Upon arriving to the seaside last week after not having set foot there in quite a while, I realized Crikvenica is the only place in the world that I consciously associate with particular smells. Olfaction-wise I've gotten so oblivious to my surroundings that I have trouble naming even one smell reminiscent of Ljubljana, New York or any other city, but Crikvenica is much different.
A couple of months ago I found negatives of the photos I had taken during a school trip to France (Tours, the Loire Valley) in May 2007. Realizing I had never scanned most of them, I had to attend to that mistake immediately. In the process I also came across a .doc file containing the report we had to write for our French class afterwards. The effect of the trip becoming alive once more in front of my eyes through writing and images was very Proustian. I was surprised by the honesty of my words ...
Dubrovnik was the first city I fell in love with. After spending a week there with my family in 2003, I vowed to return with a one-way ticket. Like many times before and after, my love for Dubrovnik was painful. I was so enchanted with the Mediterranean joie de vivre, old ladies in cafés with small dogs in their laps gazing into the distance as if trying to recall their lost youth, stone and marble, the hustle and bustle of restaurants on Prijeko Street and red brick roofs shining under strong sun that I wanted it to become my life. ...
Until I was 15, my family used to spend a couple of months a year at a house at the seaside. As the house has been my number one association to the word "childhood" since I've been introduced to the concept of nostalgia, I developed a strange relationship with it after we'd stopped visiting. When something that valuable for your inner life is (for the most part) taken away, you begin to question everything related to it in order to discover a definite, carved-in-stone truth ...