I started to write this blog post almost a year ago, after living here for a month or two, then I was adding something, deleting something, editing, and almost all the time I wasn’t satisfied with the result in order to publish it, then I started think that this is just a too short period of time to make any assumptions about the country, so I decided to leave it until at least 1 year. So today is THAT exact day! Today (27th of September) one year ago I stepped on this land for the first time, today one year ago the new chapter of my life has begun.
When I started to look for some photos from this year for giving me some memories and inspiration, they brought me so many different emotions and feelings, in this year I had so much: excitement, joy, happiness, confusions, disappointment, depression, loneliness, awkwardness, hope, stepping out of my comfort zone, beautiful days, cosy weather, smelling rain, longing, homesick, desires, plans for the future, anger, love, frustration, pain, desire to escape from here right in this moment and at the same time desire to live here for the rest of my life… And all these emotions and feelings were repeated again and again and again…
When I started writing this post last year, I was writing why am I here and the whole story how we ended up here. Now for some reasons I don’t feel like posting it, now I want to write about my emotions. But if someone will be interested about the whole story maybe I will make it more shorter and post it sometimes in the future.
From the start I want to say that I was a fan of the Netherlands long before coming here or knowing that I will be living here some day, or even having any plans of this kind, so you can imagine how excited I was finding out that I will be actually living in the Netherlands, I couldn’t believe my luck. The main reason of my love to the Netherlands was the huge amount of music that I like is from here, but even rationally thinking the Netherlands overall it’s a beautiful and very comfortable country to live in, where everything is made for people, with good ecology, highly developed in almost everything you can think of, always on top of lists with the most happiest countries and in a lot of other lists with high positions, where government actually takes care of its people, what not to love, a perfect country, and in my humble opinion one of the best countries in the world!
Through this year people were always asking me a question “Did you liked the Netherlands?” and other variations of this question, and somehow I was always unprepared for this question, so I was like: “Umm… yes… I like it…” But in reality I just had TOO many words to express my feelings towards this country that I couldn’t put them all in one short sentence (which probably the majority people expect to hear), so in the end it sounded like I don’t really like their country, which can’t be farther from the truth. Because I love this country with all of my heart!
Like I’m said I wanted to make this post when I just got here, but then decided to wait a little bit for my euphoria to calm down a little bit, and yes the euphoria is gone, so now I can see even clearer that I consciously love this country, with even not so good sides, which I already experienced, but it’s even better. It’s like when you love a person, you love them whole, and not just good sides. In general I have a strange connection to places, countries etc. Like for example I always said that I am a patriot of my country, and I certainly still am and will be, I am not renouncing of that, it’s just our country unfortunately is better to be loved from a far (but that’s a whole another topic). Sometimes I have strong emotions in some countries or cities I travel, with no particular reasons, without logical explanation. Sometimes I want to cry being in a place, or laugh, or staring just in one place, or admiring the coulours of the light from the sky, or even a sexual excitement, ok that is starting to be too personal , so I won’t continue to not scare you off, but I noticed when I tried to say this to people they don’t really understand me (not the sexual part), and some people don’t even have that feeling of love towards their homeland, or any other land. For me it can go even farther, sometimes I don’t have those feeling for people, in general didn’t have much of those in my life… ok ok of course I had once, maybe twice… I mean not the same feelings, not the same kind of love but rather the intensity of love. I feel the huge amount of love to the places. So what I wanted to say that I feel that is MY place, it’s where I suppose to be, and I am forever grateful to be able to live here.

And now I found myself rewriting this post again, I lost count how many times I was rewriting this post, or changing the direction of it. That’s just because I have too much to say and in my every day life I don’t really talk to people, so when I write something it turns out as a tornado of words 🙂 Ok now I completely lost myself in the ocean of my thoughts and feelings, so I better stop here and publish it as it is, because there is a chance that after half of an hour I will change my mind and will start writing it with an entirely different approach. So I will leave this post as it is, very imperfect, but at least published, because I have so many posts in my ‘drafts’ folder on different topics which I decided to not publish because they never were perfect.
I will close this post with a few not so interesting but important photos for me, from the last year.
P.S. Now when people will ask me how I like the Netherlands I will send them link to this post 🙂