Coming is a slightly lighter, much more self indulgent blog (which is saying something since I only ever write exactly what I want to write). Late in 2021, I was inspired by my friend Aine’s bullet journal to start my own. After a year of doing it myself, I wanted to share some of my favourite designs and a little about why I have enjoyed it so much. Read Aine’s blog if you want to hear more about the benefits of bullet journaling and also get some bujo envy!

I actually started my bullet journal on New Year’s Eve. Seeing as I had been confined to France over the Christmas holidays, having had covid right before I was supposed to go back to Scotland, and most of my friends in Mulhouse were out of town, I spent the evening drinking G&Ts, watching Marvel movies and starting my bullet journal. I decided on a 1920s, Great Gatsby inspired theme for the opening pages that included things like a calendar of the year, goals and a bucket list for 2022 as well as a place to keep track of the books I had read during the year and other things.

For January, I decided to do a theme based around fireworks – we were welcoming in the new year after all! Looking back on it, it’s not my favourite which is why there aren’t that many photos included. It took me a while to figure out the kinds of layouts that worked for me and that I like but you might start to spot some repeating arrangements in the months to follow. Even if the fireworks theme wasn’t my favourite, it was a simple enough one to start with. As I got more comfortable and built up some habits and instincts for what would work and what wouldn’t, my themes and spreads became a little more complicated as I became more confident.

Now February rolls around and I’m not quite sure how I managed it so early on but this might be one of my favourite themes all year! After the unexpected spanner in the works at Christmas, I was heading back to Scotland during the week I had off work in the middle of February so I decided to do something a little related to that. I can’t remember exactly what inspired the choice other than thinking it would be quite effective but I based my theme on Rennie roses. For anyone that doesn’t know, Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a Scottish architect and artist who was born in Glasgow and was a very influential figure in the British Art Nouveau movement. As an architect, he is most known for the Glasgow School of Art building but his creations can be found all around the city. In terms of designs, his most famous motif is the ‘Rennie rose’, which reflects his architectural style closely – a combination of sharp angles with floral designs and more subtle curves. Charles Rennie Mackintosh is someone that I remember learning about in school, I think his roses were a go to for art teachers across Scotland! For this bullet journal theme, I love how the shades of pinks and purples came together and some of the finer details in the line work as well.

In March I was again inspired by something that I had planned that month. Towards the end of the month, I had a trip to Paris planned with my longtime friend Nina who lives in London. It’s funny when you think that Paris is the halfway point for us to meet, if anything it’s actually closer to her! It was mostly using the street signs which were nice and easy to draw and worked well with the boxes in lots of the layouts. I enjoyed the little bits of sketching as well! I wouldn’t say that I can draw that well but I’m pretty good at copying things!

April was a bit hit and miss for me. I love the opening page, the retro colours and wavy design but I don’t think I was able to carry that through as successfully into the other spreads. Each month I start with a monthly calendar, a habit and mood tracker and a few other things. The mood tracker for this month is particularly effective I think and one of the weekly spreads, while not my favourite, I’m pretty proud of because of how much time I put into it (I’m sure you can guess which one it is!). I also found this lettering really satisfying to do. I have always loved drawing out different fonts like this, I used to sit in front of the TV when I was younger with a big book of fonts or an alphabet that I had found online and printed out and then would copy them.

I had a bit of fun with May. This was the month that I left Mulhouse for the summer and started off by travelling to Munich, Innsbruck and Vienna so I wanted something along that theme. I think this is the point in the year where it became a conscious choice to base my choice of theme for the month off something that was happening in that time. For example, I already had fireworks for the start of the year in January, Rennie roses for my trip to Scotland in February, Paris street signs in March ahead of going there and in May I had a similar idea in mind. From this point on, I would think about what I had coming up in the month and try to choose a theme based on that. Because I was doing a bit of travelling, I thought doing an idea based on the iconic Airmail envelopes would be interesting. The blue, red and white stripes worked really well around the boxes and I added in some doodles of airplanes and stamps based on my destinations during the month.

