Copied and pasted; From World Nomads Scholarships Writing 2018, Application: Paradise Is On This Planet

Paradise is on this planet — by SlavoMILA Zachova (Denmark)

The last thing I expected …

No party please!, is what I thought about Ibiza. Until someone said, that party is really just a very small part of the entire island. But I still had no plans of going there, until two new travel-colleagues talked me into it.

I arrived with a heart that had just started to heal, from a love broken due to misunderstandings, not at all looking and neither wanting to get involved with any man, and didn’t think much of the place itself either, other than, just another mediterranean island.

Within my first week, staying at a flat with a few other girls, a German guy named Niravan, who happened to know some of the girls, started coming around to see me, very confidently wanting to know me more, and showed me the whole island.

In a few days I found myself realising, that international families and people from nearly everywhere live on this island, and it turned out to be the first place where my answer to “where are you from”, to which I, the international blooded globetrotter, prefer to just say ,,Europe” was totally accepted without any further questions. I started feeling like, this could be my place, here I am understood. And on top of that, it’s in Europe!, and it has so many all different and all beautiful places of stunning and all cool nature.

Next I began wondering if this might actually be the place I have been looking for, the place to “drop my suitcases”, my kind of place. Then it hit me that it gets all quiet, empty and deserted-like during the winters, and I was sold. Finally I found a place to possibly settle, and finally make a home base.

One of the loveliest girls from my flat (Bulgarian like my mother, who died when I was 16 months old) became my best friend, and took me yachting all the time. It became one of the two best summers in my life, and I ended up staying the whole summer, well into october, till the season had ended, past all closing parties, to which I didn’t go, and fell deeply in love with Niravan.

Niravan is someone who loves to make fun of people, by making them fall for silly untrue stories, and tried to make me believe in fish that fly, and that there should be dolphins around this west-mediterranean european island. But towards the end of my stay, he took me Jet-skiing along the wild coast of the north, and I saw both flying fish and dolphins, but also a huge 1meter turtle up close.

That following winter, at age 30, I felt homesick for the first time in my life. Everything about Ibiza was the last thing I expected.