Friends! I just realized that my last FeelGoodFriday post is two months old! Ooops. Well, a lot has happened in the meantime. I have been home for more than a month now and it feels good to be back! This post goes online when I have just arrived in Taiwan but I didn’t want to wait another three weeks to write a FGF post, so I pre-wrote this one. Anyway, in this post, I’d like to reflect on a few moments that made me particularly happy in the last five or so weeks. There were definitely more than five things (more like a hundred) that brought me joy but I have to keep it relatively short here, so here are just five of them (more or less randomly chosen):
1. Keeping traditions alive: Watching Eurovision. Back in the US, I was talking to some friends and the Eurovision Song Contest came up randomly in our conversation. I suddenly realized that it’s going to be May soon (this was back in April) and had to look up when the ESC is taking place this year immediately. It turned out that it was going to take place the first weekend I was going to be back in Germany. It’s super silly but I think during the last maybe 16 years I think I have only missed the ESC once. It has been a tradition in my family for a long time to watch it every year and so I was super happy that I wouldn’t have to miss it this year. I watched it with my mom and my boyfriend at my mom’s place, we made some delicious vegan food, and we even played a little betting game about the voting results (I lost, haha). My favorite song this year was the Portuguese entry, which actually ranked last and that’s totally beyond me. It was still an awesome night though 🙂
2. Seeing my hometown through the eyes of a foreigner. I was super lucky to have a friend from the US visit me in Hamburg just two weeks after coming home. He was taking a trip through Europe and had some spare days in between, so I invited him to come to the city and even though I had a major cold that weekend, it was so nice to have him here and show him around. I actually realized that you get to experience your hometown rather differently when you show it to a stranger than you do in your everyday life. When we were strolling around, my friend kept pointing out beautiful houses to me that I wasn’t even noticing anymore. It made me appreciate Hamburg on a whole new level and it was cool to see all the nice spots again after being away for so long.
3. Being outside, enjoying nature (baby cows!!!). So of course, the single best thing about being back home is spending time with my favorite people: my friends, my family, my boyfriend. Additionally, the weather has been incredible during the past month. May is usually a nice month in Hamburg but we’ve had an unusual amount of warm, sunny days this year and it’s so nice to be outside and enjoy the weather with the best people. I took the photos above while I was taking a walk with my mom through some meadows near her house and we saw the cutest little baby cows there! On another day, I spent some time with my boyfriend in the dunes of Boberg, an area in Hamburg that totally looks like the seaside. And the photo below is from an evening we spent at the Elbstrand, the beach of the major river that runs through Hamburg. #goodvibes
4. Being back at my place. The first three and a half weeks back in Hamburg I was moving back and forth between my mom’s and my boyfriend’s place because the couple that I had subleased my apartment to during my time in the US were still living there for a little while longer. It was so nice to spend a lot of time with mama and my bf, but it was also such a good feeling to be back home properly, in my own place. I really enjoyed living with other people in my dorm in Alabama, but having a space just for my lazy-ass self is so relaxing, haha!
5. Getting back into creating. While I have been getting back into my normal routines recently and doing all kinds of organizational adult stuff (job searching, writing reports, cleaning the house, blablabla), I have also concentrated on my creativity a lot and I’m enjoying drawing and painting so much right now! I can’t wait to do it more often 🙂 I am also plotting and planning for the blog a lot. While I will be in Taiwan for the next two weeks and won’t be able to post here, I hope to put out some cool stuff in July. While I’m away, feel free to follow along with me and my travels on my Instagram!
See you in two weeks! <3
Lena