running down a dream

now we’re fully into june! but here’s a little ol’ post i wrote about the beautiful month of may.  from the very first day of the month spent with our lovely neighbors and friends at at our garden party, to the middle very high highs and low lows, to the last day of the month where i rose much too early after five hours of sleep from an all out rock party the night before to cook breakfast for our visiting family from chicago before sending them on their way to ljubljana to finish off their european tour… then crawling back into bed and getting a few more hours rest in the middle of a sunny thursday afternoon. this is my life.

by spending time with some american homies last week who were on the aforementioned tour followed by a little vacation in southern europe, their experience reminded me of how i used to feel when traveling to a place like the one where i live, but now, looking at it from a resident’s point of view.

since i turned eighteen and started my almost annual summer trips to the european continent, these summers always felt like bouts of accelerated living – the part of my life where i really got to do what i wanted to with reckless abandon, go where i wanted to and even to do things and go places i wouldn’t have done or gone to back home. a hiatus, if you want to call it that, from reality. (or, you could think of it as the only real part in the hiatus that was school, work, etc…) a short-lived dream life of discos, beer halls, warm nights, cool bars, street parties, different languages, cultures, different kinds of soda i had never heard of, and all kinds of memorable adventures and moments.

was it because of the positive connotations of this “dream life” that i wanted to move to europe? i’m not sure really, but now i find myself here living my real life. going to work every day, getting married, adopting a dog. cleaning. doing the laundry, tending to the garden, paying taxes. you’d think with my choice of country that i would be taking much more advantage of the cheap beer prices, but for much of the year i certainly do not. sometimes i sort of just hibernate in the dark winter with candles, tea and books.

all that being said, i don’t regret giving up the “dream travel life” for real life.
without living in europe (and south bohemia in particular), i wouldn’t have got to know what a relaxed pace of life that can be experienced outside of the united states. to not have job stress or that subtle, underlying social competition between one another with regards to what one does for a living and how your job seems to have to define you there. (you really don’t know this is there until you leave the USA – it’s incredible how pervasive this is) the opportunity to be in a more international environment and study many languages. all of this is so valuable to me.

the dream life was fun, and maybe i’ll see it again sometime, but this real life (#sobodayz style) is quite fitting for me nowadays.