I was leaving Ljubljana, not just going to Spain, rang a small alarm bell in my heart, that Ljubljana has a hold on me. 

And maybe that's what it is this whole time, all those thoughts on how I felt and how that changed. I am no longer just returning to Vancouver, upon which I was fairly focused, but also leaving here. 

I'm not sure I'm telling this right, or if it makes much sense at all. Or if you are rolling your eyes and banging your head against the wall for home much I talk about this leaving business. Send me a message or something if you'd rather I just didn't. And I would apologize for how very vague and unspecific I am in writing things here, but if you know me enough to read this, you probably know me enough to get it. 

One thing Mike said to me in a late night chat was just how much I don't take things for granted in the places I find myself and in my travels, something along those lines. And that's what I've inked on my body, how to realize this journey, this life, in every, every minute--or at least as close as you can get. 

So in the time we've got left, I think I will lose myself in just that: being here. 

Bring on the late nights and red wine and dancing and classes and reading and essays and picnics in Tivoli and Slovenian sunshine and Prešeren square in summertime and church bells and cobblestones and rivers and roads, rivers and roads, rivers till I reach you. 

x

-k

two

months since I last wrote. 

I'm lying on a squishy couch in a flat in Lisbon because outside the world decided to rain windy rain, so it's a casual afternoon in this ridiculous saga of life. 

I read over, not really meaning to, my first blog post from just after being in Slovenia for 24 hours.

It's so funny what time does, how it feels to look back on the beginning at now what is the halfway point, ish. Though technically I've already passed the 6 months gone, 6 months to come, there is a kind of heart swell in thinking when next I'm in Canada I will be in Vancouver. Also just that it's a sliding scale now where I get to live these next months with nothing left to climb away from a return. Those were feelings, at some point. 

And there are new Erasmus students coming in now, messages and emails about orientations and first dinners and all, and it makes me smile the way it made me smile to return in second year, feeling how I know things now and there is a whole new world about to begin for others. Which I think would be a really nice way of putting it, not that I am halfway to finished now, but that I get to begin again, new students and new classes and a pretty much new apartment. I can't really believe it, to be honest. Imagining this February as it is, knowing so clearly where I was last February, thinking of all that time that has elapsed since. 

I received a message from another UBC student who will be in Ljubljana next (this?) semester, which had me thinking of all those beginning things again. And the fact that I'm in Portugal right now, after a whirlwind stay in Spain, the fact that I could do it like this because of people I've met and friends I have now, because of the last 4, 5 months we have spent together, because I've been abroad for a long while now. 

Because I'm living somewhere longer in these next six months in Slovenia for one unbroken stretch of time than I've lived anywhere since leaving home for Vancouver. 

Here's what two months have been. 

Amsterdam, which was after a tour in Brussels with a tour guide I would have greatly enjoyed conversation with, history and politics and a country I never really thought of before, aside from chocolate and a French project I did in grade 6. Amsterdam was perfect timing, and finding a Nepali restaurant and saying namaste again like that and eating dhal with my hands, smiling, wandering the streets after and rounding corners and running into Liam and friends and then coffeeshops and red lights and nights and chocolate waffles and then a warm hostel bed with the sounds of bumping clubs. Amsterdam was seeing Kirsten on this side of the world and sharing that, an afternoon, an evening, a breakfast, a goodbye for another 6 months. Amsterdam was metros and buses, and then missing my flight, but working it out anyways. 

I landed in Venice and got a phone call about scholarships and for the last time took a bus from the bus station home to my apartment. 

Because then I moved apartments, and rescheduled my bus routes, but I'm in the city centre true now, so it has reoriented me and I love it. 

I love it, above the convenience, also for the freshness of it. The new bit. The second start. The totally solo move, the totally solo decision, the clean walls with no emotions and nothing attached, especially for the next chunk of time there. 

And Ljublj turned her lights on, and the nights got chilly but not freezing towards Christmas, and I got tired. I got tired in late nights and Skype dates and morning songs and presentations, last minute things I've known forever, and I got tired in classrooms and conversations and infuriating professors. I got rattled, leaked, couldn't breathe, couldn't sleep, and then started over again. Tired and checked in and checked up and last holiday dinners and last holiday white wines. 

