"So far from home where the ocean stood down dust and pine cone tracks." Ben Howard-Old Pine
There is something entrancing about this song. It is both captivating enough to guide me to my next adventure and grounding enough to remind me of the home I return to when the adventure comes to an end. It doesn't hurt that the video is also fairly alluring.... Enjoy!
Every October the people of Zaragoza gather for a week-long celebration in honor of the Virgin Mary of Pilar. While the celebration has some religious aspects, the city of Zaragoza was filled with music, parades, and wine by the time we arrived. It's hard not to get a little caught up in the good times taking place on the streets, which is exactly how we found ourselves IN a parade in Zaragoza.
This isn't exactly the kind of fun you can sit idly by and watch pass you by, now is it?
And in case that wasn't convincing enough....
Naturally, there was plenty of beer and wine to go around....at least twelve times over...and new friends were made!
So here's to you Zaragoza, our new friends, and wine glasses that never end!
"But if you would be my bluebird returning then I will be your evergreen standing tall on your horizon, guiding you home to me....You're my wanderer, little wanderer."
“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
"I'm just a traveller on this earth. Sure as my heart's behind the pocket of my shirt."
I keep an incredibly long playlist of songs I fall in love with that remind me of travel, make me want to travel, or make me completely content with the fact that I am a Grade A wanderer.
A pitcher of sangria after a day well spent. The sun is setting as the last rays stretch to the smallest reaches of the city. There is a slow beat in the background carrying hushed conversations in its melodic arms. "You are so loveable...."
....Maybe this is where I learn that I'm not broken; I am not weak. Maybe this is the best part of growing up--realizing, maybe, in everything that I thought had maimed me I came out stronger. Here, I'm relearning everything I thought I knew: what I had come to know about myself, my own path and where my piece fits into the world. High on life at our rooftop close to the sky- it's just a suitcase, a backpack, and now a very happy girl.
I have been incredibly absent many times over the past few months in focusing on my mission this year to soak up all of the absolute best moments of my life. A LOT has been happening. I am moving to Madrid (as of yesterday I got notice that I will be in Primary school in the fall!! SCORE!), my mother is moving to Florida, I've started to pick up shifts at the ever-lovely Captain Al's again for summer, and I have been incredibly bogged down at work in the office (so not Gratitude Jar material). That being said, I am here to put in a quick catch-up on some of the silly, happy, smiley things that have been happening!
Summer is in full swing here at home, which can mean nothing other than "time to get back to mid-afternoon deck drinks" with Mrs. Magoo!
I celebrated St. Patty's day with these lovelies. Note the re-introduction of MaryBertrand to the mix! So happy for our mini, epic, crazy ShowCamp reunion <3
I visited the ever-beautiful Monika Marie for the #siblingadventure of a lifetime as she showed me around my future home (holla at ya girl, Madrid!), biked through the streets of Budapest, and got lost with me in Istanbul ("Istanbul?" you may ask...well HECK YEAH I crossed that off my life-goals list this year too!)
We had roof-top wine and marketplace coffee
Delicious food
Tried the local beer
And had an all around good time with some fellow Warehammers!
Since returning home, I have been going non-stop and don't intend to slow down any time soon.
As I come across more silliness from my time-lapse in Lessons in Gratitude, I will be sure to add new posts, but until then, I leave you with these lovely drawings my mom and I came across last night as we continue to purge most of our belongings in anticipation of each of our new starts.
Behold the glories of my sock-puppet "Indian Dog"
And this December-thing...
Here's to a future of having hardly any possessions and being the part time Primary School Teaching Assistant, full-time wandering gypsy I have always aspired to be!
In the maybe 10 or so years since moving out of Dartmouth, I have managed to keep in touch with maybe only 1 or 2 friends successfully. While 2014 proved to be a difficult year, I am happy to say that it has brought one of my best friends and I even closer and reunited us through many tears and shenanigans. As we move forward into this new year, I am incredibly thankful for truly feeling like I have gotten one of my best friends back in so many ways.
To celebrate the end of a crazy week, it was inevitable that I ended up in Boston for a night of burgers, brews, and a room full of hipsters (I'm looking at you Bent Shapes and your fabulous birthday show at Lillypad in Cambridge). Boston Burger Company stole my soul....I'm almost not kidding. After ordering this monster....
((For your own safety, please hold on to your jaw as you view the picture and caption below.))