Here I have to admit that I dropped the ball a little over the summer with my bullet journal. I spent all of June and part of July volunteering in a hostel in Tenerife and the rest of July hopping between Dunblane, the Isle of Lewis, London and Croatia! In all of this, there weren’t many things that I needed to keep track of, the usual tasks that I rely on my bullet journal to keep organised, and the down time that I would usually use to draw out the spreads was taken up by socialising with people. I still got some bits and pieces done and I actually really like the themes that I chose! June obviously had to be a turtle theme in honour of La Tortuga hostel but then I’m not really sure what I wanted for July. In the end I chose something simple (at least so I thought) in that it was just black and white so I could do it with the limited colours that I had available. One of the (few) weekly spreads that I did for July is one of my top designs of the year. It took ages and I spent probably longer than I should have doing it but the repetitiveness of the positions of the flowers and the care I had to take with the fine lines was actually really relaxing for me when I was doing it.

August saw a return to more regularly scheduled programming. I was still on holiday but I was settled in Scotland for the whole month and was starting to think about returning to work so had a few more things to keep track of. My chosen event and therefore theme of the month only happened in the last few days but did a great job of getting me excited for it. At the end of August, I attended the Rock en Seine music festival in Paris which was incredible. I took the design of the posters, tickets and general promotional resources and used that for my theme and I was so pleased with how it turned out! I don’t have any particularly fancy pens that I use for my bullet journal, maybe the fine liners I use for outlining are a bit (Fineliner Pigma Micron pens from Sakura) but the felt tips I use are the humble Crayola Supertips. I also used pencil for the first time in the August designs to create the sunset background. Something I remember about this cover page was that I was finishing the lettering while watching TV with my dog lying on the sofa with me. Òran decided he wanted to help and that’s where the little line coming off the first ‘U’ is from!

After four months away, September was the month that I finally made my way back to Mulhouse and Alsace and that felt worthy of being the theme of the month. Alsace is known for having lots of half timber houses which made up the majority of this month’s design features with some nice flower highlights but I also used the local favourite snack, a pretzel, as an added feature. This one actually took a long time to do because the little houses had a lot of detail in them!

Now this. This one. This is the month that makes me question whether February actually is my favourite theme. I based October on a trip I was taking at the end of the month that turned out to be my favourite week of the whole year I think. If you’ve been paying attention to my blogs at all recently you’ll have seen how much I enjoyed writing about my time in Morocco, visiting Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakesh and the Sahara and even before I went, I knew that I would love it. I only left for this trip in the last few days of October but I already had an idea for the theme in November and I wanted to use a Moroccan inspired theme to get me in the mood for the trip! I am OBSESSED with the tiles that are the main feature of this design and just like the repeating floral design that I spoke about before, I found drawing them out really relaxing.

I mentioned before that I already had a theme in mind for November already and that Día de los Muertos inspired. The Day of the Dead is celebrated on the 1st or 2nd November and is a joyful celebration of the dead. This is a celebration that happens across countries and cultures in Latin America and is actually something that I celebrated while I was living in Honduras. The Honduras celebration is a little more relaxed than what most people might think of (such as the Mexican celebrations that you might have seen in the Disney film Coco) but I went for the more iconic images of the sugar skulls (or calaveras in Spanish) and marigolds. In general I love the contrast in this holiday of the bright, joyful colours and the celebration of something that is often very sombre.

Last but not least, can we get a bit of commotion for December! This was one of the easiest decisions in terms of theme because it was so obvious. Every year Mulhouse (home to a fabric printing museum) designs a new textile to use as decorations throughout the Christmas market. Last year’s design wasn’t my favourite but I loved this year, it immediately made me feel really festive! It was the perfect design to finish the year on! This year the pattern was called ‘scintillance‘ and is meant to represent the light at the end of the tunnel after two years of restrictions on the markets and our lives because of the pandemic.

Looking back on 2022, it’s nice to feel that some of my favourite parts of the year have been immortalised in the pages of my bullet journal. It’s not just the designs, looking back at the tasks and events from week to week, the books, TV and music that I watched, the habits I sustained (and the ones I didn’t) and I how I felt along the way provides a lovely snapshot into this year in my life. Even though this is significantly more work than what I was doing before (just very quickly splitting up pages in a lined notebook with a biro pen – simple but it got the job done), I think I feel the benefits more. I like using my bullet journal as a creative outlet as much as an organisation tool. There’s a reason why adult colouring books or paint by numbers are so popular. There’s something relaxing about those kinds of activities that let us have a break from our high-tech, ultra connected world and this is just my version of that.