And then the customs officer said "welcome home" after looking at my passport, getting off the plane from Frankfurt to Toronto, returned for the holidays. 

And I blinked strangely at that, those words welcome home, and I didn't know what to think, and I understood every conversation around me because it was all in English, and I couldn't focus on words because everyone else was speaking them. 

and then my family happened for Christmas, in a new house in the city, and we were all there again after more than six months being everything else, and it was unreal, probably just the best, to be bantering as we do, playing music and eating cereal and joking and tinking cutlery and making drinks and everyone again together, because all our lives are no longer close. That's a strange thing. That is a beautiful thing. 

I got to see people again. 

I got to do things with people again. 

It was nice, because it happened. Because it gave us all a little bit more, because I have no idea when it is going to happen again, truly. 

Celebrated New Years outside breathing frosty air and surrounded by thick-jacket bodies and fireworks that never ended and that kind of exhilaration of people and people and a reason to celebrate, the way everyone calls out to each other and loves it all, at least for a night. 

On the first day of 2014 I watched The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and somewhere between the soundtrack and the story, I knew it was going to mean something, and it did, and my mom asked me "that bus was like the ones in Nepal, huh?" and then I had to lock myself in the movie theatre bathroom and sob into a clenched fist, silent, for the emotions that overwhelmed me. I don't know what it was, what it is that did that. Just that it was. 

I thought--life is not so dramatic.

But it is not that. 

It is just being alive, and being places. 

And then there was Once, and live music, and best friends, and cold hugs and breath for goodbyes. 

And then there was this 

another Skype that saw me through the night into the morning and the words I wish I could be there, and the words you will be and the fact that this year I will be. What that means. 

And then there were giggles and sisters and a last night to puddle on a bed and be silly because now we're growing out, not of each other but of a shared space, and what that will become, no idea. 

And then there were hugs and snowstorms and a flight back. To return. 

It was 9 degrees when I arrived in Slovenia. 

I paid my bills and didn't do essays and couldn't sleep, for a long long time, and I caught up on Venezuela adventures and then saw everyone together on the same screen in the same room and that was weird and that's all I will say, and then I debated on the responsibility to protect and shut the fuck up, you condescending shitty professor dean, and then I booked a flight to Istanbul because deals and then train tickets in Spain and Portugal for exam break. 

It snowed, and kept snowing. 

January was all of that and returning and settling and letting time do its thing and messages and chats and lunches and the library but not enough of it, really not sleeping and studying in a very loose sense of studying, salsa dancing bars and that delight, coffees and laughter, tripping off of buses and hilarious mistakes on the dancefloor, and squeezing out squeezes in the self-imposed exile of everyone from everyone else that comes from exam times. 

And then it was quickly time for goodbyes for the beautiful people I've grown stupidly fond of in the time we've had, and goodbyes that got bonus time and at night on street corners and doorsteps, and I walked away and didn't know how to feel about knowing people I might not see again, and then, it is not even that intense, really. 

We are all just people-ing along in our mistakes and joys and sometimes we fall in line and sometimes out of line and it is always okay. I have to believe it will work out the way it is supposed to. 

***

And now I am sitting in the Lisbon airport finishing these thoughts. I've just spent two weeks travelling through two countries I certainly never thought I would get to see, not this time anyway, and I am absolutely enchanted, Spain and Portugal, February weather aside. 

It looked like this, for all that I didn't actually have a proper camera in my hands for most of it:

my deliriously happy train ride from Barcelona to Valencia. I'd not ridden a train proper before, and this was in Spain, by the coast, at sunset. Good first time, I'd say. 

this is my first paella cooked over an open fire outside at Irene's country house just outside Alcoy, and it was delicious, and surrounded by happy chatty laughing loud energetic Spanish friends, and we sat in the chilly house (not heated, and situated in a beautiful but windy crook) and it was all kinds of home in all these different ways, and I sat in a quiet kind of place and watched and laughed and listened. 

and this is the next day's lunching spot, where I could see the sea, after wandering a castle with all these buena vistas, before discovering the white walls and sunset of Altea, and looking out over how beautiful and fragrant this country is, I tried to breathe it in to the forgetful bits so as to keep it there for days I dream of travelling again. 

