Home

It is always tempting in a new place to try to see as many things as possible, especially when you are in the Cultural Capital of Europe. But when you move around a lot the first thing you do in a new city is find the places where you feel at home and stay there for as long as you need.

I am in Wroclaw, in a way by chance. I was in the south of England to give a workshop and travelling back to either Amsterdam or Barcelona was expensive so I took a 14 euro flight to this Polish city. Since a year I've got a suitcase stored in a small village in the south of this country and it is time to pick it up. It was too complicated in the last year to travel back to the fairytale town I fell in love with last summer but now circumstances seem to tell me it is the right time. A cheap flight to the city that is the Cultural Capital this year and is also the city with an airport closest to Sokolowsko (where my suitcase is stored together with a part of my heart), where in a few days the yearly Kieslowski film festival is starting. The original plan was to travel on straight away but landing in this city where I don't know anybody I felt a strong urge to be invisible for a few days, wander around without a goal, breath in and out, talk little while keeping my eyes and ears open.

I am writing this from the Vinyl Cafe that is just around the corner from the hostel where I rented a room for three nights, not far from the central square. It has vintage furniture and old photos on the wall and lots of records for sale, although the best ones can't be bought: they are the private collection of this place but they play them on request. I drank coffee here when I arrived early afternoon and stayed for a Polish beer while listening to Patti Smith's "Horses", reading my book about Kieslowski.

My homes are cafe's and bookshops, my home is in language and sounds, being surrounded by people talking to each other, the smell of coffee, the taste of cheese cake. Strange languages, familiar ones and specifically one I haven't mastered yet but makes me feel more at home than hearing my own language does. When I seated myself on a small terrace outside a cafe/bookshop yesterday evening I was surrounded by Spanish, small kids counting from 10 to 1, playing hide and seek, adults drinking beer and talking about art and literature. Somehow I managed in this Polish city to choose the place that reminds me of the city I have chosen to be my home for the coming time. A city that has welcomed me in since the first moment I set foot in it. A city with the sea on one side and mountains on the other and inbetween many kind people and dear friends.

Barcelona seems so far away but it is lovely to find traces of it here. I guess you always somehow do that, find the things you long for in small encounters, gestures, words, scents; a sign that everything is connected and all you have to do is to be open to it, to be in the middle of it.