When I was in college, going back home to Paris a friend sent me a letter from Illinois, where she’d gone to visit her grandparents. It was super symbolic because she knew how important living in Chicago had been for my sense of identity. Despite it essentially amounting to the blink of an eye. Don’t…
Tag: friends
Impromptu Guidelines for Surviving Any Given Holiday (at any given point in time)
As the bells toll and the fireworks are popping off, some people might dread that which is to come in a few hours. Namely, the Relative Fight Fest.That occasion when everyone gathers together, tensions mount and you begin to understand within seconds why it is that you normally don’t hang out, unless a “family occasion”…
Ode to a Lost Friendship Polish Style II
Click here for Part I The thing with broken kids and kids from broken homes, we always recognize each other. What we do with that information is one thing. But there really is an invisible bond, accessible via the subtlest of signals that brings us kids together. Perhaps Babette was broken, too, but that didn’t…
Ode to a Lost Friendship Polish Style I
He came to me fully grown as a seven-year-old boy about to turn eight, so that’s how I always saw him, as the boy who lived below us in my building and was a year and a month younger than me. There were three of us on our side of the building, so that there…
The Author Contemplates a Childhood Friendship Lost
Meeting Ethnic Kin M. would kill me if she found out I was writing this. I can say this for sure because when I wrote a fun piece about our friendship and tracked her down to ok it, she took months to reply and then told me that the reason she did was she was…
Road Trip Adventures – How a Trip to Silesia Reinforced my Intuition. Part I: Arrival
The hostel was a hovel. Nothing matched how it had been advertised / the photos they put up online. For starters, the 3-bed arrangement with one bed on a mezzanine with private kitchen and bath in a spacious room turned out to be a bunk bed contraption with barely three inches between the third…
The People Watcher Observes a Couple
This particular Nero we are at is an island in a not too busy mall. It’s also the northernmost mall, a concept reflected in its name. Most people are there to take a much needed break from shopping (one of the reasons I loved malls as a child was because of the hustle and bustle…
On the Power of Saying Yes – Epiphany Rock
I’m not a big church goer, preferring my own interpretation of things, but there’s a beautiful chapel right behind where I live when I happen to hang out in Poland, and an even more beautiful church, so when I was invited to the carol singing for Epiphany, I decided why not. The original plan was…
Three Positive Things About the Place You Live
Right now, and this may or may not change, Finland is not my favorite place to be. I’ve tried to achieve something (many somethings) that generated very positive responses in other countries but never here, and between that and the beyond abysmal healthcare – henceforth known as Burana Care thanks to the inimitable and super…
Life Hack Homesickness – Tip 2: Be a Tourist in Your Town
Truth is, I had never played tourist in Paris. The touristy places I visited were places of interest because of a certain exhibition or event, and the touristy places I’d frequented repeatedly were places that kind of just happened to be there and were attractive to me because of people, cafes or some energy that I liked. I always loved Sacré Cœur, but living so close meant that the path there was part of my fitness routine, as in I love walking and being asthmatic, this helped me gauge my fitness level on any given day.
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