"Homemade potato chips, melted cheddar jack cheese, coleslaw, chopped pickles, drizzled with two types of BBQ sauce, & topped with pulled pork, bacon, and sausage with homemade ranch on the side"
...We then decided to go for broke and order burgers. I got the Vermonster-"maple mayo, sharp cheddar cheese, caramelized granny smith apples, red onions, maple syrup, and bacon." with a minor alteration-a veggie burger substitution which I did not regret. Fun fact, I still got the bacon...on the side, which got brought out on its own separate plate to further add to the fat-kid fest happening at our table for two. The sweet and savory combination of the veggie burger, melted cheese and delicious granny smiths was worth Olympic gold and then some.
((Again, I beg you to hold on to your jaw if you know what is good for you))
As we sat there in our food-induced highs, many interesting statements came out of our mouths. Along with not believing that we would ever be so ridiculous as to order that much food, out true feelings-that we are glad to have picked exactly the right friend to go out and order this nonsense with and that my outer body experience had led me to feel that I was "outside of my body watching myself eat this burger, tasting myself taste this burger." A statement I'm sure I will never recover from uttering.
Next time we go (aka my next available moment to sneak up to Boston) I am daring to try the King burger whipped up with peanut butter, bacon, and fried bananas dusted in cinnamon and sugar. Judge me if you want, but it was listed in the top 25 Burgers by Boston Globe so I'm game.
My love of bacon is not a secret, especially not to my co-workers, any guy who spends more than 3 seconds with me on a date, or anyone who notes how much I talk about bacon on Facebook. That's what made being tagged in this post such a hilarious start to my day.
Having friends who are living awesome lives abroad fills me with intense jealousy, but it also gives me a fantastic reason to continue travelling. I am so incredibly thankful that keeping in touch with friends no matter where they or I may be has become so simple because sometimes nothing can beat the awesome messages you wake up to.
My love of travel, my tendencies to be fairly adventurous and a bit of a wanderer, and my ultimate life goals of just going from place to place helping humans cause a lot of people accuse me of being a bit of a "hippie". While I'd love to put these rumors to rest, I probably can't. So when my friend left me a message saying....
"My roommate wants to go to India and I told him you studied there and he goes, 'is your friend a hippie?'"
I obviously couldn't help but start my morning off laughing.
"It's a beautiful notion, the idea that we are all connected: That what we do, our actions, affect our friends and neighbors down the block and on the other side of the world; that we must be responsible for each other and for this planet we are all riding on."
Today I came across two hilarious things I have documented my parents as having said last year.....I couldn't not share these moments of absolute gold.
"The only boy she ever trusted and loved, and he went and cut her f**** wings off."
-My Dad on the movie "Maleficent"
"It's like gin."
-My mom describing mango, the fruit, not any sort of alcohol whatsoever
God knows your early 20's are not for picking winners. Thankfully, I haven't been one to get sucked into the world of "serious dating" (Let's face it: at this point in my life I feel that my passport is the best travel companion a girl could ask for and people are always very happy to let you pet their dogs when all else fails) because I would hate to be the girl who....
Thus far in life has made dating choices which stack up to...
50% sociopaths
75% dependent on some sort of substance
50% casual sellers of drugs
25% addicted to multiple, pretty serious, drugs
25% incredibly questionable choices in employment
25% cheated on me
50% required restraining orders at the end of other relationships
25% have done jail time (as far as I know)
75% never graduated from college
25% never graduated high school or got their GED
Even at that, I've left finding someone at the hands of my friends...eventually.....if I ever decide to stop moving around because I am allowed to make 0% of those decisions on who I date. (I mean come on, I've heard the horror stories!)
That doesn't mean I haven't shared a beer with some...characters though. Jokingly, in response to whether or not I am a halfway house, my friends respond with, "Yes, for poor, very lost souls."
There's nothing like a good bout of honesty from your best friend.
:) <3
I had an incredible weekend in and out of Boston (which I fully intend to make my new home*). In a complete spur of the moment, what was supposed to be a fun night out with only one best friend turned into a Girls' Weekend with two of the loveliest ladies I know. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we definitely had a blast. The night really kicked off when I got a bit creative cracking open beers without a bottle opener....
While the bar in Cambridge may have been a bit more hipster than we could handle, we did set off on our own adventure to Harvard Commons for one more drink before last call....where we obviously proceeded to awkwardly judge matches on Tinder (one of which happened to be at the bar...).