Spanish beers and flowing conversations in a square courtyard with those glowing warm streetlamps, and I love where life goes sometimes, and this is it. 

and then I was in Madrid on a slanty rain kind of afternoon and this just. I think my eyes became plates the size of paella platters to absorb all of it--including the gastronomic delights of the mercado and these buildings and what. How even. 

this was upon arriving in Cais do sodre in Lisbon. 

O, Lisbon, you city of lovers and streetlamps and cobblestone, poets and fado hidden and rising in corners of blue-white tiles and viewpoints--you rainy spectacle of sunshine and sea spray and old trams and discoveries

and people, whose homes open into yours and so easily we can be under verandas and sprawling trees and speak of things that matter and not and say grand things, say we know love and we don't know, have hope and cynicism and clap after jazz jam sessions and the wuiet of nighttime on weekdays and see the moon; it tastes like olive oil in the mornings and the way we sit in kitchens and open balcony doors and hold our hands out windows and feel cool pushing air and know the sight of rain to come and how it is so good, this

and I know even now I can't do it justice, this quick turnover of timetables and places, and I need some quiet moments just to let myself know it has all happened. 

We are landing soon 

and you know what happens then? 

We get the chance to keep going. 

I like that. 

-k

it's been some time

So I'm sitting in a slowly filling up airport. I arrived here about an hour and a half ago, in which there were two sleeping gentlemen on the otherwise empty airport chair-benches. 

I'm flying to Brussels, then taking a bus Brussels to Amsterdam for the weekend. 

I think I know the date(s) when I'm coming back to Canada for realz in June. 

I'm thinking a bit about dates now. Sort of, in a slow kind of remembering, tuned in. Mostly. 

How a week ago, I was going to Graz, Austria tomorrow. 

How two weeks ago, I was going to Rijeka, Croatia in two days.

How three weeks ago, I was in Belgrade.

How all of this has happened, how people have happened in the most stunning of ways. 

How this is no laundry list of events, not some kind of do it get it done say you did it sort of thing, but places that have showed me things, have expanded how I think of myself, this world, the people I know and the lives I don't, how every second and step inside every new border breaks down blank spaces on maps I never knew how to use, perhaps still don't, but my world has become colour now. Colour and sound, the way playlists will remind me of car rides and roll over sleepy mornings and the frost on the grass and road ahead.

I'm not feeling a creative kick drive at the moment to let you in on these last weeks, the trips and days and laughs and wonder and thing that have been my life of late. Though I promise to try and do so soon. 

Just wanted to put a bookmark in place of where I've been, perhaps as a reminder for stories, a reminder of dates. 

Here are some pictures. 

locks and rust and bridges and fortresses in Novi Sad, Serbia. 

0.62 cent beer in Belgrade. Less, if you convert the dinar to the euro. Haaaa

Rainy beautiful days in Ljubljana. 

Winter branches by my apartment, and cold evenings of clear skies and head craned backwards to see the stars, chatting with loves a world away and discovering the present tense, how it can be

Sunsets in Rijeka, Croatia, where we sat by castles on a balcony and squinted our eyes and drank cold coffee and laughed and spilled tea and were there, we were just there.

Baking bannock! Late at night a day after recovering my voice a day after losing it entirely in laughter and chatting around the city of Graz, all Christmas markets and German words and one foot in front of the other. It turned out pretty okay tasty for our international dinner the next day, where I couldn't speak from laughing so hard, how spectacular everyone was, games and desserts and words and company.

Ljubljana turned its holiday lights on.

I worked my way into the middle of the massive crowd full of children on shoulders and couples holding each other and old ladies tottering in; I wanted to feel the people around me, to know no one, hear the countdown in a language I'll not understand and that gasp, the collective "oooh", the mittened hands clapping and little kids laughing, that moment when wonder is not so far from all of us. 

