I never understood the concept of hate following. Actively dedicating part of your time to looking at content you don't enjoy seemed the most pointless thing ever to me. Besides, with a climate crisis, Brexit and Trump's possible impeachment on our hands, I like to keep my social media feeds a bit more light-hearted and positive than our current reality is. Hate follows do not fit those criteria. So picture my surprise when March rolled around and I found myself hate following Caroline Calloway.

Caroline Calloway caught my attention in the early days of this year. Like many others, I'd never heard of this New York-based influencer before a Twitter thread about her "creativity workshop" went viral. The workshops were supposed to be part of a tour, which was canceled, uncanceled, called "a scam" by internet dwellers and was ridiculed all over social media. I followed every second of the drama that ensued, laughed at Calloway's lack of skills in the event management department, lost it when she got stuck with over a thousand mason jars in her teeny tiny studio apartment and made sure to share this beautiful mess with my closest blogger friends. I checked Calloway's Instagram stories at least twice a day, until the drama blew over (at least on this side of the Atlantic Ocean). That's when I finally hit the follow button.

At first, following Caroline Calloway was just about being the first to see the next installment in the Scam Saga. But after a week or two, I was following with genuine interest. The hate, which is a strong word for me anyway, subsided. I was confused about the content she put out and absolutely unimpressed, but interested nonetheless. Later on, I learned that I'd joined the madness long after Calloway rose to fame with her long captions on posts about her time as an American student in Cambridge and that her current content had little to do with her original brand. Not that I cared. Because the things she does on Instagram now are oddly fascinating.


I can't say I truly like any of the things Calloway makes. "Like" is too strong a word for how I feel about her content. I'm also not interested in any of the things she's interested in. I don't obsess over art unless it's been spraypainted on a wall and I don't care for Oxbridge and the prestige linked with it. Neither do I like sharing every single little detail of my life online, the only thing Calloway seems to be doing these days. It dawned on me that I was hate following this girl just to see her make more dumb mistakes. I wasn't proud of this at all and told myself to unfollow her. But I couldn't do it. I kid you not, as my finger hovered over the button, I thought to myself: "I'm going to miss the plant content..."

I couldn't do it. I couldn't unfollow her. So I didn't. Just for her plants. Deep down, I did kind of like what Calloway showed the world in her Instagram stories: the small studio apartment, all the plants, her art. She showed me a variation of the life I was dreaming of, a life full of creativity. I hated to admit it, but I wanted that kind of life too. Minus the unexplainable Caroline antics. Every few days I found myself looking at her content and going WTF out loud. There are plenty of articles and Twitter threads to fill you in on all the weird and questionable things this influencer has done. Believe me, it's all highly entertaining. I often find myself laughing out loud over how disconnected from the real world she can be. And, in a weird way, that inspires me.

You see, Calloway sells her art on Instagram. It's not my cup of tea. If you want my uncensored opinion, I'd say that it's nothing more than an overpriced crafts project. She used to sell minimalist paintings of boobs for $40 and is still making copies of Matisse's Blue Nudes, which are usually priced at $140. Most of the time I just roll my eyes and move on when I see these pieces of influencer art, but sometimes I see something so bad that I just have to make my own version of it, to prove that anyone can do it, and that I can do it better. In some weird and twisted way, Caroline Calloway is now my muse when it comes to painting.


The first time I made Caroline Calloway inspired art, it took me two days - a long time compared to the two hours it takes her to cut out a shape created by Matisse, glue it onto store-bought paper and slap a $140 price tag on it. My own project started as an attempt to prove that you can be inspired by Matisse while still adding your own flavor to the work. I kept the position Matisse's Blue Nude is in, but redrew it in my own style. It took me an entire day to get the figure right, mostly because my drawing skills are a bit rusty. Since I do like the paper with stars and constellations that Calloway used when she first started her Matisse series, I kept with that theme and placed the figure in a black night sky. By the end of the second day, I had my own "dreamer bb". Art inspired by Caroline Calloway's Matisse-inspired art. Very meta.

During those two days of being artsy, I kept checking on Calloway's Instagram stories. It was almost like I was making art with someone else, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This realization pushed me into a bit of an existential crisis: I didn't genuinely like Calloway's content, did I? It all felt so paradoxical. I couldn't figure my own feelings towards this influencer out, so I did the only thing that seemed to fit the situation: Make more art. I sketched two more figures in different positions and painted their silhouettes onto pages of an old book that was on it's way to the dump, creating a triptych. I daydreamed about selling my art at reasonable prices. I learned more about anatomy. I learned how to handle my paintbrush better. I learned how to make a speed paint video. I learned so much.

