📝 day 11-37: vienna, friend group joys, campaign anxiety.
🇳🇱 vertaling van dit stuk, geschreven door Krit van XRNL (bedankt!!)
showering on top of the abandoned anti-fascist monument of Petrova Gora (more on this monument a bit down the page)
Hi, you! Did you get a ‘ding’ in your mail inbox? Do you check this website periodically? It’s true: there’s something new to read. This! Welcome, I’m happy you’re reading this. Last time (when I wrote about an occupation close to Vienna, in case you missed it, I think you should read it!), I recommended you to listen to Late and Rain Take by Nils Frahm. This time, there’s no music recommendation. Pick whichever songs or album fits with looking at plenty of pictures (the album Old Friends New Friends linked above is still a pretty good candidate for that).
Because, indeed, that’s what you’ll be doing for the next 10-15 minutes. I’d written a bunch of words to publish here, but they all vanished. Strange, where do they go? They were on my screen, my eyes saw them, my hands wrote them. Now they’re lost.
Re-writing what I had written doesn’t sound very exciting to me, so I won’t. I’ll just start anew with whatever I want to do.
So, I want to share photos with you, and let my words guide you through the past month. Imagine you’re holding a big book, a book like this one my mom and I had at home. Thick pages, hard cover, we’d flip through it and point to the photos and say ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’. Right? One like those. Perhaps, when I’m back home, such a book gets actually made and you and I will meet and we’ll flip through a big photo book of this journey together?
self-timed image of me sitting on the place i describe below. it's cold, and once again, Nils Frahm's Old Friends New Friends is playing in my ears (i'm wearing earpods under my cosy beanie hat).
let’s start. it’s mid-august, Savannah and I spend the last few days together in Kassel and Wurzburg. you’re looking at photos from that time.
Last blog entry was a while ago, on August 10th to be precise. I called it “👋🏡🎒day 1-10: goodbyes, campaign buzz & personal reflections”. I was sitting at the edge of a lake, close to a camping filled with Dutch couples spending time on their phones in front of their €50.000+ campervans. It was quite absurd, I questioned their spending choices. Now (September 13th) I’m sitting in La Rossa, an Italian restaurant in Knin, Croatia, next to a busy road. It’s chilly, the temperature dropped to 14C degrees.
The photos below depict precious moments me and Savannah shared in the last few days she was still with me. She actually went so far as to make a gorgeous movie (7 minutes) of the time she was with me. It’s very pleasing for the eyes, so I can only recommend!
august 15th! vienna.
Fastforward. I’ve arrived in Vienna, spent some special days there with Bine, whom I also wrote about in my previous piece (more below). I moved a closet around, cycled around the city (overall a commendable experience), and swam in the Danube. It was hot. When I left Vienna again I picked up a new passenger: Alina. We started cycling south. From the pictures below, the (presumably) father & son in the basketball court is my favourite.
august 17th. we visit the occupation of Lichtenwörth.
I deeply encourage you to read the piece I dedicated to my time at the occupation of Lichtenwörth. I called it “🌱✊“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds” - reflections on the occupation at Lichtenwörth”. I put love into that post, just as I did into this one your eyes are currently reading. The piece about that occupation takes around 5-7 minutes to read, and it’s filled with recommendations to learn about occupations and the radical environmental movement further. So, I won’t take up space here to write about it, go look if you haven’t already! 💖
august 19th. Alina and I depart through Austria, Slovenia and end up in Northern Croatia.
these days are characterised by what Alina has dubbed finding our ‘groove’. sometimes the groove is there, sometimes it isn’t. Alina and I do the work of getting ourselves into the groove as easily as we can. we learn to communicate better. we understand each other’s emotions more quickly. we grow used to each other again after having been separated for a year.
it’s august 25th. we’ve arrived in Donja Stubica, Northern Croatia.
our friend group has rented a house in the hills.
the blight of choosing an international friend group lies in the fact that they’re internationals. these people live scattered all across europe. so, after spending 3 wonderful years altogether in university, we don’t see each other much anymore. we often swing by, one-on-one, perhaps in a trio. but it had been over a year since the whole group (7) was together.
the only thing i wanted to do was cook. and so i did. i made this vegan mushroom stroganoff and the people loved it. baked a focaccia, cooked a broccoli pasta, it was a joy. lots of cocktails were consumed, at some point they all changed the lyrics of Snoop Dogg’s song Sensual Seduction to “Sensual Sebastiaan”. We sung it every day. Now, there’s Sensual Sebastiaan written on my green biking bag. I wear the name proudly.
