Less is more…than enough

To tell you the truth I am exhausted. In my quest to keep busy until I leave has bit me in the ass as I knew it would. The past six months has seen me juggling motorbike lessons, learning how to swim, starting a new degree and finishing half of my 1st year subjects, mentoring a teenage girl who lives in a children’s home, continuing my Italian lessons and trying to find time to meet my Italian friend when I can so that I can practise.  All this and still working a 9 to 5, just writing it all down exhausts me.

So yes apparently I can’t do it all. Seeing as the past 6 months were so chaotic I’m going to take the next 6 very slowly. I’m going to eliminate  as much activity as possible. Taking on too much can be extremely stressful and detrimental to your health, trust me. I’ve been getting sick, spraining things and suffering from more headaches than I usually do.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to do absolutely nothing because I am addicted to learning. I’ve got a photography course that starts in a month that I am looking forward to with fast forward photography. So I’ve just got to figure out what to cut out of my life but for now I am just going to take it easy and watch Friends re-runs.

The waiting game – may the odds be ever in my favour

The month of May was kinda hectic, what with turning 30 and all that. There was also the stress of my exams, finding out I grind my teeth during my sleep causing pain and sensitivity. Sprained an ankle from a fall and then sprained the other one from doing a 10km big walk. To top it all off I was in be whole weekend recovering from the flu. On the plus side I finally booked my ticket to Bangkok, Thailand.

I’m sure the next 6 months are going to drag its feet just to spite me but then I came across this sentence in The Alchemist which I am reading (again) which resonated with me: “Because I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man” This is hard for me to do because I am a thinker (who tends to dwell on the past) and a daydreamer (always looking ahead to the future). So I forget to focus on all the things that still happens in between.

I am going to try to focus on the present and live in the ‘now’ and maybe do all those things I’ve been putting off like working on my book, taking my photography to the next level and finally mastering downward facing dog. The possibilities are limitless.

I sooooo wanna be freshly pressed

and if you think this is a blatant and shameless attempt for WordPress to find me well then you are most likely correct. So for those not in-the-know getting freshly pressed is like winning the blogger lottery. Todays stats at this point in time is: The best of 454,352 bloggers, 912,843 new posts, 1,420,249 comments, & 198,873,981 words posted today on WordPress.com and on average only 10 posts are selected daily to be featured on the WordPress home page. I mean what blogger doesn’t love more traffic or subscribers?

I love reading the freshly pressed posts everyday and I usually have the following responses upon reading them:

1) OMG! This blog is so awesome, this blogger has managed to move me with an image or a few words. I wanna be just like them. I’ll subscribe immediately so that I can get a daily dose of this awesomeness. This is way better than getting piggyback ride up a mountain by Edward Cullen to see him sparkle.

2) Why didn’t I think about this first? In fact I did think of this first but I just never got around to publishing my draft. I wonder if I can sue? Intellectual property theft is really not cool people. Unless maybe this is my twin and we’ve been seperated at birth.

3) Seriously? This gets to be freshly pressed? A monkey with a typewriter could have written a better post. My stuff is way better than this so why don’t I ever get freshly pressed. What exactly is the criteria here?

Oh let me throw in some photos to seal the deal. Only 3 types of pictures makes it onto Freshly Pressed anyway: Food pics, nature pics and travel pics.

Home made sushi

La sagrada familia - passion facade

 

 

Sneaking a peek into secret gardens

Hagia Sophia

People seldom mention this monument which I found to be more impressive than the Blue Mosque. And all it takes for you to get to Ayasofya is as simple as crossing the road from the blue mosque. First a church then a mosque before it was eventually converted into a museum. It is so big inside that you standstill and stare in awe before snapping back to reality.

The colour Blue

I will not recount that mosque incident here but I have realised that I did not post enough pictures of Turkey.

