Slowly Getting There..

With slightly more than a week to go, I am suddenly overwhelmed with the amount of little details that I have yet to deal with in order to make everything run smoothly.

I'm having a great time reading tips offered by my would-be fellow travelers as they are most practical and handy for someone as scatterbrained as me! This condition is usually heightened by extreme excitement and anticipation so I hope I can keep it together as to not unravel completely as an unabashed gawking clumsy oafish nerdy tourist in Europe, because that would not be a sight you'd like to see, believe you me.

This is not my first time travelling to a foreign country, but as it is for me the anticipation is as exciting and nerve-wracking as it had been the first time (I usually get butterflies in my stomach for weeks before the trip, which will only dissipate once I'm on the plane).

I remember my trip to America about 4 years ago. It was a first in many ways: My very first time being so far away from home and everything that I deem to be familiar, my very first time having to sit in a plane for more than 12 hours, my very first time travelling such long distance with friends, my very first time taking responsibility over myself and of my travelling companions (we took care of each other - in unfamiliar places, your friends will be your family) for the duration of the trip.

I took a lot of photos then. It is a natural reaction, I supposed, when surrounded and immersed in something completely different that we want to capture as much of the experience as we can lest the memory should fade and be lost.

But sometimes in the frenzy of capturing those memories, I find myself not living the moment that I had frantically tried to keep to be looked at later! There's that fragile fraction of a second in which things happen, and I look at it through the lens of a camera and click away, and in that moment it was all gone and I am left with pictures that has no story nor heart behind them.

I made 2 more trips in the subsequent years, and I still took photos, though significantly less in those times around. Call me crazy but I'd rather just bask in the experience, letting it all seep in through the pores of my existence. But I do make sure each and everyone of those pictures count (proof for skeptics, something to show your friends and family, bragging rights! ). And that I had lived the moment before capturing them.

Sometimes it feels good to just sit back, take it all in, and let your heart take a picture.