New Year's resolutions or maybe not

via google.com

Every now and then you feel like doing some resolutions. First you look back towards the best moments in your life, then ahead and picture how your life is going to be in two or three years from now. The best time to do all these evaluations is New Year’s Eve and the days around it.

Each week before we do the transition from one year to another, I start thinking about my life. About the brilliant moments that wished would never end and the not so fortunate moments that either taught me something or are there just to make the memory bitter. And after all this journey through my twisted memory is over, I get to present and realize that the one I am today is the result of my past actions. Then I start questioning myself if I’m happy with who I am and what I’ve become. If the answer is merely affirmative I begin to picture the future. What will happen from now on? What will I do? Will I change my job, my lifestyle?

When all these questions and torments are done stressing me out, I get to the point of no return. The point where you realize that all these New Year’s resolutions are pointless. The past is the past, you can’t change it no matter what. The present is a result of your past but it’s also an evolving process, changing continuously. As for the future, nothing is sure. No one can guarantee one thing or another, but there is always the hope. Hope that things will get better, hope that you’ll be a better person, hope that you can make a difference. And sometimes, this HOPE makes things happen. Even if the future is not certain and things can change in a blink of an eye, hope will always be with us, leading the way through life.

Happy New Year with hope!

Comparison

I've just read something about comparison and I realized that most of our insecurities and our depressions come from it. Either if it's at work or life in general,we constantly compare ourselves with others. We sometimes think it's unfair that some people have more but we forget that everything in life comes with a price. And even if they seem happy and complete on the outside, the reality is totally different. So whatever you do, try not to compare yourself with anybody. You are a unique being and you must be happy with who you are, because life is too short to stop and constantly compare. Just live as you feel not as you are being told!

The spirit of Christmas

I have always wondered what the true spirit of Christmas is. For many years I thought it’s the magic of bringing the whole family together, the smell of baked cookies and cinnamon wine; the sound of the Christmas carols while we all open our presents. I wasn’t wrong completely, but last night I finally saw the whole picture. The whole magic of the Christmas lies in another thing called tolerance.

Last night in a room full of people I finally saw it. We gather once or twice a year during the holidays. We care about each other (generally speaking) but we don’t do visits due to the fact they would result in sharing impolite words and thoughts. I know we are not the best example of a family, but we are one. Not by blood entirely, but by union. Average people who live in a foreign country far away from our parents and real relatives. It’s not that we don’t like each other, it’s just –as I like to put it- have different opinions about almost everything. And by that, there’s no turning points. That is the reason why we see each other so seldom.

Considering all of the above, last night we lasted in the same room for two hours and a half, without being sarcastic or rude to one another. We behaved decent, trying to calm down when the atmosphere got a little heavier. Even if we all have our opinions about one another, opinions that in certain occasion we express as loud as we can, last night we locked them in a secret compartment and swallowed the key.  And then it hit me: the true spirit of Christmas is tolerance. In order to have happy holidays we have to tolerate our relatives, neighbours, pretended friends, everyone in general. That is the true secret. And also alcohol. While drunk, everyone is friendly and lives in his own bubble. J

Merry Christmas and a tolerable/drunk New Year!

Blue

Blue is the water that gives life and calms our reckless spirit

Blue is the sky, endless and fascinating in his mesmerizing emptiness,
Blue is the sea always so mysterious and loud,
And blue is our planet so nurturing and wild.

Blue was the bracelet my friend gave me as sign of our never ending friendship,
Blue was my heart when some of my fears came true
Blue was the t;shirt I wore when I first met you,
And blue are your eyes when you tell me you love me too.

You once told me

You once told me there's no sunshine,

You once told me there's no rain,

You once told me that everything vanishes,

If you can't see me again. 

You once told me how you love me,

How I am the most special person in your life

And that no matter what

Nobody could keep us apart. 

I felt the same,

I belived in you;

Even though there were signs,

Showing you were changing thourgh.

I couldn't see them, I was too ecstatic 

I could have avoided things

Thar made me suffer after.

And then came that day,

That awful autumn day 

When you told me everything's over

And walked away.

I wanted to remind you 

All the things you once said

But it seemed too childish

So I just watched you go instead.

And that's when I realized

As difficult as it is

In life you can't say things

Then blow them in the wind.

  

 

Wednesday is the new Saturday

If you ask anybody in the civilized world what is their favourite day, they would probably say Saturday or Sunday. That would have been my answer one year ago, but many things change in one year. And this year, my favourite day is Wednesday.Why Wednesday? Because it's my true and only day off per week and I cherish it with all my heart. I get so sentimental over my days off, since they are so few, that sometimes I start crying when I think about it.