On our trip home to the Cape to watch the Patriots narrowly (but still completely) defeat the Ravens, we had a lot of long discussions about how we label people, whether or not we identify as feminists, and how we can move away from compartmentalizing ourselves so much. It was great to be able to have a good, lengthy, and insightful conversation-something I sometimes feel I lack in my day-to-day life. I also shared some of the really incredible slam poems I had listened to throughout the week that were relevant to our conversation.
In typical Dachelle fashion, I also made new friends! I will forever be grateful for my fellow patrons on the Red Line, who, after being made incredibly uncomfortable by two men who seemed pretty unsavory, was welcomed onto the next car with high fives and even an apology for speaking to me after a stressful situation. Everyone on my new car was incredibly friendly and welcoming and seemed to want to make sure that I felt safe. I owe an extra special thanks to the one kind Gent who I actually had a really awesome conversation with and ensured that I made it safely to my destination at the end of the evening. As promised, I have already begun sharing some of my dating haikus with him!
This also happened Saturday night:
I took full claim over my adulthood by spending $7.50 on incredibly huge Reese's cups, which we then turned into delicious dessert. I was inclined to do so mostly because they were on sale, but even for $15 it would have been worth it. I decided that this was the best part of being a grown-up: being incredibly satisfied with my decision to buy disgustingly large candy.
I am pretty sure that we spent the entire weekend laughing (well, when my GPS wasn't finally proving to others that she completely screws up my routes, probably on purpose, and causes me to get lost for 20 minutes within 5 minutes of any given destination. At one point her instructions were actually to just follow the signs to Newton. Like, thanks GPS but if I could read signs and no where I was going, you would be homeless on the street.).
I would like to round-up this post with a few very important, largely unanswered questions which are just largely inside jokes:
1. #swallowsnortspit?
2. What on God's Green Earth is Burbonaise?
** it has been decided that the official hunt for the Boston Best Friends' apartment/love shack will begin in September. Potential sites of the futurehome include Boston' South End (not to be confused with Southie), or the Cambridge/Somerville area relatively close to the red line.
It is not even one full week's worth of days into 2015 and already I am throwing my hands up. It has been a rough day, to say the least. Tackling the in-s and out-s of always trying to do the right thing and realizing that sometimes things just don't work out were the big lessons of the day, but, that being said, some really fantastic things also happened that made me incredibly grateful for the people I choose to be surrounded by.
1. I am endlessly grateful for the two lady-friends that really came through in the clutch today when I needed some real-talk girl advice. There are times when I feel like maybe I don't have enough friends my own gender because my idea of a girls' night consists of me and one or two other friends getting cocktails and then there are times when I'm happy that I don't have a ton of female friends because of how overly dramatic it can get, but today, I was incredibly happy that when I needed them, at least two of my girl friends were there and both offered the same advice.
2. Speaking of lady-friends, I am always always always happy that I met my fellow #ladyplayah over a year ago and that ever since we have been bonded for life. I always know where to go for solid advice, a good laugh, sharing in a new song obsession, and having someone read me a bit better than I can read myself most days. So thank you for putting it all into perspective, because let's face it, we all need the friend who tells us that we were settling for someone who probably wasn't worth it and who will help you get back on your feet with a couple of cocktails.
...And while we're on the topic of friends...
3. Sometimes it's nice to hear from old friends as well and just laugh about the silly times from when you first met. They say the sign of true friendship is that you can go a long time without talking or seeing each other but can always pick up where you left off and today that felt really true. There was even a location chosen for a 2015 reunion (which you are definitely being held to) in Philly (a compromise of almost half way, but more in my favor so I can knock "get a Philly Cheese-steak" off of my 2015 bucket list...thanks Roomie!)
All in all, what the universe tried to deem as an awful (or at least incredibly off) day (as far as days in my life go because they generally aren't even that bad, thankfully) turned out to have its perks as well.
And one last thing!
In my strong attempts to be a somewhat real grown-up this year, I made a giant leap forward and purchased my own car coolant, managed to pop the new Volvo's hood open, and...wait for it....this is really big news here......put the coolant in the car myself. Thank you. #biggirlstatus.
Being the incredibly spoiled (and by that I just mean lucky) [still very much a] child that I am, I still cannot resist my nana's Chocolate Cream Pie. Judge me.
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