All posts filed under: over7seas

sheep drawings

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Everybody is very keen to hear how this fascination with portrait drawings of sheep began.. Let’s just say: Haruki Murakami was a big inspiration. Have your read his book: “A Wild Sheep Chase”? It somehow formed the literary soundtrack for my second journey to India. Part surreal, part real.

It never rains in Northern California…

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…. at all. It’s day after day sunshine here. It is definitely very tantalising and the flavour of opportunities around the corner is everywhere. In our case without a car we can’t really reach them because it is true, America is a car culture and you better have a car here or be limited but the opportunities are there. There is a distinctly different attitude here to everything. An optimism that I am always trying to understand the origin of. For example in real terms being poor here sucks more than In the UK even (!) thanks to this culture of ‘the individual’ this mentality that creates and progresses SO much “everyone out for themselves: ready, steady, go” but it leaves one a bit by the wayside when in the UK (up until ‘Cameron the Coldhearted Opportunist’ came into power) and Europe there would be some support to helps bridges gaps until one can gain a foothold again. This here really is not a model I would follow if I had a say over government …

Petsitting in Bernal Heights

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After being told that this cat didn’t like being petted and that she is rather moody I was ready for snappy attitudes and a lot of aloof ignoring. Yet within days she was purring on my lap, sleeping in my arm and resting her paws on my right arm as I typed emails and social media posts.. We made best friends! And this just has to be one of the coolest cats that I have every had the pleasure to be friends with! I teasingly called her ‘Zippy’ because I (wrongly) assumed that she would be slow and laid back.. Instead she had so much beans and it was a lot of fun seeing her chase invisible mice from time to time and bounce up and down the bed. I truly fell in love with ‘Zippy’. If we had a San Francisco home of our own, an owned one, I would have pleaded with her family to allow her to come and live with me. What a super, super cat! Daisy the dog was much …

Where can we go from here?

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Our housesitting appointment is drawing to a close at the end of the coming week. We by chance got asked to take on another house-pet-sitting gig from the 1st – 4th of August and I said yes minutes before I found out that we likely have lost the (stationary) RV that we were schedule to move into that weekend. So that was a lucky decision. It leaves a rather big question, especially considering that this is the Bay Area with incredibly high rental costs: where do we go from there? We have a grace period of another 9 days or so before I really have no idea where we will go. I had this wild idea of buying a school bus as an art-workshop venue, I prefer to teach lessons and classes in small settings rather than bigger ones, even if I take a pay-cut as a result. I had come up with a school bus when I couldn’t think of anywhere where I could teach, especially with me being new to the area I just don’t …

An amazing Day for Marriage Equality in all 50 American States!

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I have only followed the news headlines as time has been tight and I couldn’t read more in depth. But the news look good and just as I went to bed to try and catch an early night an hour or so ago a huge firework display was visible from our bedroom window and it was far too exciting to go to sleep without embracing this truly historic moment. All day I had been too busy to really give it a second thought so I am glad that the fireworks got me back out of bed to say : “CONGRATULATION!!” to all who for too long could not enjoy a basic right that most of us may take for granted. I hope that all the other rights that should be in place but simply are not will catch up. There probably won’t be a better place than San Francisco this weekend.. The pride march takes place on Sunday and I hope that I can get a good view and meet some people, too! I hear that …

Housesitting in San Francisco : View from Bernal Heights today

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We are housesitting in San Francisco. The way this works is that we got connected with a family who went to visit family on the East Coast and needed somebody (us) to look after their cat, dog, home and plants during their absence. In exchange for our reliable housesitting duties we stay here free of charge. It is a fair exchange of our time for accommodation. We added up the time that we spend caring for the pets and if you paid somebody the hours that we put in then that person could pay rent on a pretty decent place to live. So while I regularly see the headline ‘how to travel for free & housesitting” in the same sentence on the internet it is not really ‘free’. It requires commitment and time that often can clash with other activities that you might prefer to engage in. For me for example it generally means that I can not go out and explore the city as freely as I naturally would because the dog needs attention every …

suggestions on how to find more meaning in life and on journeys

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– keep a diary and look away from any screens – learn a local skill or language – are you bragging or are you sharing? I mean: are you just consuming the landscape, the culture or are you participating and can you feel the difference? – What can you learn that you have not read in any guidebook and that therefor you can not tick off of a list that offers 10 stages to travel satisfaction. Is travel a supermarket to you or an opportunity to create something meaningful for yourself, those whom you meet and those at home whom you will share your experiences with..?