Oh! Happy days

After several months of frustrations, stress, what I have been waiting has finally arrived. That is to say we should never give up (I almost did, but I would not in the future).

Yesterday I received the big news, which really made my day, and I still can't imagin how easy it became. Finally, I can plan on my big trips, of course, first need to work on the budget, but it won't be a big problem. I am so happy! My 30s BD will be a big one, and I hope I will celebrate in the place that I have been dreaming to be. The place I want to see before I die ;-).

Nothing could stop me now, I feel like I could move mountains, cross river, even that won't make me tired. And I am going to take my first swimming lesson next week, which of course open more doors to new discovery (the water world ;-)).

OMG, can I be happier? ;-). Anyone up for a big bear hug? anyone? anyone at all? ;-)

"Source Thermal d'Akitsu"

If you have been the one who read my blog often, you would have noticed how much I complained and felt disappointed about the world we are living today. I just realised that not only me, not only now but through the "lettres" of Katherine Manfields (around 1918-), she also was disappointed about her world, about the period when she lived in. It is just incredible to see how precise her words were to describe people. I wish I could write like her. I don't know why but it is like I really know her through her letters. Again, the paper letters really have a big impact on people, not like emails eventhough I have always been careful on what I write in them (emails).

Somehow I become a bit poetic ;-). But that does not stop me from being sad when I saw millions of Ethiopians died of hunger, or children who have no foods to eat, and when I looked at their fragile bodies, I was sure that a breeze of wind could carry them far. Feeling these horrible sadness make you stronger, they have a power to make your problems small, and help you to stop complaining or arguing about silly things because somewhere else problems are bigger, and worse nobody cares!

Anyway, I feel much love in me today ;-), and if carrying a carton board around my neck with one of those "free hugs" written on it does not make me look ridiculous, I would definitely do it!. Yesterday, I went to see an old Japanese movie, "La source Thermale d'Akitsu", it was about a very melancholic love story. The movie was slow but it was cute and was made beautifully. I was happy when it finished because it was slow and sad. The girl died at the end, she killed her herself when she realised that she fell in love with the wrong guy, a guy who came to her for a few days, and then left her for years eventhough she was the one who saved his life...So much for love, I guess.

Nowadays, how many of girls and women fall for the wrong guys before they actually meet someone decent or worse of all, some of them never meet the right guy. One of my friends (and this coming from a guy who also looks for real love from a woman, and most men will surely agree ;-)) that "women are always attracted by the bad guys, if we treat them good, they do not show appreciation but if we show them we don't want them, they run after us". Well, something like that.

Why that is, I wonder.

Letters

I think I could say that I am a fan of paper-letters. I guess at the digital age, we rarely find people who still use this old method of communicating. I still do from time to time.

I used to write paper letters more often because when I arrived in Belgium years ago, we still did not have internet at home, so I had to wait for almost a month to receive a reply from my friends or my mom from VN. I could recall clearly the feeling every time I came home from school to see a blue red stripes envelop, and on it there was several bamboo picture stamps ;-). I sat down next to the entrance door, tore it out and read my letter several times before dragging my slow, heavy feet, and my home sick heart up to the stairs to my room. I usually replied right away.

Now, my cousine who just joined Canada with my aunt, couldn't experience that. Everytime she chatted with my uncle, so with her, the experience of living far away from home is not the same thing, and of course less home sick, too.

I am reading a book in French (something I rarely do compare to the past), and it is a book of letters ;-) written in beautiful French. Letters from a wife to her husband and her friends. I love the beautiful phrases she described her surrounding, it is so romantic, sad, but at the same time so details and real. The emotion, her feelings are described in a way that you can not only feel her pain but her optimistism. The language she used to write to her husband, although it sounds very polite and distant, but it says all. Most books nowadays are written in such simple languages, easy to understand, sometimes there is even vulgarity, the language just loses its core. And that worths both for English and French.

"Ma chambre est bien chaude. J'ai un petit brin de feu, et les flammes dansent sur les buches sans se decider a les attaquer...Voici un train qui passe. Maintenant tout est de nouveau silencieux, a l'exception de ma montre." Katherine Mansfield

Isn't that beautiful? Now imagine you are listening to Edith Piaf's "La vie en rose" or "Je ne regret de rien" with something old you wrote on papers (diaries, letters...), memory comes back, and well "without memory we have no soul". Yes, I know this is my mid-life crisis ;-)