Long time no see, I’m back with a travel blog: Hello from Barcelona 🎉!
I’m writing to you from my second stop of the trip: a beautiful apartment in the neighborhood Barceloneta. It’s tiny but so beautifully styled and well-organized that I would sign today if they asked me to move here. The apartment is owned by an aquintance of AJ, my boyfriend, who flew here today to join me on the trip 🙌. Before this, I was staying at my friend Anne Fleur’s place in the neighborhood Gracia, who moved to Barcelona 1,5 years ago with her boyfriend Arno and is working remote and fulfilling her dream of becoming a yoga teacher. It was lovely to spend extended time with her offline ❤️ (rather than our two-weekly video calls, haha).
This is a special trip for me, and very much out of my comfort zone, as I haven’t traveled abroad for two years. As some of you know, I had a bad case of burn-out and anxiety, which made it difficult to go outside at times, let alone travel. This summer, I have been slowly building up traveling: attending two yoga retreats and undertaking a sailing trip in the Netherlands. Now, you might be reading this and thinking: yoga retreats in the Netherlands to………FLYING TO BARCELONA?! And not only that, we’re also going hiking in the Pyrenees for a week after this (!). Yup, that is not exactly gradual exposure therapy 😅. But sometimes you have to take a big leap of faith, right?
Has it been hard? Yes. Have I cried and felt overwhelmed? Yes. Has it been fun and am I proud of myself for taking this step? Hell yes. I wish that life would be less complicated for me right now, allowing me to travel more easily and without anxiety like I used to. This makes me sad sometimes 😢. But I am also proud that I don’t let it hold me back any longer and do it anyway, even if it might feel or sound crazy. All the while listening to my body, a skill I had to learn over the past years.
So there I was, on a plane for the first time in years. AJ had brought me to the airport and kept me calm with his super-chilled travel spirit built by years of travel experience. On the plane, I quickly got talking to a friendly fellow solo-traveler, a model and dance choreographer with amazing stories about his work and his past relationship, that had just ended the day before. These encounters allowed me to be relaxed and distracted. Before I knew it, or my anxiety could grab hold of me 😇, I stepped out of the cab I had shared with the heartbroken model-choreographer and was standing in front of Anne Fleur’s apartment. After a sangria and beer in a local tapas bar, we went to bed.
The next days, we explored the city by shopping, biking around, going to Anne Fleur’s rooftop yoga class (her teaching, me enjoying a lovely free yoga class), and eating a lot 😋. While Anne Fleur was working, I went to te beach, cycled to the Sagrada Familia and went grocery shopping. For you, this might not sound like a lot, but for me, this was probably more stimulation in two days than I’d experienced in the whole year before 🤯. So the next day, I crashed. My head and neck hurt, my jaw was clenched and I felt exhausted. I decided to give in. After a slow breakfast, I visited a knitting store (omg grandma heaven 😱) and spent the rest of the afternoon knitting a top on the balcony. At the end of the day, I had some energy again and Anne Fleur and I went out for a quick stop by the Korean skincare store (a new obsession of hers 😉) and a baby ice cream.
This morning, I was partaking in a very exciting online job interview (who am I?! Me of 6 months ago wouldn’t have believed it) and before I knew it, I was hugging AJ, who had arrived in Barcelona in the meantime. Now, here we are, in the beautiful tiny apartment. I think I’ll squeeze in a quick dip in the ocean, which is literally 3 minutes walking from our apartment (!) and from there we’ll see. Keep you posted! 🤗