I hope you enjoyed this peek into my brain, this is a pretty accurate representation of what it looks like in there! I’m already loving what I’m doing in my bullet journal this year but you might have to wait a while to see it! Maybe now it’s your turn – would you or do you use a bullet journal? What was your favourite theme of mine from 2022?

I’m back, back, back again! Is anyone else having déjà vu? I have once again returned to blogging, just in time for me to run off to live in yet another country! One week today I leave for France where I will be working as a lectrice in the Université Haute-Alsace in Mulhouse. There is lots more information on my job, Mulhouse and how this all happened to come but for now you might notice that a few things have changed around here…

First and foremost, I’m sure you’ve noticed the name change. The blog that was previously known as ‘Sara in China’ (really creative, I know) is now ‘Sara Somewhere’. Nice to meet you all (again!). When I first started blogging, what feels like a lifetime ago, it was for my year in Honduras with Project Trust. I was using a different site called Sara’s Year in Honduras, hosted by Blogger. Then, when I started blogging for China, I decided it was time for an upgrade and set up a WordPress site, Sara in China. This is that same site but rebranded.

Sara’s Year in Honduras and Sara in China served their purposes but I thought it was time to settle down, digitally at least. Instead of creating yet another new site for my upcoming adventures in France, I decided to rebrand to something that I could use to chronicle my life from anywhere and everywhere, hence: Sara Somewhere.

While I was rebranding and refreshing the layout of the blog a little, I also thought it would be nice to have all my blogs in one place. I have spent the last two weeks copying over my Honduras blogs (and also rereading them because they were riddled with typos) so that they can all be found here! It was so nice rereading and reliving my time in Honduras and China and was the perfect way to cut through my stress about moving to France and get me excited!

I’ve always really enjoyed writing blogs but never had the time to keep it up while at university in Edinburgh. Having recently graduated, it feels like spare time is in abundance for me now. My job in France doesn’t involve a super busy timetable and also won’t take the same mental toll that studying does so I should have plenty of time and mental capacity to get back in to blogging.

It feels good to be back and I’m excited to get going! If there’s any styles of blogs that I’ve done before that you liked, for example the food diaries, day in the life, survival guides, or anything else, let me know. I’ve got a week to go until I leave for France and I can’t wait to get started!

If there’s one thing there’s plenty of time to do in lockdown, it’s think. Lots of things have been running through my mind about our current situation and I’m sure most of you will be able to relate to at least some of these, especially those that have been forced to leave university or a year abroad early. Some are rather specific to having had to come home from China but then that’s what this blog is all about isn’t it? These thoughts have been collected over the course of this lockdown so some are more related to things as they were a few weeks ago but I thought they were still worth reflecting on now.

Back in mid march, just as things were starting to get more serious here, I was looking over to China where cases were going down and things were looking up. I had a lot of comments from people along the lines of “If you had only stayed in China you’d be fine by now!” I don’t know if those people thought they were being helpful or just funny but they were neither. Yes, things were looking more encouraging and I want more than anything to be able to go back to China but the fact remains that there was still a reason I left. Added to that I would have been inside for two months instead of doing everything I wrote about in my last post. I didn’t even really have anywhere to stay – I was in the middle of travelling plus I was inbetween my host family and moving into the dorms.

Having left China in part to avoid lockdown, and to now be in lockdown is an interesting development. On one side of things it is frustrating as China is now starting to come out of its lockdown phase while we are still in the throes of ours. Added to that, foreigners are now no longer allowed into China, so even if it was safe to travel back, I wouldn’t be allowed in. But on the other side, it has encouraged me even more that it was the right decision to come home. Lockdown has honestly been hard enough here, in my own home with my family to lean on and the comforts of my own space and belongings.

This virus has been around since the start of December but became a concern in China towards the end of January. This is when it started ruling everything in my life. It drove me to come home from China, and then had me grasping at how to continue studying Chinese while in Edinburgh, all the while thinking and wondering about how and when I could go back to China. I was also worried about my friends, the ones that had decided to stay in China, the ones stranded in China when all they wanted was to go home, and the ones that had no choice but to stay because China is their home.

And then it came here and I’ve had all the same worries. People have had to decide whether to stay in Edinburgh, whether to go home and then trying to get the timing right and not waiting too long. I decided to go home to ride this out with my family (this also being the cheaper option!) but as well as moving me back home, it also put another spanner in my studies.