-k

asterisk

I'm sitting in the library of our faculty, being super dutiful in getting things done before this weekend. For some reason (like as not related to the last 6 nights I've been up for one reason or another until 3am and beyond...aha 'sleep when you're dead'...right...), I battled an intense sleepiness while reading. Somewhere in some direction I could not pinpoint, there was this very slight cool breeze, which chilled me to the skin, easily working through my thin Nepali shirt. I remembered some fact from somewhere that if you are freezing to death, mostly you just fall asleep and never wake up. I perhaps entertained that thought for a moment, though "freezing to death" was a rather grand exaggeration of the cold. 

To my left is a shelf of "305 študije spolov", and a bunch of books on sexuality. Casual reading, anyone? (Memememememememeeeee!!!)

I figured now would be as good a time as any to catch up, though I hardly remember where I even left off. 

Mm. Venice. 

Mhmm. 

By day time 

the slap of the sea and a sky that eventually cleared 

me being pleasantly lost down canals and alleys and the Monday morning sounds of a slow start

GONDOLAS!!!

Which I didn't ride, but I did take the water bus on tight timing back to the bus loop (haaaaa) and managed to get to where I needed to go in time. 

And it is true when they say this city is sinking, temporary walkways set up around puddles-turned-rivers. As I walked by the cafes by the Rialto bridge, one of the waiters waiting on customers to approach said "lunch and a swim?" and gestured to the amount of canal swirling around the tables. I laughed. For real though. 

Made it back into Ljubljana in enough time for class, which in part featured a Russian economics prof, and I struggled with someone's opinion on how to fix things and with Russia being Russia (yoh) and migrant attitudes and then went home and slept. 

Slept through Tuesday and commenced my week of catch ups, still reeling in delight over the necessary weekend that had passed. 

I think we know who is better at making faces ... (ahem) 

Can you see the me in the postcard? 

And it was long chats and catching up but surpassing that, really, and discovering the meaning of family and of complete intensity of feeling and what two hours of sleep do to your dreams (Francis) and watching sunsets through the Internet and being able to hear again voices that have been gone a while. I wondered over feelings of together again,  just as easily as I eyes my calendar of 8 months with a fluttering sense of unknown and untethered-ness. That gripping of the oars and setting sail, kind of, except here I still struggled with the swing and pull of it, what rides feel like late at night and walking home alone, that sort.

I was overwhelmed with a need to bake.

So I did.

And words jarred batches of cinnamon cookies into burning ness and I thought, huh, that's probably related, and words shook me and I was a bit of a mess, flour included, alone on a rainy afternoon/evening/night. 

And then I slept and then I woke up and this happened 

Metelkova by daytime, and then bus rides and sharing cookies and exploring caves and definitely being a hobbit with long lines of flickering light along edges of cave paths and a roaring roaring river that flushes the significance right out of you on the inevitability of nature 

Lights and skies at the end of the tunnel, and this was me emerging

And people just became such a thing, such a thing. And lifted me and being outside and people. 

Yoh.

these people :) 

So we explored 15th century frescoes in old old churches and that Slovenian countryside that keeps reminding how beautiful things are 

And i love it. 

Monday was a drag into class and then a truly kick-ass, intelligent, not-patronizing, pregnant professor ruling the world for a bit, and then I left to pick up some juice to go with some rum and then discovered the hilarity of mirror angles and tattoos 

and danced my kukere way to the bus stop and to a gathering of Germans and Spanish and Finnish and Lithuanian and Slovenian and Czech friends and soon to be friends. 

A gathering like the times before, alcohol and good playlists and chats for always and then dancing. 

And because we rule so much more, limbo'ing. And cha-cha'ing. And macarena'ing. 

Tomfoolery and hilarity on the way to the club and hey, it's a Monday night. Dancing cut short and fresh walks home and hello, 4am and that delicious soreness of foot that arrives from a night of fantastic people and dancing. 

And this I love. 

This sign was especially funny the next day. Duck-headed triangle child. 

And then it has since been a pick me up of people and points of brightness and lunches with friends and plans to Belgrade just happening to work out.