So to cut things short, today is my favourite day of the week. And since it’s Wednesday and we are in the middle of nowhere, and here this is a short day, so all the shops close at 2 pm, what’s the best thing to do on a sunny and hot day, than to go on the beach and relax a bit. While there I prefer to find a quiet space, child proof if possible. I was lucky, the beach wasn’t crowded. 

My eye was imediately caught by a russian grandad who decided to reinvent his swimming trucks and turn them into a thong. It was more than ridiculous, but maybe grandad didn’t want any tan marks.

I turned my attention from the grandad (I wasn’t feeling very well watching his wiggling body) to a russian mum with her 7-8 years old son. Nothing impressive so far until they started the photo session. More exactly mom started it and the child was taking pictures of her posing in the most ridiculous postures. With her back to the camera, profile, standing, lying down. I couldn’t help but stare, as were some English tourists nearby. After 15-20 pictures, the lady decided to have a snapshot while jumping, cause there’s no holiday album without a jumping posture. But since the gravity is a bitch, the boy couldn’t catch his mum in the air only landing. I could hear her growing frustration while directing the child: “Davai: ras, dva, tri” and jump at four. But it didn’t work. Annoyed, she put her child do it while she was taking photos. She managed to find the right timing and taught him  how to take the perfect photo for a Facebook profile. And hurray! He finally succeed. After that, they packed their things and left.

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but if this is not an interesting day off, I don’t know what is.

Painting a life in shades of blue

It’s funny how a colour can rule an important part of your life without you even noticing it. It can be found everywhere, but you can’t realize it, because you are either too young, either too busy…

If I was ever to paint a picture of my childhood it will be in shades of blue. Interesting choice, you’d say, but believe it or not, blue was the colour that governed my early years of life.

I was born in a snowy morning of mid-November, in a country that was under the suppression of the communist regime. I can’t remember many things from my first year of life, but there is one thing that will stay with me till the moment I die: my room.

For a young child, one of the most important things is the place where he lives, his room, his sanctuary. My room with blue cloudy walls was my temple, where I always hid from the world. Those blue walls encouraged my childish imagination. Behind those walls I could have been all the things I wanted to: a pop star - singing and dancing for an imaginary audience, a fashion model - wearing my mom’s clothes, a teacher – teaching my imaginary students. I felt so good in my blue room, that my favourite colour became BLUE. I also loved buying blue clothes that matched my eyes and in high school I was only using blue eye shadow and blue mascara. Blue became like an obsessive colour that ruled my life. It was taking me back in time to my blue room, so whenever I saw this colour I felt safe, at home. And that is why blue was a part of my life.

 Until one day of cold December when my mom passed away. I was only eighteen and from that moment my blue room became a grieving place. There was no joy in that room anymore. All the memories I made as a child, were now replaced by a big sadness. Everything changed. Blue wasn’t a comforting colour anymore. It was haunting and sad, like a ghost from the past that still tries to make room in your life. All the blue things that once I loved were sending me back to that awful day.

I don’t know why, but every time I saw something blue, all those sad memories were coming back to life. It was like a nightmare that keeps repeating every night, though it wasn’t a nightmare, it was real. So real that I wanted to run away. And so I did, thinking that running away will make me forget. But the blue sky, the blue ocean, they were all a reminder of my fears and nightmares. I couldn’t escape them. They were my doom.

I thought it will always going to be like this, one endless fight with my sad memories every time I see blue. But life always has an interesting twist so not long ago, the meaning of blue changed again.

Blue’s meaning changed three years ago when I fell in love with two beautiful blue eyes. They were nothing like I’ve ever seen before. They were like an innocent child’s eyes who is looking at his mother for the first time. That was the moment when blue changed his meaning. It was the colour of love. It stopped being sad and haunting and became instead warm and loving.

From then, every day I look into my lovers eyes I know that everything is going to be alright and there are no more nightmares to be afraid of. Like a phoenix bird, blue reborn, being more beautiful than ever.

How do we deal with them?

Secrets…Almost everybody has at least one. While some of us are like an open book and can’t keep even the most shamefull things to themselves, others are like occult books, that can be read only by the initiated ones. Even so, there are some secrets you have to keep to yourself (even though you are a blabber) because if the things come out they might be devastating.

Everyone has things s/he’s not so proud of, things s/he wants to shove under the carpet and pretend they don’t exist. Nobody is perfect, we all have flaws, but we shouldn’t be ashamed with our past. We are who we are today because of those things we did then. Our personality is the result of those shamefull situations, of those sleepless nights, of those drunken moments. All of those changed us. We learned from them, we took what’s good and left the bad behind.

