jululv

Flowery Nostalgia

March 17, 2017 Filed Under: life, writing

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Kat and Line at Frederiksborg Castle, 2015.

I found these pictures I took during my time at Grundtvigs Højskole in Hillerød and it made me nostalgic. It made me miss all those days I spent with these lovely ladies eating ice cream, drinking drinks and dancing on the weekends.
I haven’t been posting the last three months because I have been struggling with what to write. The other day I realised, that if you never take the time to sit down and just write something, anything, you’re just wasting your time waiting for that magic inspiration that never comes. So sitting down and just writing something, that is exactly what I’m doing right now. And maybe one day something meaningful will come out of it.

The joy of walking alone in a foreign city

December 10, 2016 Filed Under: travel

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TOKYU FEEL, October 2016.

I’d tried it a few times before, walking alone in a foreign city. I’d stayed with friends in California and gone exploring on my own. I’d done it in London, Brighton and New York. But I’d never been alone all by myself in a foreign city, let alone a foreign country for more than eight hours at a time. Not until I went to Tokyo. I had four days until my dad would arrive.

I must admit, I was a little bit utterly terrified when I had to find out how to into the city. Fortunately, there was a nice lady that helped me find a Taxi (holy shit that was expensive, the Taxi ride I mean). I was nervous and I wasn’t sure if I could check in at the hotel yet. When I finally arrived after the Taxi driver failed to find my actual hotel twice, I was ready to check in. Get my feet up, put on shorts and rest for just a second. I couldn’t check in yet. I left my luggage at the front desk, went to the bathroom, changed to shorts and starting walking. That was the first of many during those four short days.

Walking around exploring a foreign city on your own is the most magical thing in the world. There is no one there to tell you where to go, you just go where it feels right and hopefully don’t end up getting robbed. If you want to spend 30 minutes staring at a pigeon trying loose a piece of gum stuck to the ground that’s totally up to you. There is no one there to tell you to hurry up or tell you that you’re weird. Although, if something tells you that you’re weird, you should thank them, it’s a great compliment.

I spent most of my time wandering aimlessly and thus finding interesting spaces I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t walking alone. The second picture, the one with the trees, is actually a toilet building in Yoyogi park. I noticed it when I was walking around, my camera around my neck and with a wandering eye.

Hamburgers in Hamburg (yes, I am being serious)

December 6, 2016 Filed Under: travel

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Hamburger Dom, August 2016.

In the beginning of August I went on a short trip to Hamburg with a close friend, Katrine. I drove to Fredericia to pick her up from the train station and then we drove three hours to Hamburg (stopping at an outlet on the way – because, shopping). We stayed at a pretty ok hotel just a few meters from the metro and Hamburger Dom, which we wrongly assumed was a cathedral for some reason (cathedral in Danish is ‘domkirke’). We hadn’t googled anything about Hamburg, so we knew absolutely nothing when we got there.

The first couple of days we mostly went into the center of the city, looked around, got lost. We ate dinner at a horrible Mexican/cowboy themed restaurant a few times because it was just around the corner from our hotel and we even waited in line for the Hamburg Dungeon just to be told after 45 minutes of waiting, that there wasn’t an English tour until Friday. We chased second hand stores, walking for what felt like half a day before having to turn back, because the place where the store had been had literally been torn down. We saw an explicit exhibit at Deichtorhallen’s House of Photography, which was great. On the fourth day of our trip, we realised that the hotel we were staying at was on one end of Reeperbahn, Hamburgs red-light district and party center. As you can imagine, we felt kind of dumb for not noticing sooner. So of course, we dressed up and went out dancing all night. The music was shitty and the drinks were pricy, but it was one of the best nights of my life.

Dreams and Delusions About Spending Several Consecutive Days in Nature

December 2, 2016 Filed Under: dreams and delusions, life, travel

Under the stars

Sometimes I dream of a simple life, just for a while. To wander mountains and forests. I dream of sleeping in the open air with only nature by my side (and food, water, a tent, a sleeping bag and a good friend of course). I’ve always liked nature – from a distance that is. One thing I especially like about nature is how beautiful it is, how calming it is. In a lot of stories, going out into nature (without toilet facilities) is portrayed as a spiritual journey. An opportunity to find yourself. I have no idea if there is any truth in that as I have yet to experience it myself. But I am curious. I’m in my early twenties, this is the time to find myself if ever there is one, isn’t it?

I have a dream of going on a hiking trip and finding inspiration. Finding inspiration and motivation to write, to take pictures, to do something extraordinary. But isn’t that just an excuse? An excuse to wait for something to hit me, for something to magically become tangible? But why wait? Why not just write something down and hope that something becomes clear during the act of rambling? That is what I intend with this blog. It’s a space for ideas that aren’t fully formed. A platform for questions that I do not have the answers to. Maybe one day I’ll go on a hiking trip where I’ll experience a spiritual journey or maybe I’ll just cry the whole time, wishing I was at home or at least closer to a restroom. You never know where life will bring you next. Mine brought me here.

Reading Without Updating Goodreads?

November 28, 2016 Filed Under: books, reading

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In late October I watched a video by Ariel Bissett titled ‘Should We Always Track Our Reading?’, which really got me thinking about my own reading habits. In the video she talks about booktube’s obsession with numbers and tracking all these numbers of books. She continues to then talk about zines, which are self published mini books or magazines (hence the name). Ariel describes how she read a zine and had a mini crisis because it wasn’t possible to mark it as read and go on to talk about how zines are not trackable reading material. This got me thinking about why I would never read anything ‘untrackable’, which is probably true for a lot of people.

I rarely read anything that didn’t count towards my annual Goodreads reading goal. It felt good and it felt like I had a purpose for reading. Don’t get me wrong, I love reading and I love being able to track what I read. But, it was becoming a problem. I wouldn’t read an article or a magazine and I would definitely never ever read a newspaper. The problem with that was that I am fascinated by the trade of journalism and I’ve always dreamed of going into journalism myself. So why did I become so obsessed with being able to track it every single time I read just a single page? I can’t give a simple answer to that. One thing I know at least is that I like to organize and remember what I’ve read or watched in order to be able to go back and look at how many stars I gave it or read through the thoughts I had about it. I admit updating goodreads and accomplishing a public goal of 100 books in a year felt kind of bad ass. But on the other hand, when I finally completed that goal nobody came up to me on the street and patted me on the back and told me what a great human being I was for reading a hundred books. It was very anticlimactic and I honestly haven’t read much of real substance. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading for the sake of entertainment. In fact it’s one of my favorite things in the world. But only reading for entertainment gets old. I started realizing that a lot of the books I read had almost the same protagonist and the same tropes.

This obsession with being able to track the books you read is basically the same and just as strange as documenting what you eat on instagram. So, should we always track what we read? I mean what is the point really? No matter what you read or how much you read, you’re still a reader.