And I'm left looking at the things that have lines up and I feel like I am catching my stride, a weight has been lifted and I can move freely now. 

Freely to class that is. 

And then to Belgrade tomorrow. 

And the next next next days, and who knows all of this, all of this possibility, if only of being found and letting this happen. I am gathering energy after chasing, perhaps reaching, and I am no longer. 

I am made and feel this. 

keep going

-k

*"Don't chase people. Be yourself, do your own thing, work hard. The right people...the ones who really belong in your life will come to you. And stay."

had

I want to eat the five franc coin. 

I realized this when I landed in Geneva, from Venice, and I was purchasing a ticket for the train into the city. It spit out my change, of which the five franc coin was a part, and I laughed in delight at how very large it is. And then I wanted to eat it. I don't know how this thought appeared but that it didn't. Chomp. Maybe it reminded me of those cheap chocolate loonies we'd have when we were little. Except it's silver and larger and made of real stuff you can't easily digest. I wasn't particularly hungry...I just...I wanted to eat it. 

I battled this craving and came out of the other side, managing not to eat the five franc coin on my ride into the city, and not eating it when I arrived, totally lost and with no sense of where things would be. Okay, just so you're not in suspense: I never did eat the coin. But if you saw it, I think you'd feel the same way. 

Wandered past a high school thinking "not sure this is where I need to be", so I drift along the afternoon sunny streets of Geneva until off far in the distance and just over the tops of those beautiful balcony buildings I spot this misty spray jet of water and I think: go there.

So I do, wandering past Gare Cornavin and that main street there and I say "wow", and it is wow, it is almost sunset and I find myself on the edge of the massive lake in the middle of Geneva. I walk over the bridge and you could try but you wouldn't succeed at wiping the grin off my face, I'm in so much awe. I laugh about all the beautiful things, the swans, the colour of the water, the flowers posted along intervals, the Jardin Anglais, the everything. 

I'm smiling this big, at every one who passes 

and part of everyone who passes are the business men in their shiny Rolex watches and tailored suits who are wearing backpacks and taking pictures of the sunset. One rides by me on a scooter, one of those basic metal contraptions that could amuse you for hours as a kid, just swinging his leg and pushing off and not a care. 

So I fall in love with them all in their humanness, because you forget that even the suit jackets see the sunsets sometime. 

:| 

I just lost two hours of words here. 

*looks at the tower of feels and frustrations*

Grrrr.

So I will tell you my weekend like this:

because it was something I needed that I could never have known if it wasn't for the ways in which Octobers have become strange for me and this time it was still too, and what I thought was freedom was some kind of emotional tethering to a beautiful kind of once we'd had and no longer do, and I didn't realize how much I will never get what's gone back again until I look up into my horizon and even though my arms are out like I can hug the whole world I hadn't left the harbour yet, 

so I've set sail and grabbed the oars and am harnessing this wind I've got that has come from the present, and of loving in the letting go and one loves the sunset when one is so sad and were you so sad then and I don't know what it is, what it was but that I am setting into what I will have, perhaps we, but we've never been recap people, and this was the beauty of the weekend, contained in that and spiced wine and chocolate chaud and quiet corners on wide lakes and finding people you like in the world and fountain moments that take you back and away and all the waiters who are all so attractive and the moments when the universe affirms what you've been wondering and I wondered, oh my fuck have I wondered these last weeks and now it is different, it is none but still all of the words said before 

because 

Wherever you go, go with all your heart. 

and do you know, I think I'm moving, because time (and we've got it), time will squeeze into when we left and when I will return so it is terrifying to think of continental drift in between but it is also freedom and weird without you but not, as well, because of how we live now

So we, Kui and me, wandered streets and around and there was sunshine and being alone and talking about the differences between Canada and asking to go out for coffees because people can still lead such human lives and the changes in time, what and however it decides to be, and how you can sleep when you're dead. Jay walk the streets and squeeze onto cable car wire trams, walk through markets selling mushrooms and meats and all of it, writing lists in chai latte coffee shops and the little children and dipping fingers in the lake and the city lights at night when it arrives, the six hours away from fondue and warmer evenings. 