In the end, I came to the finish that it really doesn't matter how I feel about Caroline Calloway and her content. The world keeps turning, no matter what I do. I don't have to support Calloway financially, which I won't, and I definitely don't have to follow her. But I choose to follow her, no matter how conflicting my feelings about her content can be, because at the end of the day, it leads to me making art and enjoying it. As long as it doesn't come from a feeling of hate, but a feeling of curiosity and confusion, I think it's a wonderful thing that could only come out of an era like ours.

Half an eternity ago, I was in the process of throwing my goals for 2019 out of the window. It was January, the nights were long, the days were short and I was bored out of my mind. Everything I wrote down was either not exciting enough, or was bound to happen anyway, regardless of how hard I'd work. Then Ella from Ella Was Here came to the rescue and challenged me to visit a new city each month of the year. The Twelve Cities Challenge was born. I went to Paris for January, but had to stay a lot closer to home for February because of university assignments. After a quick glance at the map of my country, I knew exactly where I wanted to go: Dordrecht.

Dordrecht is a small city very close to Rotterdam. It's not very well-known, often ridiculed in a local saying, but . You can reach Dordrecht within minutes if you take the train from Rotterdam Central station, or you can take the Waterbus, a boat. Paying the fare works the exact same way is it works for all other public transport in the Rotterdam area; if you don't have an "OV chipkaart", you buy an RET day ticket and scan it upon getting aboard the boat. Even though I love trains, I like boats even better, mostly because I rarely get the opportunity to go anywhere by boat. I'd followed this route once before, back when I was in kindergarten, but barely remembered it. It was time to really get to know this city so surprisingly close to home, yet so unknown. So on a sunny day way back in February, I got on the Waterbus to Dordrecht.


As usual, I arrived at my destination with no plan at all. Actually, that's not entirely true. I'd thought about doing a street art route and had the vague idea of walking to the city center, whichever way that may be. Neither of those plans was thought through, so after picking a friend up at the quay where I got off the boat, I did what I always do when I don't know what to do in a new place: I started walking.


The walk to the city center would have taken no more than a few minutes... if I hadn't gotten distracted by just about everything along the way. Dordrecht became a city in 1220 and wasn't bombed to pieces in the Second World War, so it has something Rotterdam doesn't have: old, monumental buildings from centuries ago. Many of the streets in and around the city center are small, winding and flanked by high, small houses from the 19th century and earlier. Some of these houses are now antique shops or sell vintage items. I spent ages windowshopping - until I saw the water of the marina.
As in many parts of my country, water is everywhere in Dordrecht. But whereas Amsterdam has its canals and Rotterdam has the river Maas dividing the city in two, Dordrecht's water isn't as omnipresent. It's been turned into a marina some time in the Middle Ages. The marina is relatively small, very cute and a perfect example of an old Dutch cityscape. Countless little boats and yachts bob up and down gently in the calm water. There is literally not much more to do than walk along the quays and look at all the sails, gear and old boats, but that's exactly what makes the place so charming. I could feel the stress leaving my body as I took pictures of the marina. I could have stayed there for hours, just looking at the water, oblivious even to the Pokémon Go players who had come to Dordrecht that day for a community event.


A million pictures of boats later, I decided it was time for lunch. My friend and I discussed our plans for the rest of the day over sandwiches: We'd do the street art route, look at the Church of Our Lady, go to the comic book store I vaguely remembered from a visit almost two decades ago, then catch the boat back home. I have to admit I did a terrible job preparing this short day trip. I couldn't find the street art route online anymore, and when I did find it, I noticed that my reading comprehension skills were not strong enough to understand the description. There was no map available, but since we had access to Google Maps, we figured we'd be fine.

We were not fine. The challenge began as soon as we'd left the old city center behind us. We did find the starting point, directly next to the train station, but the next street in the description was nowhere to be found. A quick Google search showed us that we first needed to walk down another street, which wasn't mentioned in the description, to get to the street we needed to be on. This happened time and time again. You had to be a local to be able to follow this route. We fell into a time-consuming and frustrating pattern: Read the description, google the street, get directions to that street, read the description again, follow the description for a couple of dozens of meters, maybe find a mural, and repeat. We gave up after three murals and went to a Japanese store instead.


Although the sun was still shining when we left the store, I was getting cold. We headed back to the old city center and walked around for a bit in search of a small coffee shop. We came past a machine that was writing a Bible, the comic book store on Scheffersplein which was still there after all those years, the only mill left in the city of Dordrecht and the Church of Our Lady before my friend spotted a place called Francis Lunch & Baked Goods. We ordered some drinks and talked for a while. It had been a good day, but it was coming to an end. At 5 pm, exactly 6 hours after my arrival, I boarded the boat to go back home. As I sat down in my chair and looked out over the water, I felt an unexpected sense of relief. With Paris and Dordrecht under my belt, I only had ten more cities to go to complete the Twelve Cities Challenge. I already had my next destination in mind. Bring it on, I thought to myself as the boat left to bring me home.