Touch of Red

Sultanhamet

The Blue Mosque

So blue we did not even know it was the mosque

Blue tiled dome inside the blue mosque

View from the inside

Travelling slowly

 

Balcony in Barcelona

The reason why I want to live and work in another country is that it isn’t enough for me to visit a place for a few weeks and race against time to see it all. Where does it say that you have to cram all the sights into the little time that you have? Rushing around and constantly being on the move is as exciting to me as route canal is to the average human being that is to say I hate it.

How is it possible to really submerge yourself into a culture if you only there for 10 days and doing everything at a whirlwind pace? As fun as taking in all the sights was at some stage I grabbed an early night (in bed by 8) and I’m glad I did as I felt refreshed the next morning. I also decided against going to the beach and chose to relax and watch a movie at the hostel.

Another mistake that I made was not taking into account actual travelling time. Which is why I ended being only able to spend 2 days in Istanbul which was not nearly enough especially considering the fact I fell in love with this city the minute I saw it. Once I arrived in Barcelona I realised that it would have preferred more time in Turkey as opposed to the bulk of my holiday being in Spain.

Yesterday I decided to take the hop-on hop-off bus and learnt another valuable lesson: ‘travel’ in your own city/country first before deciding to jet set over the oceans. I always knew Cape Town was beautiful but after visiting Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens I actually felt ashamed that I never make the time to appreciate what my country has to offer. It’s not as if I’ve never been there but it’s the first time that I really took the time to walk around and marvel at mother nature. There is a reason after all why so many foreigners flock to South Africa every year.

Protea - SA National flower

 

B + W

Help portrait

 

I took this picture when my bother and I took a spontaneous train ride to Simon’s Town and we came across this homeless man/car guard. My brother asked him if he would pose for a picture and he got so excited about the whole thing that I wished I was able to give him a print-out of it. I unfortunately can’t remember his name but I’m sure there are many people like him who haven’t had a photograph taken of themselves in years. In an era where if you don’t have access to a camera your cell phone can still take pretty decent photos.

Then I stumbled across Help-Portrait (amazing what one find on the internet). What started out as a one-day event on 10^th Dec 2011 (to be held on the second Saturday of every December) has turned into a movement whereby photographers use their skill, time and expertise to give back.

More specifically Help-Portrait is a movement of photographers, makeup artists and volunteers who come together to give, not take pictures of those who are in need. A non-profit organisation that takes photographs of people who wouldn’t ordinarily have access or be able to afford professional photography e.g.  poor families, the homeless, orphans, the elderly etc.

You can get involved even if you are not a photographer by bringing food, drinks, books, blankets, canned goods or help by assisting the photographers. Helping and giving is not restricted to December but whenever and however you can. Check out the SA website http://www.helpportrait.co.za/ for more details.

Lomography Part 1

Each year I have a theme. 2010 was trying new things: Extreme Sports. 2011 was doing things I’ve always wanted to but never got around to: Italian, Surfing and Guitar. 2012 is going to be Lomography. It’s like photography but better. The Golden Rules of Lomography:

• Take your camera everywhere you go
• Use it any time – day and night
• Lomography is not an interference in your life, but part of it
• Try the shot from the hip
• Approach the objects of your Lomographic desire as close as possible
• Don’t think (William Firebrace)
• Be fast
• You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film
• Afterwards either
• Don’t worry about any rules

http://www.exposuregallery.co.za/ had the below info on Lomography – Exposure Gallery can be found at the Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock.

What the Hell is Lomography?

In the early 1990’s we, at that time students in Vienna, Austria, discovered a small enigmatic Russian camera; the Lomo Kompakt Automat. Together we started a new style of artistic experimental photography with our first unorthodox snapshot cavorts. Our approach: taking as many photographs (Lomographs) as possible in the most impossible of situations and from the most unusual of positions possible, and then having them developed as cheaply as possible. The result was a flood of authentic, colourful, crazy, off-the-wall and unfamiliar snapshots, shot by many people and mounted on panels to form a sea of thousands of Lomographs; the LomoWalls.

No digital cameras though and old school 35mm film is used.

http://www.lomography.com/