Belgrade Photo Challenge

Belgrade – Image source : Wikipedia

As many of you know by now, I am going to spend the month of May in Belgrade with a few potential short trips around former Yugoslavia. I have no friends, I do not speak the language and I do not know a lot about the city. It makes for a perfect adventure, doesn’t it?

The trip also has a personal motive, largely centered around the notion that less than a decade ago this city was the capital of a country that no longer exists and less than two decades ago this country was in the middle of a nasty civil war that ended by dividing into it seven countries. Of course, I am no foreign to the stories of civil war and their nasty implications neither to the division discourse and being the curious person I am, it is only natural that I want to explore what it is like to be in a place that once, not that long ago, was somewhere else.

Now, in an attempt to push myself to explore and discover new things, I am setting myself to a challenge of a photo a day. Ideally the photo will be accompanied with a short blog (a bit more than a one-sentence description) and a word of the day, a new word related to the photo I learned in Serbian.

It would be nice to get some support and encouragement. I will be posting the photos on this blog under the category C in Belgrade, and using Twitter and Instagram for promotion.

For those of you interested in following, the hashtags, I plan to use are #CinBelgrade #wandererinBelgrade #Belgradephotochallenge #MayinBelgrade

Twitter: @crystel_hajjar

Instagram: @crys_tel

Au +33 ( aka I am in France)

Paris is always a good idea – Audrey Hepburn

 

I visited Paris for the first time ever, twenty years ago at the end of June. I was six years old and my mother had a hard time putting me to sleep because the sun was still out. As she tried to convince me that even though the sun is still up, it is late and I still need to sleep, all I kept thinking of was how cool it is to live in a place where the sun is out so late that I don’t have to sleep. Yes, I have a philosophical issue with sleep (that will be the subject of another blogpost). That place could have been Saskatoon, for all I know, but it wasn’t, it was Paris! The oldest, most romantic, most visited and one of the most beautiful capitals in the world.

Fast forward twenty years later, I am writing this post sitting in a tiny overpriced apartment on the fifth floor of a walk up with very steep and old stairs overlooking a one way street with small boutiques at the bottom of short residential buildings with horrible plumbing; a very typical scene of Paris. This time, I am here to stay, well as long as the system (and my finances) allow me.

Call it adventure, or call it despair, I actually do not even know but what I do know is that I’ve been looking out for a change and I wasn’t simply gonna sit around waiting for an opportunity to fall in my lap. Instead, I decided to put what I was doing on hold or simply move (only time will tell) and move to Paris.

So I packed up my belongings into a duffle bag and a suitcase and moved across the Atlantic. The time I’ve spent in Paris so far has been very interesting, partially because I am still in the tourism stage but without the need to rush and be a tourist. I can take my time establishing my routine while not having to deal with the logistics of being a resident of city while at the same time.

I am really enjoying the city and looking forward for, yet again, another year of uncertainty and full of ups and downs of a different nature this time. I’ve been thinking about ways of making this blog more useful (and just as fun), so in addition for fun facts and trivia, I plan to blog some practical tips about things like opening a bank account, finding a flat or a job or auditing a university course, things that could actually be a lot more complicated than you would think in this part of the world. So stay tuned, I may even include some more fun stuff on the French ways of dressing, eating, dating …

*France should actually be on GMT instead of the CET, but the Germans changed that in WWII and it was never set back.*

My story with stuff

This is one of those stories that has the ability to drive me crazy. Perhaps it represents the most significant change, I consciously made the decision of doing in my life, becoming a minimalist that is.

I am not a minimalist, in fact I am long ways away from becoming one, on the other hand though, I have been trying to become one and so stuff sit on my nerves. It all started couple of years back at a time where I had nothing much going on for my life except a relatively unstimulating office job and I lived alone. I heard someone say how they would like to become minimalist and I decided to see what that really meant. Of course, the internet yielding a lot of theories and success examples and tips and, and, and…

Then I came across www.becomingminimalist.com. The website had some interesting information, enough to keep me thinking about the issue.

I decided that whenever I buy a new thing, I’d have to get rid of two of the similar category. This had generally succeeded at keeping from buying things and I found that it was changing they way I look at stuff.

Then I looked around in my crowded bachelor apartment and decided that I can probably live minus a 100 things in this place. So I decided that every day I will get rid of three things for 33 days and throw in a bonus at the end. To be honest, I forget if I followed through with plan until the end.

However, I became “allergic” to stuff and while I am not claustrophobic, the idea of having a lot of stuff started to increasingly bother me.

Then came the dreaded moving day!

I was supposed to move the day after having worked insane amount of hours and slept very little for the entire week before. I had decided that I will fit all my stuff into 15 boxes and three suit cases. Yes, I packed few things earlier and I got rid of some stuff and I had a pile to take to the free store but I could have never anticipated how much more stuff there was left. In that one day on Tuesday October 30th, I had to pack up all the rest of that stuff and move it.

It was daunting, chaotic and somewhat maddening! By the end of the day, I felt like I wanted to throw away everything. I had a few friends who were really helpful at getting rid of stuff or placing it in the appropriate piles and while I was ready to give up on everything, I really wanted to keep my target. I think being overtired, sleep deprived and overwhelmed made it much easier to decide on giving up whatever that no longer fits and I managed to keep my targets, and 15 boxes and three suit cases moved into my aunt’s basement while I bought an e-reader and took off with a 23 kg bag to what would become a 4 months trip away.

Every time I think about that, I struggle with the idea that I managed to collect that much stuff and also reflect on to how difficult it was getting rid of them. It was almost like divorcing my stuff. And without philosophizing it too much, I think having certain things with me for a long time gave a certain level of comfort that despite things and surroundings changing some things always came along.

Now, as I am slowly retrieving my stuff, I find that I could do without so much more than I thought I would. Every time, I go to get something I find 2 that should just go. I get mad at myself for getting into the trap of buying stuff and of being attached to stuff and of society being attached to stuff.

Stuff are bad for us, bad for the environment and bad for our wallets, yet stuff make us feel and look good. Well they don’t anymore and now more than ever, I am ready to get rid of stuff, and perhaps that’s not a bad thing. I know I’ll always have a book or a notebook to fill the void and that’s how much stuff I need.