I'm Nico
I love adventures in all sizes
Through written accounts and backed up by visual material I navigate the beautiful world we live in. To convince you, the reader, that no matter who you are, adventure is literally at your doorstep. If you care to notice.
Everywhere in Particular is a Belgian adventure travelogue. My personal creative corner if you will, focussing on storytelling through words and images. I use this platform to ventilate my thoughts while traveling near and far, reserving absolutely all rights to exaggerate shamelessly, brag scrupulously and be annoyingly inconsistent. Like all good workshops this is a place of experimentation. Style of writing, content focus and pace of posting will inevitably vary depending on where I am, who I’m with, what I’m doing and how I feel. I’m not scared to be messy. I only have two aspirations here. First, to convince my future me that once I was young and wild and bold and free indeed, regardless of what I may remember or think to remember. Second, to inspire people to get out of the door and into the world. There’s a lot out there that deserves to be experienced. Don’t listen to what they say. Go see.
About the author
I’m a 27-year-old architect and hobbyist travel photographer from Leuven, Belgium. I’m not a writer, nor a professional globetrotter. I don’t earn money through this website, it’s merely a public diary in which I comment on the things happening around me. After a very international year studying in Spain back in 2012 I realised life’s too short to sit at home watching the world pass by on the omnipresent screens we surround ourselves with. Fast forward 5 years, a degree in architecture, an amazing internship and several long and short trips across Europe, Asia and Africa and here I am, committing to being on the road full time. In July of 2017 I left my home, my job and everyone that I know behind in search of a grand adventure that has been lurking around the corner for years.
About Everywhere in Particular
I learned over time that expressing myself vocally when it comes to my personal state of mind isn’t exactly my strongest virtue. Unlike in real life though, written words tend to be structured and contemplated. They make sense on the page instead of being twisted by the pressure of conversation. Writing for writing’s sake is the main motivation to start this new blog.
Since my first blog, which treated about spending a year in sunny Spain, I noticed that I like to share my vision on experiencing the world that I live in. To speculate about life and learning, and to critique the status quo. I started Everywhere in Particular for exactly this cause. As a framework, an isolated, digital bubble floating a safe distance away from the material world, from which my perception and observation could be both very objective and very subjective at the same time, depending on the topic I want to discuss.
This website isn’t an exercise in ego. I am well aware that very few people will stumble onto it, and that, of the ones that do, some will laugh about my naiveness to think people would actually be interested in my thoughts. I don’t really care. I write for myself, to remember, and for friends, to follow my thoughts, hopes and dreams change on a regular basis. Be it because they’re too far away to notice these things in person, or too close to me to see infinitesimal day-to-day alterations. I also write for strangers, and try to inspire them to do the same, since I belief in self-reflection as an expression of truth.
From the simplistic tendencies of my beginnings to whatever end, this whole website will be the evolution of my personal growing process. I’m not trying to ‘complete’ anything with my writing, nor do I have a fixed timeframe in which I want to get it over with. Sometimes you may not find any entry for months at a time. Although this slow pace is not adapted to our 21st century attention spans, I hope you, the reader, will not lose interest due to a lack of new material. Dreams and musings do not come to us whenever we please, and neither does inspiration, time or desire of writing. There is no specific ’challenge’ here, it’s just contemplation and life.
I write in English, although this is not my mother tongue, and the reason for this is simple: I like it. It is often considered that the English language has the largest vocabulary of all languages spoken on earth, and unlike Dutch English seems to have all these beautiful phrasal constructions which make it easy to formulate thoughts. This is not the only reason though. Many foreign friends commented on the fact that my last blog was written in Dutch, and they felt annoyed because they could not read posts in which their own names appeared. Also, I would love to write in Spanish if I could, but for that my level of written Spanish is not high enough and the number of people around me who would be able to read it even lower. So English it is this time. Since this is just an endless draft, the only thing that remains now is asking forgiveness for the undoubtedly numerous grammatical mistakes that will be made in posts to come.
