¡ Ay Papaya

Love is having an interesting conversation you can’t get enough of

Love is having an interesting conversation you can’t get enough of

✏️“Where are you from?”: The Real answer 🔗Link to blog on profile www.ideasinwords.wordpress.com 📃Fragment: “(...) I come from Venezuela, its sunny side and its dark side. I come French education. I come from American pop culture. I come from Catholicism, Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Consciousness. I come from Europe, as a whole. I come from Italy, as a family ideal. I come from China’s bursting expat community. I come from Belgian "solutions", or should I say 'complications'. I come from Swedish democratic design and socialist mentality. I come from Nordic work efficiency. I come from Hispanic literature. I come from Caribbean salsa. I have a Venezuelan and an Italian passport. I have Venezuelan, Italian and Belgian ID cards. I have Venezuelan and Belgian driver’s licenses. I speak Venezuelan Spanish, American English, Belgian French, flat-accented Italian, amateur Chinese and basic Flemish Dutch. I have Venezuelan parents with a European way of thinking. I’ve dated one Swede, three Venezuelans, two Brits, one Spaniard, one Belgian, one Dutch, no Chinese. I’m from many places and from nowhere in particular. I do not take responsibility or appreciate the burden of being from one place at a time. Mixing and matching those cultural experiences made a personal culture. Where am I from? I’m a third culture kid.” www.ideasinwords.wordpress.com @carotravaglio #ideasinwords #blogger #blogpost #blog #creativewriting #creativity #storytelling #ideas #life #culturalbaggage #venezuela #europe #thirdculturekids #china #belgium #brussels #culturalexchange #expat #tck #france #italy #spain (at Barcelona, Spain)

✏️United Colors 🔗Link to blog in profile www.ideasinwords.wordpress.com 📃Fragment: “(...) I was lucky enough to have been born with a natural tan, which was proudly inked on me by my mom who put me straight in the sun during my first few weeks of my life. My best friend is insanely white, as is one of my first cousins, meaning that a regular trip to the beach for them meant virtually being harassed by parents to "put on some God damn lotion!". If they didn't, they'd turn red like strawberry ice-cream (mixed with vanilla, depending on how successful parents had been on applying the lotion). I didn't need much lotion, and I got tanned like a natural black, even more so than I do today. Ironically enough, I wanted desperately to be like my friend and cousin, and they wanted to be like me. At age 4, while living in France with my family, one day I suddenly started being bothered by the fact that my family would lovingly call me "negrita". My parents assumed it was because at school I was picked on. I would be so upset when they did that they had to stop. I remember the day I discovered skin had a color. By then, I was living in the US, age 6, and my mom bought me a set of 12 Crayola markers all in different shades from peach white to violet black. They where beautiful and I could finally color my characters in their real skin tone. (...)” www.ideasinwords.wordpress.com @carotravaglio #ideasinwords #blogger #blogpost #blog #creativewriting #creativity #storytelling #ideas #life #culturalbaggage #venezuela #europe #thirdculturekids #racism #race #saynotoracism #multicultural (at Barcelona, Spain)

✏️Hey, Europe I’m home! 🔗Link to blog on profile: www.ideasinwords.wordpress.com 📃Fragment: “(...) I have more than an Italian passport: if you ask me, I'm rather a European citizen.
For the first time in 3 years, after travelling within Europe as much as I possibly could, I left Europe for a month-long holiday in the US. I hadn't been to the US in over 15 years, and still felt like I was much in touch with it's culture, as I'm a big follower of its media industry. No offence guys, but Europe is much more my style. Even more than Latin style.
I am so used to Europe by now, that the rest of the Western world seems foreign. Don't get me wrong it's interestingly fun to have an anthropological experience in the States (and anywhere else if you ask me), I just live by European values now, and realise I always have.
For one, things and spaces in Europe are human-sized. I can buy products that fit in my hand and can be lifted with my tiny arms. Of course you can find bigger packaging for stocking and such, but it's not what your ordinarily find in your around-the-corner grocery store. Streets in cities also tend to be designed for walking in a human body, through efficient public transport, not inside an individual mechanical carcass.
People (for the most part) believe in cost consciousness, sustainability, and plain old recycling. Using unnecessary plastic? A sin. Not brining your own bag to the supermarket? A reason to apologise. It just breaks the environmental side of my heart to do otherwise.
Food is a crucial part of life in Europe. Sitting together around the table to share a healthy and tasty meal is a sacred moment. I love being able to share that moment with others and eat such delicious and diverse food, including food from many other places in the world.
After all, Europe is intrinsically diverse. (...)” www.ideasinwords.wordpress.com @carotravaglio #ideasinwords #blogger #blogpost #blog #creativewriting #creativity #storytelling #ideas #life #culturalbaggage #venezuela #europe #thirdculturekids #travelling #european #italian (at Vienna , Austria)

