Beach side entertainment, Barcelona.

A family trip: Portrait of my mother.

Having been away from home now for 8 months my excitement kept me awake the week before my parents and sister arrived here at  Cadorna station, and when they arrived it felt like have never been away from them. So on that excited state we parted from Milan central station for a trip starting in Tuscany, making a turn in the Alps and ending in Milan.

Going on holiday together as a family is not something new to me. This is one of the important things my father worked into our years since I’ve been a child. It was not necessarily anything luxurious yet these childhood travels through South African landscaped lies embedded in my mind as joyful childhood memories.  However I have not travelled with my parents in years, and I’ve never travelled with them as a grown-up. With my new perspective of travel  and perhaps this part of growing older  it made me look at my parents in a different way, it was sometimes frustrating  but mostly quite entertaining, and somehow  illuminating in who I am.

My mother is a lady. I have never heard her utter a crude word in my life, never heard her shout and she always drinks her tea from a pot.  When we have guests things are served properly and when it is a special occasion the good silver is taken out.  She is also very shy and sometimes it seems has this thing where she needs the confirmation of others to make a choice, but at the same time she has very strict ideas of what is wrong and right, even though she would never impose it on someone. My mother has been brought up to be completely proper. She was raised in the height of Afrikaner nationalism in Pretoria, in the times when children must be seen and not heard, where women got bad reputations for “promiscuity” and where most things they saw were under the conservative censorship of the then government**.  On top of that they were raised  in kind of high society Pretoria of those days, my grandmother have always been the perfect host and was featured sometimes in the society pages for the dresses she wore to functions. This makes my mother often care too much of what other people think.

The problem is this, my uncle always said to me that in my case the apple falls very far from the tree; I am not shy, much more flexible on my ideas and I am definitely not as conservative. Yet the older I get, the more I am aware of my complete resemblance to my mother, I talk like her, I look like her, I tend to express anger like her and I have inherited al lot of the same insecurities. This was a scary thought for me at first, yet once I observed the situation more closely I realised that it’s also from her which I’ve gotten that thing which has allowed me to have a life full of  amazing friendships. It is from her that I learnt to be soft, to be loyal, paying attention to my friends, baking cookies for everyone for no reason, to keep the peace, be diplomatic and that clean sheets and a well made bed is the best thing in the world, and that little things count.  These qualities are which made her a wonderful mother. She always made sure I had tissues on me, a habit I still have now and I am lucky for, one always need those at some point.  It is she who made me tea every afternoon after school, who put flowers on my bedside table when I came to visit from university and who listened to me moan for hours about the same topic on boyfriends that broke my heart.  She always has time for people and it is something that I have inherited that I hope I will never lose. 

** talk about no exposure 

Berlin: Tea with Lise

Day 2: Having tea on the way to Schloss Charlottenburg

A short break - Friendship and stroopwafels

I have had no time to write lately, also sometimes just not the inspirations and at most time just not the energy.  But it is Easter holiday now and I am writting from Amsterdam while stuffing my face with stroopwafels. It is my fourth visit to this city, and everytime I arrive I am happy to be here, I love this city.  People on bicycles (the air here is way cleaner then in Milan), a language where I recognise the words and well this city with its canals is just so picturesque.  But the best part of it is that I am vistiting my besty Lise who has been living here since 2008.

One often has very romantic ideas about travel, and in a lot of ways those ideas are true, but when one moves to a country for a longer period then a touristic visit one is also faced with the harsh realities of dislocation. It is not a temporal sense of dislocation that one enjoys and then returns home and put in a photoalbum to look back on. One is living alone far away from home, with people often being so different from you in culture, language and belief which hard as it forces you to confront you own ideas, beliefs, culture. While this is not a bad thing, the process in itself can be quite disruptive to the system, it is a series of breaking things down and building things up, finding an idendity in another space. One does not have the same luxury of quickly calling a friend who believes exactly the same as you to call when you are experiencing an exitstentialist crisis. It is a challenge one can not foresee or understand unless you have done the same.  And one that will not leave you unchanged.

By then one has this realisation that by the time you will return back home, that home will probably not feel that home anymore. One has this fear that when you get there you will be so different that one wouldn’t find your space there either.  One also has a fear to somehow betray yourself, and its a violent process of holding on to things and letting go of others.In this half way there space is a longing to just touch base somewhere.

 What amazing thing a good friend is. We have not seen each other in months, and in the time we have been changed.  We share a tiny mattress sleeping “kop voet” (the skill of sleeping with on head on the one side of the bed and the other on the other side) like one needs when one doesn’t have enough beds, something we learnt already in the early years of our friendship at University. One can be happy with so little. And now many years later, older, two very different people from our original wide eyed days, we can still find honesty, I can still feel like myself and I am able to piece together little pieces of myself, albeit a little rearanged. And we can still laugh at each other’s jokes; we still understand each other even though we are different. A good friend brings home, no matter where you are.