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I wasn’t living there, just exploring. My best friend and I backpacked for three months together when we were 20. We’d wake up in a spare room in Brussels, a hostel in Venice, somehow ended up in Athens, London, Barcelona, and everywhere in between. We had these train passes that pretty much gave us unlimited travel use. Some of the best times and fondest memories were the hours spent on the train drawing and writing, it felt very meditative for me. I really fell in love with art during those times. As for epiphanies, I suppose I had my share. While we were traveling, a lot of things seemed to go “wrong” for us, I was always getting weirdly sick, she was constantly losing her pants, getting her wallet stolen, then we’d find ourselves in seedy neighborhoods in Paris, I even got lost in the Sistine Chapel. We actually starting making this massive list in one my sketchbooks entitled something like “We Are Murphy’s Law”. Naturally, the sketchbook was lost somewhere between Rome and Sicily, never to be seen again. It turned out to be really funny to us, we always laughed when something seemingly went “wrong”, and were just like “yep, of course!” It almost turned in to this game. I think it really reinforced my belief in how important your attitude and outlook is. It’s all about what you do with what you’re given, how you respond to situations, how you process it and are able to pick yourself up and keep going, which for me, applies to a much larger scale than little things happening to us while traveling. Alright, this is turning in to a novella. 

Here’s one of the drawings I did on a train (in my replacement sketchbook). I don’t remember what it means.