As you can see, lots of time was spent in the kitchen. The other popular place was outside, with everyone gathered around a massive thick wooden table. Under the table lived half the world’s population of mosquitoes, which resisted even the deadliest doses of citronella candles. Our favourite game: The Mind (with lots of cheating).
the tree that was perched above our table outside. in days of sun, it didn't provide much shade, as most of it's leaves had already dropped.
I want to finish with a rite of passage. An intimate act that has come to feel quite symbolic. I asked Erik to shave my head. To symbolise our friendship. To symbolise ‘going’. Humility, openness, curiosity. I find these pictures very special. I love that man a lot.
it’s september 2nd. we set off towards the Bosnian border.
things get a little more serious again.
this is a part where i struggle. i don’t know who’s reading this, i don’t know how many of you i’m reaching. in the previous piece i wrote, the one that got lost and was never published, i went on at length about anxieties, insecurity and the difficulty with this campaign. reflecting, it was quite personal. yet it also made me feel less lonely. as i’m writing this, i feel the same. and publishing these words, that are perhaps too long, aren’t perfectly formulated, but are raw and vulnerable, makes me feel heard?
so yes, it’s been hard. doing this campaign. not knowing what to do. being far from my support network, who always inspire and encourage me. how i’ve felt, as my distance to you all grows, proves the point I made when I left Amsterdam, and that I wrote about in the first blog post of August 10th: this trip is made possible thanks to the work of hundreds of you. visible and invisible, big and small. it has all culminated in this campaign. and now that i’m slowly pedalling away from you, i’m shown that indeed, doing things without all the lovely people around me is more challenging.
let’s take the video of Petrova Gora that I recently posted. Petrova Gora: a historically charged place due to its antifascist symbolism. Alina and i spent hours researching it, and coming up with an outline for a video. then, we went there, explored, slept on the roof, and when we left, I spent hours editing a 90-second video together. now don’t get me wrong: i think it’s an excellent video. informative, fun, exciting. actually, you should watch it below!
after it was finished, on the same day as we were set to meet with the No Name Kitchen team (i’ll introduce them soon), I posted it. and, well, the video didn’t do as well as i hoped. which is fine, those things happen, i think. but being on a platform like Instagram where everything is measured in numbers, it can be so easy to get caught up and couple self-worth to online relevance. which, if i take a few steps back, is totally absurd.
yet.
it’s easy to get stuck in it. and to spiral. into believing that this whole campaign is irrelevant, a meaningless show. why would anyone actually care what i’m learning about borders? who actually gives a sh*t? to be clear: i don’t actually believe these things. but, doing this campaign that i’ve attached so much meaning to, which is completely online, is scary. if there’s anyone out there with some wise words they can share with me, i do really appreciate that. how i can stay healthy in the face of the algorithm determining how many people get shown this campaign (or maybe my videos are just bad - in which case, i want feedback). looking forward, i want to keep developing the relationship to the content i create. dissecting that how good a video is, stands separate from how popular the video is.
anyways, please do enjoy the incredible photos taken by both Alina and I below.
it’s september 7th. we’ve arrived in Bihac, Bosnia.
a border town where plenty of people attempt to make it into the EU.
but that’s where i’ll stop for now, and pick up later.
perhaps, this is where i’ll leave you for now. it’s 18:45, and it gets dark here real early. we still need a sleeping spot. writing this has been difficult, yet healing. it feels exciting knowing you’re looking at the photos i take. perhaps, after having finished these paragraphs, you’ll go up again and scroll through the photos. one photo sticks. a few weeks later, you still think about it. you look it up again, and notice something new. i don’t know, these are my naïve dreams. perhaps none of that will happen at all.
regardless, it feels damn good to publish this. staying in touch has been harder than i thought over the past few weeks and i’m yet to figure out why. but don’t get it wrong: i think about you who i left behind a lot. wondering what you’re up to (for some of you I know because i peer into your instagram stories 👀). i want to keep you close, and somehow, finding ways to do that is tricky. so, for right now this is a way of conveying to you how i’m doing.
i’m finding my way around being a traveler. understanding my emotions as i’m cycling through the world. there are ups, like biking downhill, pretending I’m Alexander Supertramp while listening to Guaranteed (yes, really, yes, that’s a cliché, but what are you going to do, sue me?), and receiving as a gift a plastic bag of homegrown plums, apples and pears from a local’s garden. there’s downs, like feeling the distance grow as i don’t know what to answer to my friends’ texts while i choose to pedal my way further and further from them. but through all of that, there’s something new growing.
i’m unearthing a feeling of aliveness i forgot existed.
goodbye from me and this self-portrait taken with my lens that can't zoom in-or-out.
some sounds to keep your ears busy: Tag Eins Tag Zwei, as you go on with the rest of your day.
