Rainy Inspirations

It’s been raining for a good solid 8 hours now, I think… At least as long as I’ve been up and a little before that. This is typically the kind of day I would normally love when I’m at my parents, but unfortunately, today, I’m not. I’m home alone in Leiden, my housemates have both gone out to work or otherwise and left me to defend our fortress. My plans of studying are slowly evaporating because of the inspiration I always get when it’s this rainy.

Rain is traditionally a phenomenon that makes things grow. In my case it makes my hopes grow. I dream of going places, think about that one time I put on a hoodie (I was about 16 I guess), turned up my mp3-player and just started walking in the woods near my house in Ede. Without realizing, I had been out for about 3 hours and saw the most amazing things. I didn’t run into any people which made the walk all the more calming. I came back soaked all the way through but with some kind of new found “zen”-thingy that I hadn’t had in a long time. You can see why thinking back to that time always gets me in a good mood.

Having the house to myself gives me more freedom to do whatever I want. I’ve already taken a bath in the middle of the day, played my music very loudly in the living room, made a whole pot of tea just for myself and started reading about 10 different things (study material, the newspaper, several blogs, etc) before I realized that I had all these thoughts in my head that kept me from really reading what was there. I ranted to the other Craydians about what my afternoon’s been like up until the point where I confessed to actually listening to a Taylor Swift song (She’s my guilty pleasure and I’m not gonna apologize!) and they stopped responding. I think they’re in shock.

Not many of you may know that I’m a huge fan of making lists of things I want to see, read, hear, watch, places I want to go or basically anything I want to do. The rain got me thinking about all the places where I would someday like to travel, so here goes!

• New Orleans, because of the amazing stories and great pictures I somehow always run into in the internet.
• Charleston. I’ve been once with my dad in 2006 but I’d really like to go again and have more time to see everything I missed out on the first time.
• Chicago
• San Francisco. For some reason I never felt that drawn to LA, but San Francisco does sound amazing. Maybe it’s the one too many Charmed episodes I watched.
• New York, of course.
• Prague
• Vienna, though I’m going there this February with my mom!
• Budapest
• Paris, because you can never go to Paris enough
• Indonesia, but maybe in 10 years or so.
• New Zealand and maybe even Australia
• Scandinavia, though they would hate me for generalizing like this.

Ideas anyone?

xoxo Ko