Beach Time Sweethearts

August 3, 2016 Dorija Parsley

Recently, my BFF Jurga, her boyfriend and I decided to go camping for a weekend - wherever, doesn't matter, as long as it's in the nature, it's green, close to the water, kind of calm yet giving a summer holiday feeling. Last minute, just the day before leaving, we heard about this awesome place on the Baltic Sea coast called Prerow - a fisherman village on a peninsula, combining a lagoon-like calm sea on the east, yet rough waves on the west side of the peninsula, a forest in between, soft sand and our campsite on the edge of the dunes. For us, two Lithuanian girls, this place was giving a very rare sense of a Baltic homeland site, it was mind blowing to recognise something we grew up with on another countries shoreside like the preserved architecture of little wooden houses, the landscape of the shore, a pine tree forest just along it.

We stayed at the Regenbogen Prerow Campsite. As we checked in very late, for some magical reasons we got the very spot we actually were wishing for - at the very corner on the last bit of the campsite, where our two of the four neighbours were a dune (with the sea 100m behind it) and a young growing pine forest. Moreover - we got located next to the nudist beach :-) So I could finally get one of those pictures out of my tent that I was always dreaming about when diving into Pinterest scrolling too much. However, absolutely everything was perfect about that weekend - coffee in the sand, rain in the night time, sun all day long, braless suntanning, campsite cooking, hot water showers and, of course, a lot of amazing scenery filled with love and kisses for my photographic delight.

It wasn't my first time at the German part of the Baltic Sea. But all these years we've been fast to book flights to anywhere in Europe for hikes, roadtrips, beaches and longing for distant corners with high peaks, hot springs or long sandy stripes of beach. But I had to realise how little I actually know Germany and how much it has to offer nature wise if you know where to look for it. If you have any advice, top 5 must experience nature locations - share it with me, please. I'll mark them up in my map and save my weekends for them.

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Helgoland Friday

July 11, 2015 Dorija Parsley

oh how delightful it is. the silence, the calmness of island life. sometimes is does get on your nerves a lot, but then again, in those good mood moments and days, life is so blissful and beautiful on an island..on a friday afternoon i met Nadja for a tour in the Helgoland ornithological station - second oldest in the world. in there many voluntary helpers work for the sake of gathering information about the most seldom bird kinds of Europe and World. they help the wild breeding couples with their babies, like the guillemots, which jump out of their nests into the water in order to learn to fly (they actually jump into the sea so they can learn to fly from there and survive on the fish they find on the surfice of the water). the little hour of nature joy was followed by a delightful best friday night Bulgarian dinner which Nadja made specially for me. pure relaxing, pure joking, talking sense and nonsense.. and water-colouring!

Nadja is in love with this picture and the magic of lens aperture =)

i love this one picture on the right with the casual relaxing legs. i love the little details of the couch cover and the socks. hyper coziness when i see it. and then i lit the candles, so the water colouring could start.

a little jump to the day before. on Thursday we went out to watch the storm and waves around the island as we had a storm passing this area and cutting off any ship connection to the mainland for two days. so, wearing a winter coat again, we walked around the edges to experience the wind playing with our bodies and all sorts of greenery.

these water coloured flowers actually made me think about painting beautiful things again. and do it happened the night after.

back to Friday. after leaving Nadja's place i saw the sunset hour coming closer, the water so still after the stormy days, fresh summer breeze back up again. i decided to go for a kind of a sunset run session which was constantly interrupted by the beauty of every corner - i needed to stop and snap a picture on my phone. after all, all i can say is - i love this island, i love being a part of this nature, i love to be so much excited by the sky every time i go for a run. i love to be interrupted by the crazy sheep standing somewhere on the hill in bizarre compositions. right now - i just adore the smell of the rose hip along the beach. it's insane that this can be and is my nearly every day life at the moment. i recommend it to everyone. cities are great, but this - water all over in the horizon, sand on my skin, the greenery smell, seashells on strings.. this is actually the life environment i was wishing for. and somehow - i got it.

i wish all a good weekend.

ps: and leave some thoughts in a comment. i always appreciate <3

f e e l h o m e

May 18, 2015 Dorija Parsley

the ones who know me a little bit also know how much home, coziness and hospitality means to me. like those little details - seashells on the window ledge, found drift wood and branches together with grandma' flea market pictures hanging on my walls, blanket patterns and a cup of tea each hour... all in a very certainly organised happy mess. rethinking what home actually means to me is a very frequent topic on my mind. when you move several times, change countries, leave family or, after all, brake up with people in whose arms you were feeling so warm and peaceful -like home-, after you go through all that circle a few times i guess it becomes natural, that practical and philosophical questions arise and wait to be stilled with an answer for that one little while. for me as a child of migrations this topic is a huge thing and never off the table. nevertheless there are those two battling sides of mine - the shelter craving snail versus the butterfly jumping from one flower colour to another to whom the whole meadow is his home. the butterfly still wins the most of those battles.

up till this day the places i stay in - even for years - still tend to feel like stations. nonetheless i feel this grand wish arising to start putting the first stone down for a place to call my home, and a place to come back to. i'm still very much on a silent slow search, but i can't wait till the day i find this right piece of land - close to the ocean, surrounded by trees, with space and blankets for best visitors, and candles at calm rhythm dinners. a place i feel safe, warm and peaceful in.

now even thought i don't know how to define this upcoming sentence do that anyway - call up your mom or dad or your best mate, for in their warmest voices one will always find home.

* the photos are from my best friends place a few weeks ago. a place i can always feel so safe and cozy in *

if you don't bother just tell me what you think about the definition of h o m e, even on a comment bellow. i would like to have more words to describe this feeling with.