A long long time ago, in January, I finally visited Paris for the first time. Ever since then, I've tried to put my experiences in the French capital into words. But sometimes things are difficult to explain. Especially if you're trying to explain something in your second language. Although I've written blog post upon blog post about my travels, I often feel like I don't get my point across as clearly as I would like. Not unless I share my random thoughts from my trips. Chaotic, honest and sometimes way too personal; They're the only thing that can show you how I truly felt about a destination. I did this for Scotland, Thailand, Belgium, Israel and every other country I've visited and written about in the past two years. Paris will be no different. I had such conflicting thoughts and feelings about the place that this is the only way I can paint you the bigger picture without being overly positive or negative. Ladies and gentlemen, here are my random thoughts about Paris!

Growing up in Europe, I heard a lot of stories about Paris. About how romantic the city is, how the architecture will blow your mind, how lovely the culture is. All those stories fit the cliches perfectly (except for the story about a high school friend running away during a field trip - love that story). But I'm not a fan of cliches. Paris is a lot more than the decor for a perfect and romantic proposal. It's creepy, crowded and sometimes very cold. Most people wouldn't say such things about the French capital, but I like to keep things realistic on this blog. Truth is, there are so many weird and annoying things about staying in Paris that people barely talk about. So I've taken it upon myself to do that. Ready? Let's go.

Free walking tours are among my favorite things on the planet. They are great if you want to see a city on a budget or meet other people who are traveling alone. Especially if you're a broke college student, free walking tours are a life-saver. In a city like Paris, they're the best thing ever because you won't have to worry about missing out on any of the important highlights or getting lost. As you can imagine, I was very happy to find a company called Civitatis that organized free walking tours. I had to make a reservation, which I did, and showed up at the meeting point 15 minutes early.
15 minutes later, the tour was canceled. The tour guide was there, two other tourists were there, I was there, and still the tour was canceled. Why? Because they wouldn't do the tour for only three people. When we complained, we were told we shouldn't complain and be glad that a tour like theirs existed in the first place. We hadn't paid for anything, so why were we complaining? If we wanted, we could join the Spanish tour though. I'd never heard such bullshit before.
Civitatis organizes tours in a bunch of other cities as well. I'm never joining one again.

My hostel in Paris was located right at the foot of Montmartre. Every morning, the Sacré-Coeur was the first thing I saw when I looked out of my dorm room window. So of course, it was the first Parisian landmark I visited. I went there with a Chinese girl I'd met at the hostel, because I was still a bit nervous on my first day in Paris.
Going to the Sacré-Coeur was important to me. I'd read so many books that included scenes set in Montmartre and around the cathedral. However, my visit changed from a dream come true to a scary and intimidating experience soon enough. On the way up, I saw the words "the girls are thieves" in French spraypainted on a wall. Most of the graffiti was warning me for pickpockets. About halfway up the hill, a souvenir seller approached us with some bracelets. When I politely declined to buy one and walked past him, he grabbed me by the arm. I yanked my arm from his grip and walked on as if nothing had happened. On the inside, I was shaking though.
When we reached the top of the hill, the Chinese girl and I just wanted to enjoy the view. Instead, we were swarmed by girls with clipboards who wanted to scam us. We ended up fleeing into the Sacré-Coeur after a while. Our way back wasn't much better. We had to make a lot of detours, because the hostile souvenir sellers were literally standing shoulder to shoulder to block stairways and paths.
I loved Montmartre, I loved the Sacré-Coeur, but I didn't feel safe at all.


I love museums. Deep down inside, I'm a bit of a history buff. I also like to include a bit of historical background to my blog posts, and learning about the places I visit is much more fun when I'm actually there, instead of looking things up online. Naturally, I looked up some interesting museums in Paris and ended up looking forward the most to a visit to the Archeological Crypt, which holds the actual ruins of ancient Paris. I'd read online that I could buy a combination ticket for the Crypt and the Catacombs, but when I wanted to buy one at the Catacombs, the lady behind the counter said she'd never heard of such a ticket. I shrugged and thought she was just a French lady being French, ie fed-up with non-English speaking tourists.
After my walk through the Catacombs, I went to the Archeological Crypt, the entrance of which is on the square in front of the Notre Dame. I walked down the stairs - and was greeted by a piece of A4-paper with the word CLOSED on it. Not knowing what to do, I walked up the stairs again, past the police officers who were now keeping an eye on the staircase while holding enormous rifles. I sat down in the middle of the square. Checked, double checked and triple checked the Crypt's website. It was supposed to be open. It said so everywhere. Except for the sign and the locked doors, which told me the place was definitely CLOSED.