✏️A short story about emigration 🔗Link to blog in profile: www.ideasinwords.wordpress.com 📃Fragment: “(...) I’m not an expat, or a traveller, a globetrotter filled with wanderlust; I’m an immigrant. That fact has a toll on all of us, and that’s what I would like to unpack for you with this post.
We grew up knowing it would come, but we couldn’t have foreseen the extent of it. “I come from Venezuela” is a statement that comes with a hidden story.
I was 9 years old when Chávez was elected president in 1998, to which my parents rolled their eyes and secretly prayed as they turned off the TV, filled with cheerful chavista supporters. I had already lived abroad for half of my life. Stories from Cuba and Soviet countries were well-known at the dinner table. By the time I was in high school, I had seen movies about pre-Communist Russia and read Orwell’s Animal Farm. I understood, at my young age, that I was living in an unstable, ill-fated country. The possibility of leaving the country loomed our home: my parents admired European lifestyle and were critical about the government. The question was when and how. (...)” @carotravaglio #blogger #blogpost #blog #ideasinwords #creativewriting #creativity #storytelling #ideas #life #culturalbaggage #venezuela #europe #thirdculturekids #immigration #emigration #venezuelans #venezuela🇻🇪 #venezuelanproud #venezolano #latinamerica #politics (at Vienna , Austria)

Let’s splurge new ideas today @carotravaglio #blogger #blogpost #blog #ideasinwords #creativewriting #creativity #storytelling #ideas #life #culturalbaggage #venezuela #europe #thirdculturekid #thirdculturekids (at Vienna , Austria)

Animals caught in action

✏️The Typical Venezuelan 🔗Link to blog in profile 📃Fragment: “... [Disclaimer: This a personal opinion, which many of my fellow Venezuelans might deny. My critical outlook comes from having lived abroad for so long, but still knowing Venezuelans up close and personal, and being a Venezuelan myself. This is, of course, written as a generalisation and does NOT apply to everyone].
Time for confessions: there are many reasons why I have honestly felt relieved that I moved away from Venezuela. Being a 3rd culture kid (again, Google it), I felt left out in many occasions. These are the things I do not miss. ...” @carotravaglio #blogger #blogpost #blog #ideasinwords #creativewriting #creativity #storytelling #ideas #life #culturalbaggage (at Vienna , Austria)

✏️A Note on Meditation (Part I) 🔗Link to blog on profile Fragment: “...Let it be noted that Mediation is a relatively new concept in the West (Europe and the Americas), but it has been around for centuries in Eastern –also called Oriental– cultures. In India kids that meditate are fairly common. In China, the lessons of Confucius are wide spread and deeply rooted in their culture.
Meditation has more to do with spirituality than it has to do with religion. Spirituality is a concept that we seem to have lost track of in the West. Since the popularity of Catholicism fell sharply in the 20th century, commodities being easier to access for the general public and human life span having improved immensely, young people have systematically dismissed any source of spirituality, stigmatizing it as too esoteric and plain nutty.
Don’t get me wrong. Spirituality is also a central part of major religions East and West (Catholicism, Judaism and Islam). I can only really speak for Catholicism, the religion I was brought up into; for Catholics praying the “Our Father” or the “Holy Mary” is a way of being spiritual. But with time, maybe because the Church hasn’t marketed itself very well, people have begun to think praying is ridiculous. I believe it isn’t, and I’ll explain why.
My background in spirituality isn’t very deep, but it is broader than average. As I said, I was raised a Catholic and studied for 11 years in an all-girls Catholic school. At the tender age of 7, my mother started studying Freudian Psychoanalysis, which is a another way of being mindful, because one of it’s main principles is that the patient becomes aware of his or her own subconscious actions and imperfections. Subsequently, after Catholicism, Psychoanalysis “became my religion” –so to speak– because virtually everything in my household was seen through the perspective of Freud. ...” #blogger #blogpost #blog #ideasinwords #creativewriting #creativity #storytelling #ideas #life #culturalbaggage #meditation #spirituality #psycoanalisis #catholiscism #religion (at Vienna , Austria)

✏️A Note on Creativity 🔗Link to blog on profile But some situations do open our eyes, forcing us to look over the hill. One of many is emigrating. The trick lays in the fact that one is impressed all over again about every little thing and we start adapting to diametrically different ways of behavior. Your inner system is suddenly affected by this new information, sooner than later change must happen but not by replacing the previous ways, but actually combining the two.
Being form the Western world, places like Europe and the US don’t seem far too different, influence is direct, and even that can be an eye opener. Now imagine going to Asia for example, where perception can change 180 degrees. From spoken language to written language, from gestures to values, soon it is evident that even though we are born in the same kind of body in an environment that is ruled by the same parameters, the human mind is able to create a living system that has infinite answers to questions as basic as how to communicate or how to eat. What doesn’t change no matter what are the essentials. Essential words that exist in every language like ‘to be’ or ‘to love’, abstract as they are, are always part of the system. Other than this, possibilities are literally endless. #blogger #blogpost #blog #ideasinwords #creativewriting #creativity #storytelling #ideas #life #cultural baggage (at Vienna , Austria)

Here and now

Building the future one piece at a time. Happy 2018!

🔷🔹Klein blue🔹🔷

Day off