Since coming home and moving back to Edinburgh, I had been taking Chinese classes organised by the university through the Confucius Institute. These were going to run until the end of the semester and then I was planning on going to France to complete the second part of my year abroad. My friend was helping set me up with some family friends of hers that live in the south of France. Of course all of that stopped as the situation started to get worse in France at the same time as it did here. Eventually university classes in Edinburgh were cancelled and then moved online and all non-essential travel prohibited. This included all placements abroad. And there goes France.

After coming back early from China, I pinned all my hopes on to the silver lining that I would be able to spend more time in France than I had originally planned. Despite this very quickly going down the drain, I was pretty accepting of it. I don’t where this came from but honestly, maybe I just didn’t have the energy to be anything else. I know I’ll get there eventually, just not as planned and its not the end of the world.

My relationship with my two languages is a bit complicated at the minute. Even though I’ve been studying French since I was 11, my confidence is at an all time low. It has been almost a year since I studied it properly, having devoted almost all of my time in China to studying Chinese, thinking I would be able to devote some time to French all on its own. My reading and listening skills in French are still good but when I try and speak it, it feels like I have to physically drag the words out from the depth of my brain. And then with Chinese, my confidence is at an all time high as is my knowledge but I feel unfulfilled. I am working so hard at home even during this lockdown to improve, or at least keep up, with my Chinese because I’m frustrated that I didn’t get to reach my full potential with it this year.

Ironically I’m not worried about this affecting the Chinese side of my degree. We’ve already had reassurances from the Chinese department at Edinburgh that the effect of the situation on our Chinese level will be taken into consideration when it comes to our fourth year. Nobody is quite sure what this will look like, whether the level of work will change or the grade boundaries but allowances will be made. On the French side, I am worried. Its not just because of the aforementioned lack of confidence, though that is a worry of course, but because practically I don’t know what impact not having spent any time in France will have BECAUSE NO ONE WILL TELL ME. I understand there’s uncertainty for everyone at the moment and that people don’t have the answers that I’m looking for.

That doesn’t mean I’m not angry, sad, frustrated but all of this is magnified because I recognise there is no one in particular to be angry at, unless you want to be angry at the virus itself. And I am angry, for the things I have lost, the things my sisters have lost, I’m angry that people, including the government, didn’t and still aren’t taking this seriously enough, I’m angry that I only get to see my dad from 2m away on the days when he’s not working at the hospital.

This has been consuming my life for so much longer than it has been for most people here, the intensity is exhausting. It’s all encompassing, and has been for weeks. Every single conversation always came back to it and sometimes I just need to check out. The times I enjoyed the most in the weeks running up to lockdown were the ones where I was distracted from everything.

Most of the above are thoughts from before or the early days of lockdown but they’ve stayed with me. What follows are some thoughts from more recent times, the depths of monotony and isolation.

In comparison to before lockdown, when I was avidly following the news, now I actively avoid it. My mum likes to sit down and watch the news broadcasts throughout the day but I can’t watch for long. With the way social media works and how it is being used during this pandemic, the news is unavoidable. I ingest enough to know what is going on, to know what I have to but now that my life and everyone else’s is being run by these news updates, I don’t follow them as much as before.

It is one of the things I’ve been trying to do to look after myself. I’ve been fortunate enough to have good mental health but I’ve never been more aware of looking after it than now. This situation is a major adjustment for everyone, we’ve all had our lives put on pause and been confined to our houses. That can be hard for someone with the strongest hold on their mental wellbeing. I can only speak for myself on this subject but some things that have helped me have been keeping a sense of routine and keeping busy (which will surprise absolutely no one, I’m sure).

Another thing I’m fighting against, something I struggle with anyway, is the feeling that I must be productive. At university I am non stop moving, always doing something and then on to the next thing. The temptation right now is that this lockdown should be used to be as productive as possible, to write that novel, become a master chef, get fit and toned. Sure, some people, myself included, still have university work or are working from home and that stuff still needs done. But it’s ok if the best you can do is shower that day, or your spend all your time watching Netflix, or the only exercise you do is a walk outside or a boogie in your bedroom.

This is an unprecedented crisis and we are living in unprecedented times. There is no should at the minute. The only thing you have to do is wash your hands and stay inside. Everything else is a bonus. Do whatever works for you and be kind to yourself.