life is my playground

I'm moving homes and changing jobs. February proves to be packed with changes for me. I love changes, I adore changes, they make me feel alive and not stuck in a rut.

Changing home is in fact just a figure of speech -I am craving to have my own cosy little room in a shared flat in London but for now I'm just gonna be filling my sister's room with my definitively too many! River Island, Zara and Office belongings and crash at her place for 2-3 weeks. Also filling the void as she's most of the time not there anyways.

Secondly, gonna change jobs, but this is as well another figure of speech. I have been doing a nanny job for the last past year which left me with deep insight and knowledge into the English family life and customs and especially how to educate and not to educate children.
Enjoyed a comfortable job which helped me a great deal increase my cooking potential and especially cooking healthy meals, which is a HUGE accomplishement for me,taking into account I had no idea what COOKING was when I arrived here. Also got to learn how to drive on left hand-side which is in fact a piece of cake ( still have problems reversing though :P) and just being around children a lot. Loved my time with Ollie and will dedicate an entire blog to this special girl in my life. And also got to party BIG TIME!!

So after one year of partying A LOT and when I say a lot I invite you kindly to take a peek at my photo albums on Facebook to see with your own eyes the debauchery I so much enjoyed ( obvious exaggeration for literary reasons :PP), it is high time for some serious business. A brand new job. Which in fact is not a job. As I will not get paid for 3 whole months...

It is so exciting I can't stop myself from giggling with joy and happiness. I've started an internship in Event Management, my dream for quite a while now. The company is organizing an amazing Green Event and I'm dealing with exhibitors, guest speakers and media coverage. The word exciting is not enough to describe it, so I won't even try. It is enough to say that it makes me extremely happy and that the people I work with are genuine and are genuinely interested in raising awareness of the dangers of climate change and how we all can, with quite little effort, make a big difference.

Now about my blogging plans, I've been quite lazy and haven't posted anything in a very long time. But now I'm back. And with a gret desire to write. I've become much more organized here and time-conscious. You kind of have to, if you want to survive in London. So I'm gonna be posting on a regular basis.Thoughts, articles about my life in London. What I do, the good and the bad, enjoying every little success in the new career I want to pursue and telling myself off for every setback. Hopefully there won't be many, in any area of my life! Will blog what I love and what I hate about London, what makes me tick, the things that make me smile and the ones that make me sad...

About London.....London is a huge city of contrasts, where in less than 10 miles you can go from luxurious extravagant architecture blending perfectly with cutting-edge surpassing the 21st century office buildings to run-down boroughs where people struggle to make ends meet and survive.

London is a cosmopolitan city, yet ignorance and intolerance and racism are not extinct, how I would have expected.
London is a breathing soul in itself with so may stories to tell and captivate.

London is the city I'm learning to love, though I do despise it many ways. It is a jungle-city that gives the new-comer two choices: to survive or to leave. Professionally and educationally the opportunities are huge and the potential to make something of yourself is big, as long as there is will power, drive and ambition. Then you definitively need to let it go. I want, at some point, to let it go. I want to grow in and with London, on the busy streets that make me feel so alive, and I want to leave before it sucks me into it and makes me a robotic creature commuting for 3 hours a day. I want to leave before I become too impersonal to care and too polite in a very fake way to actually mean what I say. London is majestic and it's overwhelming. It's perverse and capricious. There isn't only a word to describe it. So I won't try to find just one. There will be thousands in my entries to come. London is actually many different Londons put together, thousands of life-styles under one big umbrella.


London is many times a cruel reality-check. I hate the ambulance and police sirens driving up and down the city. I can hear them at least twice a day. Sometimes you can hear both an ambulance and a police car at the same time. It makes me shiver with fear. Just thinking that in that moment somewhere somebody is in pain and desperately needs help. Or is hurt. And thinking that one of those sirens might one day go on for me...Or fire engines speeding up to save lives and peoples' homes. Random acts of violence. People hurting other people. With no reason at all, just an enraged desire to harm. I think that's what I hate most in this world. Random violence. And there is so much of that in London....

Does it make any sense? Life is short, in a big city like London you realize that even more. So you kind of set your priorities. What you want to get. Why you're here. Where you want to go. And you're just not allowed to go wrong. Need to be firm. That's what I want and want to keep this promise to myself. Do my Masters, live and breath London, enjoy all the amazing experiences and let it leave its mark on my soul. But not too much, just take the good out of it, not loose my identity, myself, my focus,my love for travelling, for knowing other cultures. KNOWING is the key word. Can't believe I still meet ignorant English who don't know that for mainland it's weird to put milk in tea and not many other countries, if any, in Europe do it.

I love finding out things, discovering the beauty of things I don't know.... and playing a lot. I love playing ..I discovered I love playing so much!! Life is my playground. I play with ideas, with my own limits, with thoughts and feelings, with everything around me. And I smile. I smile when it rains and when it's sunny, I smile when I get off the tube and get into my office. When I get a sincere '' well done'' and when I'm told off for screwing up. It's life, I learn, I might not be here tomorrow, so I smile for being here today.For getting a '' Well done!'' or a ''Mona! Could I have a word with you?' And living my life the way I want to live it.

Paola once told me something so precious to me when I was crying and stressing out and packing to leave my beloved Medellin. She looked into my eyes and said: "Mona, disfrutalo!! Disfruta tu partida, no sabes cuando o si vas a regresar. Disfrutalo, Mona!" She was talking from the bottom of her Colombian heart. She was telling me to enjoy that moment, packing and leaving Colombia behind. That is a good life philosophy. Enjoy every moment, enjoy leaving a place,it is the beginning of another experience and going to another place...enjoy a problem...enjoy finding a solution..enjoy testing yourself, your mind, soul and skills to find that solution. Because there are always solutions. And I am the first one to declare and sign this statement. Only death doesn't have a solution. You can't fix death. Everything else can be fixed. And I'm talking from experience. Painful, which made me enjoy and cherish life.

I guess lecturing on happiness and living the moment is easy, but in fact only personal life experience can make you actually realize how easy it is not to get annoyed by little things, by the big things, by anything in fact and just enjoy.... I have so many thoughts that I've been so eager to put down and am jumping from one topic to another...sorry for that... but my zest and passion for writing never really died... they were sort of numb for a long, too long... time. But I'm back now and I promise to post a new entry at least every 2 weeks. Will catch up with my travels in England and many other stuff...

Trying to make London home for the next 2 years before I take off. I'm thinking Thailand next, but am not sure. Colombia again? with a good old friend? Huge plans for this year. Been living in London for 1 year but it only feels like I've just arrived. Colombia in my mind and soul, having great expectations from myself and ready to face new challenges.

ENJOY SOME RANDOM PHOTOS FROM MAY PAST 14 MONTHS IN LONDON.

Abrazos
Mona
xx

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