People are people first, first and last born beside a swimming area and postcards found and bartenders not, hippie lettuce or two or three and sparkly roads and tight spaces squeezed and warm rooms and sleep, existentialism on Sunday morning and the sunshine that showed up instead of the rain. 

What do you know, wishing Chloe's luck for future train rides and timelines and then I saw this

and a foggy Venice found me alone and so grateful for the time I'd had with such a dear dear heart, same same but different, and getting to sound out the last month and knowing I am okay and looking at more time apart than ever again/before and we won't be the same any more. 

And so last night I slept in Geneva, and tonight I'm in Venice and tomorrow should be home again in Ljubljana and what even how the who and why, except it does. 

This is what Venice looks like at night. 

gelato in piazza de San Marco 

masks in bright shops down dark alleys, it is Sunday night and doors are locked and most bars still open, English Italian French a lot, display cases and the people who belong and the ones who wander

Rialto bridge and sleeping gondolas and the selfies of people beside me and laughing and the slap of canal waves on the boat docks 

streetlamps like works of art on the side of grand canals and dark water that smells almost like the sea, boys playing accordion around the corner and before the bridges, the hands holding and swinging and swaying and the unbelievable reality of such a sinking city. 

I had a moment of such déjà vu just now lying on this bed in this hotel room(...no but those words are significant). I sat up to get a sip of water and I've never felt more strongly like I've been exactly here, and I think I've maybe dreamt this before and it's funny to think, as I imagine such moments, that as such I am exactly where I should be. 

Because it's just after 11 now and somewhere in the absolute labyrinth of this city a cafe I couldn't find my way back to is closed and there is a young Italian man who is off work. And tonight he's not taking a Canadian home.

 I've got his card still. 

As in...welcome to Italia, LAWL. 

 I was walking in awe after crossing the first canals, really simple map in hand, backpack all backpacky looking (...no, you don't say?!) . And I have a Canadian flag luggage tag on my backpack, and I feel someone beside me before they say, "Canadaaaaaaa." 

Me: "haha yeaaahhhhh"

Him: "where are you staying?" 

Me: *knows exactly what this is* "oh, I'm just here one night. I've got some hostels to find." 

Him: *knows I'm lost* "here, wait just here I work here." *points to nice cafe beside us*

Me: "oh that's nice" *wavers on flowing or going* 

Him: "wait here"

And like, okay. So I flow, I do. He comes back with a card. "You can stay with me. I have a place in San Marco. I work now 6-11."

Me: *...............aahaha* "no, it's fine, I've got these other hostels..." 

....

and I still believe in humanity enough, so *takes proffered card* 

 "okay, well if I don't find anywhere, I'll call."

Him: "it's not my number, just the cafe. But come back here at say 9 or so with your bags and it's okay. Okay? See you then." *looks at me* 

Me: *laughs* "okay we'll see" 

Him: CIAO! ...like, a hello/goodbye ciao that is more a ya ya, okay, see you soon. 

Not even ten minutes in this city and I grt someone's number. Aish. 

Also: 

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA x10000000

wut 

No, (looking at you, parents) I was never actually going to take him up on his offer. I just humoured the universe a little. I'm safe and sound in a fine hotel with a door that locks and no Italian man in my bed. LOL 

But like...you know. these things they happen. (the side of me that is always looking for that moment to forever disappear into a life off any recognizabe path and just do crazy shit will probably always be wondering now whether i should have returned anyways just for the shits and giggles and 'reckless twenties' of it. And then have some great stories to tell and maybe an Italian child or two.) 

Ahaha. Wow. You are all welcome for putting that out there. 

I think we have all just levelled up in terms of what I do and do not relate here on this blog. 

Welcome to phase who gives a fuck we're in this for real now, apparently. 

Aie. 

ON THAT DELICIOUS NOTE

I'm going to go not sleep to get cracking early in order to swallow this city in daylight. 

Here is for all of this, and the universe, and seeing the stars in strips of dark sky, the way the hollow church bells toll midnight to me now. 

oh, but keep going

-k