3 beautiful things i found today ... day 1

There was this image ... captured while wandering Istanbul streets.  I need to go through the 8,000 photographs I took there on that visit with my beloved Canon 5D MkII. 

The quote from Lisa St Aubin ... I'm still considering whether I agree with these words or not.  I think I'm an odd traveler sometimes.  I love to return to those few places I love and I dream of being there when I'm away from them.  New Zealand, Genova ... wondering where I would most like to live.

And this song, from the band Sleeping at Last.  I love their name, as I've been an insomniac for days now The song ... I'll Keep You Safe, or perhaps All Through the Night.

Life, Divorce-Orphan Style.

Sometimes I describe the Belgian Bloke and I as divorce orphans ... 

We were both married long before meeting each other.  We divorced, completely unaware of each others existence on opposite sides of the world, and went on to lose almost everything collected over those years we were married to others.

I wandered off to Istanbul, and the Belgian got his own apartment here in the city and started all over again.  Later we met and since then we've been putting together a life that makes me smile sometimes.

I love our furniture but it's mostly from our favourite secondhand shop here in the city.  We rent the house that we live in but we are so rich in friends who come from all over the world.  There's much fun and adventure, mixed in with the more challenging times.

Today a new fridge/freezer arrived and I'm bemused by how happy this makes me.  You see we've been making do with a small fridge and a seperate tiny freezer since our beginning.  They came courtesy of somebody's caravan.  It's been YEARS!  I felt no sadness watching them leave the building this morning.  No sadness at all.

Meanwhile, that appointment I mentioned ... the one where I might get myself into trouble for not being fluent in Nederlands.  It went brilliantly.  I had an appointment with Districthuis.  Over years these appointments have varied in terms of success.  Not all of them ended well. 

I wandered along, signed in via their signing-in machine and my number was called.  I mentioned, Ik sprek Engels ... but that I could understand Nederlands. And I usually rush on explain that I do things to Nederlands that sometimes make it unrecognisable but no worries, she had already switched over to English.

That's the thing about Antwerp.  They're usually fluent in Dutch, French and English ... and other languages too.

Anyway, my new ID card is underway, and this is a good thing.  She was lovely.

Above, a glimpse inside the house the divorce orphans are creating  :-)  An 80euro oak table and 46 euro (total) for that beautiful set of chairs.  That secondhand shop is surely one of my favourite things about living in Europe ...

'The more personal you are willing to be' ...

found in Gent..jpg

The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are… And when I say universal, I don’t mean universal only within our culture… There’s a lot of balderdash thrown around — “You don’t understand people who live in Sri Lanka and their response to the tsunami because you just don’t know that culture.”

Well, there’s an element of that — but, to me, cultural differences are a kind of patina over the deepest psychosexual feelings that we have, that all human beings share.

Sherwin Nuland, extract from yet another brilliant Brain Pickings post.

One of the constant battles I have with this blog of mine is just how much raw and gritty truth I write here.  And in struggling with 'how much', I suspect I lose quite a lot. 

I do know that friends in real life enjoy catching up on the details I usually leave off my blog.  I have a complicated family life ... like so many these days.  I have much to write about on the subject of being a step-mother, perhaps.  And even more about being a foreigner in this day and age.  Or on traveling without languages (usually).  And on just making it home ...   And even more on why I haven't dedicated my days to learning the language in this country I'm currently a citizen of.

I have this theory ... but that's for another day.

I love red wine.   I mostly drink sparkling water though, with 2 espressos per day, and lately, a hot chocolate sometimes.  Most other drinks don't agree with me because they're full of sugar, or sugar substitutes, or have too much caffeine or tanin or goodness knows what.  I used to be able to drink and eat ANYTHING!  Now I have food allergies and grass allergies, and they just added dust mites to that list but I've only just begun to check the facts of it all. 

I prefer not to take anti-histamines.  

I'm not good at learning languages but I love people and traveling.  It seems to work out.  We 'talk' anyway.

'I'm from New Zealand ... ' gets me further than I could have imagined, in terms of excuses for everything.  We Kiwis are a delightful people from an exquisitely beautiful country.  So yes, what am I doing out here in the northern hemisphere?!  That's something else I could also write much and often about.

I love photography and books, and writing and people and other cultures, and conversations that go on into the night.  I love sitting down on that airport bus, leaving to fly someplace, and I love coming home to people and places I know.  I love music. All kinds.  I love people who are passionate about what they do, and I adore people who are kind.

I'm a grouch.  I should write on my blog on my grouchy days.  I'm quiet and need space, and if you hurt me I'll disappear into a silence.  I'll try not to argue ... so don't make me.  Just believe me, it's better you don't.  I also love talking.  And meeting new people.

So you see, I leave a lot of this off the blog but I'm thinking, in 2015, I might experiment with just being me on the blog. Let's see how that goes ... I'd like to be more universal.