Hi everyone! In July I visited my youngest aunt in Istanbul for about 4 days. As some of you may not know, I am 75% Dutch and 25% Turkish from my father’s side. Unfortunately I don’t speak the language, but we always try to find our way with some German or Google Translate. A large part of my family (my father’s side) is Turkish (originally from the Trabzon – Black Sea region, back in the bloodline probably Russian descendants which is quite visible in the appearance within our family) and live in Turkey and Germany. During the trip I didn’t spend a lot of time creating content, and anyway I have always been very conscious in creating content. Sometimes I see friends/others who are so obsessed with creating content or deeply forcing certain photos/content that the entire trip passes them by, it takes up hours and also removes all attention from being in the now. Everyone has their own thing of course, but I think it is a shame when so much time and consciousness is lost in this way. That’s why I only posted everything from this trip afterwards. [Lees meer…]
This travel diary is a very special and personal one, the title says Solo, but I was not alone. I was very curious about my partial ‘roots’ and lovely family members that I never or haven’t seen in the last 20 years. I went to see them on my own in Istanbul. After the sudden death of my grandfather in early 2019, which I was actually going to see in real life for the first time this year (we had facetime contact every now and then, telephone contact and he spoke Dutch), I decided to fly to Istanbul during my vacation, less than half a day after I came back from Valencia, from Eindhoven airport. [Lees meer…]