This wasn't the only time I was confronted with closed doors. My first attempt at visiting the Pere-Lachaise cemetery failed because of half an inch of snow on the ground. Which was already melting rapidly when I arrived at the cemetery, but it remained closed for the rest of the day. Other cemeteries were also closed, even when the weather was fine.

I was not surprised that I had to let security check my bag at certain Parisian landmarks. After all, a lot of terrorism-related incidents have taken place in the city over the past couple of years. What did surprise me was the extent of these security measurements. I had to walk through metal detectors multiple times and handed my bag over to security guards on a daily basis. I didn't really mind, because it's for my own safety and the weirdest thing I carry around is an unfinished friendship bracelet. But when my camera bag had to be pulled out of my backpack and triple checked, I couldn't help but roll my eyes.


Let me end this post on a light note: We're going to talk about the metro. From the get-go, my plan was to go everywhere by metro. So upon arrival, I went to buy a ticket for 10 rides, which would be a lot cheaper than individual tickets for every ride. Now where I'm from, we have a ticket system similar to the London Oyster card, but ours works nationwide for all forms of public transport. Before that system was put into place, we had tickets that would last for multiple rides. Based on my experiences back home, what with still being in Europe and all, I thought I'd get a ticket that would expire after ten rides. Instead, the machine gave me 10 slips of paper the size of my little finger and I couldn't help but laugh. For the rest of my stay, I had metro tickets flying around every time I took my jacket off, opened my bag or even moved. I looked like a character in a cartoon and it was hilarious.

Long story short, Paris isn't all it's been made out to be. It isn't all bad either, but sometimes it's better to know what's up ahead. I mean, who wants to scramble around on all fours, trying to find all the metro tickets that the wind blew out of your pocket while you were waiting to cross a busy Parisian street? I'm not a fan of pretending that stuff like this doesn't happen just to keep the idealized version of Paris alive in our imagination. That doesn't help anyone going to Paris for the first time. So I've kept it real today and hope this post will help someone, someday.

My blog went silent in March. I posted once in April. Nothing went live in May and June. The biggest reason for that, as I've in my previous post, was my grandma's passing after four weeks in hospital and three weeks in a hospice. That wasn't the only reason though. There were other, more cheerful reasons, such as completing my first year of university. Making friends who kept me entertained with top-tier memes. But most importantly: I spent a lot of time traveling.

Let's go back to February. After visiting Paris, I chose the Dutch city of Dordrecht for my next destination of the Twelve Cities Challenge. I went there by boat on the first sunny day of the year. and explored the city center. In March, I took the train to The Hague and did the same thing there. We did the things a typical tourist should do: we visited a medieval jail and the Binnenhof, where the Dutch government resides. We were good stereotypical tourists.


I never got around to writing about Dordrecht and The Hague, because I had to survive my third block at university. Once finals were over, I got on a plane to Austria. I spent a full day in Vienna, where I watched the marathon and walked along the banks of the Danube in search of street art. The next day, I took a boat down the Danube to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Bratislava became city number for out of twelve for the Twelve Cities Challenge, as well as the place where I added another scare to the collection on my knees during a mountain biking trip that one-upped my Lao cycling adventure in terms of bizarreness. It was an awesome trip.

Upon return from Slovakia, I unpacked my bag only to pack it again the next day for a trip to Ireland. I was going to meet up with a friend on the Emerald Isle, but things didn't go as expected. I ended up third-wheeling my way to Cork, then found myself in Belfast with two Slovenian girls whom I met on the day that we left for Northern Ireland. The three days I spent in Belfast flew by, filled with good music, bad ideas and endless shouts of "Oh, me wee legs! I need to rest me wee legs!"


I returned home only to rush to the hospital and visit grandma. Traveling was put on the backburner for a while, but I did manage to visit Ella from Ella Was Here in Ghent. We had a Eurovision viewing party in an Airbnb, I hid under a blanket as the results came in and did the "Mezdi dance" after watching too much Ex On The Beach: Double Dutch. City number five was firmly in the pocket after that weekend.

In June, I visited my only true friend from my college days. We spent the day in Breda, where I kept getting distracted by street art in the alleys branching off the main streets. It was a relaxed, fun day that brought me one step closer to completing the Twelve Cities Challenge.

In all those months, I didn't blog about any of these trips. Not even once. You know what that means: This blog is going on a digital trip all over Europe. Buckle up, it's going to be a weird ass ride full of random nonsense and bad ideas. In other words: Your regular Lost in Translation content will be back soon.