Or maybe we didn’t succeed of leaving all the negatives thoughts and actions behind and now they hang like a dreadful corpse on aur back. All these negative things are like a luggage that sometimes you forget you carry, but sometimes it’s so heavy that you have to stop and catch your breath. And once you stop you decide to have a peek inside to see what’s there. You discover that you are carrying so many useless things, so you start throwing them away, in order to make your journey more relaxed. And all of a sudden, you don’t have to stop so often and soon you realize your luggage is so light that you can run and jump without feeling any pressure.That is the moment when you realize YOU ARE A NEW PERSON. The negative feelings and emotions are gone. It wasn’t easy to let them go, but you needed that. Making peace with your secrets is realizing their importance in making you who you are.

All those things you are not proud of  shouldn’t drag you down. They are there, in your past and there’s no turning back in fixing them. What is left for you it’s just a long straight journey ahead that you decide how to make it.

One chaotic story

via Pascal Champagne, Flickr

Childen's imagination can be really impressive. I wanted to test it and so I gave a bunch of 9-12 years old some words and told them to make up a story with all of them, but each one can add one or two sentences with the word they've drawn from a box. The words were : hotel, plane, pig, lamp, bed, milk, fork, plate, tennis, dinner,water, finger, glass, sing, swim, sea, cheese, TV, song, write, ball, dead, party and sofa. And the story sounds like this:

"The hotel was cold, after the plane landed. Suddently they heard a big bang and wondered what was it. A dedective "pig" was called in to help out. The detective walked in the reception of the hotel and saw this strange lamp. The reason it was strange, was because the lamp was floating in the air.
He decided it was to late and went to bed still wondering why the lamp was in the air. He couldn't sleep so he went downstairs to take a cup of warm milk, thinking it would help. The warm milk didn't help so he went to play a game with the floating lamp. The fork asked to join the game. Mr Plate was an old rascal who was famous for his tennis skills, so he also joined. After the game finished they all went to have dinner. While other were eating, all Mr Plate could do was drink water through his little finger.
Suddenly everybody turned to the door where the smashing glass sound came from. On top of everything they decided to sing a song and then they continued the tennis game. Mr Pig was so sweaty that he decided to go and swim in the sea. Everyone joined him. In the sea they found a rotten piece of cheese and a fish family who was watching Justin Beiber on TV. Mr Pig then decided to write a song about a fish playing with a ball and give it to Beiber to sing it.
They all nearly fainted when they saw a dead man floating in the sea. As dreaming, they all stood up and jumped in to party with him. The party was so fun that even the dead man came to life and everybody gor back to the hotel. They crashed on the sofa and fell asleep.

The end"

This is how the story sounded in the end. They really had a great time making up this story, even though it sounds like somebody was on crack while writting it.

Random things that can happen to you at work on a not so busy day

We're still on that not so busy time of the year and today was curls day. While we were boiling there trying to curl my hair, some guests rang the bell, anxious to see the place, in case they want to leave their kids there. Truth to be told, they couldn't have chosen a better moment. Our straightener was full on, my hair a complete mess and we were trying to look professionals. As if... Then the lady decided to take some pictures of the place and I was trying to mask the straightener. Bad, really bad..

Second random thing of the day was being distracted by the sound of backpipes and wondering where was it coming from. Opening the back door we discovered there was an actual wedding in the hotel. A 6 people wedding to be more exact, but who cares, they had backpipes at full blast. Later on I was picturing a traditional romanian wedding with music and stuff, realizing it will disturb not only the neighbours, but also the whole hotel and maybe the nearby hotel. I really would like to see one romanian wedding in a 5 stars hotel, just to see the annoyed faces of posh people.

At the end of the day, after I finally got my curls done and I was told I look like Anna Nicole Smith on drugs, it was time to go home. I made myself a queens crown to complete the picture and I forgot to take it off. One of the ladies who work in housekeeping saw me and told me something in greek. I only understood Vasilis and Diana. And I wonder what was she trying to say. And who in the world is Vasilis? Is he a transvestite?

What people do when they are bored at work

Being bored at work doesn't happen often, not in this field anyway. Children appear from nowhere, like mushrooms after the rain and you can get busy in no time. That;s the (dis)advantage of working with children in a 5 stars hotel at the sea side.
But there are days, mostly at the end of the season, when you might (if you're really lucky) have no children the whole day. So that day comes like a blessing.
After finishing all the Halloween preparations  we ran out of things to do. So we decided  to have hair do's, as one of my colleagues loves doing that. She even bought a mannequin's head with long hair  to practice more. We curled, straightened and plated our hair.
All beautiful now we were just in time for a scotish wedding which happen to be on spa roof top. After a long thought, we decided no to crash it, but just spy on them a little. At least our hair looked amazing.
Next thing we did was checking for new jobs opportunities, but we weren't so succesful.
 Reading fashion magazines might always come in handy wile bored. Also does writing articles and doing shopping lists. So I must admit, having no children at work it's a blast. Bring on more days like this.

My Rebellion