The Noob on the Slopes. About Beauty and Packing for Snow Trips.

Hello dears,

I went to Austria to (learn to) ski for the second year in a row.

I will not bother you with the details - I am still rubbish and am still working to improve something that will resemble a technique. However this year I managed not to break or twist anything, which considering my last yer's broken thump and twisted knee is a huge improvement,

View from our cabin in Tauerndorf

However, I wanted to give some tips and tricks I follow on personal care and beauty, if you will, that I discovered to work for me during the winterish trips to Austria and other places that are outside of my home.

1. Pack light
   Regardless if you drive or fly to the place where you will be skiing, when it comes to your beauty stuffs, pack light. Either depot, or use the samples you have been collecting through the year. This is how I got to use most of the samples I got from Kiehl's. You will need room in your luggage for the ski equipment and warm clothes. It makes no sense to leave your warm sweater at home in order to bring your big cleansing bottle. Depot it, get the cleanser in a smaller package or use samples.
2. Hydration. Hydration. Hydration.
   Be smart about the beauty routine you will follow during your stay at the ski resort. Think winter, cold, freezing winds... You get the gist.
   Pack products that will help keep your skin hydrated while you are skiing/snowboarding and help your skin recover its moisture at night - even if you normally have oily skin. The cold temperatures, weird food [you will not get away only wth eating fruits, although you should have some] and less water intake (let's be honest, who wants to stay in line at the toilets for an average of 20 minutes and then take off half you clothes in order to pee and repeat the experience more than 3 times a day at the apres ski? Plus you will be busy hitting those slopes).
3. Mind the sun
   You wear a mild SPF during winter times when you go to work or go out, then take something stronger for the ski trip. The sun is much harsher on the slopes than in the city and you will burn your skin only with the lower SPF you normally use while at home. So pack the higher SPF right away. If you are not sure what to take - take something similar or stronger with what you use when you go to the beach.
   Also, get sunglasses and ski-glasses/goggles.
4. Emergency rescue.
   You were good and packed hydrating and SPF products and used them as planned, however you still got a mishap - chafing, burn, bruise, muscle sourness, tummy problems, the usual.
   Get products to help recover from all these annoying (unexpected) events, from eye drops, calming and hydrating creams to calm sunburns or chafings, to creams and gels that will help relieve the muscle pain, and the usual tummy relievers you should have handy, if the nearest Pharmacy is 100 km away from your ski resort.
5. Visualize
   Regarding the two above points, it is very important to visualize as you plan your packing (which you should do - make list with what you need, so that you don't forget important items like the glasses you wear at night, after you take your lenses off and still want to be able to see the world around you without the colorful lights the walls you hit give you - yes, I do speak from experience) and eventually pack. Know the luggage you will bring with you (ideally without the cats that tend to bunk in it while you put stuff in), the products and the beauty routine. In this way you will make sure nothing is forgotten and you don't take any unnecessary products with you.
6. Know where to get help

   

   The top of Kitzsteinhorn, Kaprun.

   
   If all else fails and you forgot the solution for your contact lenses, make sure you know where you can go to get one. Google maps and the hotel reception are sometimes good starting points.

Slope selfie with boyfriend and snow gear on.

Let me know if this post helped you.
What do you plan on packing when you go on Holidays in the snow regions?
Let me know if you want me to write about how I dealt with unexpected events on this holiday.

On the way down from Kitzsteinhorn, Kaprun.

View from Kitzsteinhorn, Kaprun.

Cheers,

Alexandra.

Find me on Goodreads and Instagram.
Snapchat alex-andreea.

How to survive your 20s

I turned 30 this month and I didn't go all crazy round number crisis. Instead I went all introspective and thought about my journey so far. The conclusion is that I feel at peace, smarter and wiser about myself. And then it hit me. I survived my 20s.

This is what I learned from my 20s.

Learn patience.
In all areas of your life, personal, professional, school, family, people and yourself. Patience brings you through all the events you will encounter (most probably for the first time) and will bring along its trusty friend, introspection. It must appear slightly weird, but taking a breather in the middle of a stressful moment or a crisis situation, will help take you away from the middle of the action and give you a different perspective, which will help you find additional solutions or coping mechanisms.

School. Learn. Read.
It is during your 20s that the basis of your profession is being laid. Go to school, make the most of it. Find the elements that appeal to you even in the most dreary of subjects. Read and learn about the world and about other people's ideas and passions. Reading should be fun and should be the one activity where you feed yourself information that will help you grow continuously after you finished a book.
Learn the history that was build for you and learn how to further improve that history.
Use the school to find a career you will love and further learn about it.

Self education.
There are things you have been taught within your family and there are things you learn in school. But without individuality we would all be robots, therefore now is the perfect time to think about the principles that apply to you and that you resonate with. Research on those principles and bring more shape to them as you study about them. Learn about their pros and acknowledge and accept their cons as well.
The same goes for additional foreign languages or skills you wish to develop.
If you can travel, then that will also help you

Flowers I received on my Birthday

Learn to budget.
This is probably the most complicated and scary part when you are in your 20s.
You will get your first job and you will have to learn to budget by yourself, because your parents won't be there to do it for you and if you spend all the money as soon as you receive your paycheck, will probably not help you at all. The best way to do it, is to put on paper the monthly costs (food, utilities, rent, school fees, clothes, a.s.o.) and then calculate what you have left over. Ideally from the money you have left you should put some aside (to have a constant fallback budget equally to 6 months salary) and some you should allocate to fun activities (going out with friends, books, movies, music concerts, sport activities, a.s.o.).
If you parents are helping, then you are lucky and you should see their contribution as an addition to your salary and not as "money that are not money" and spend them all at once.

No bank loans.
One thing you should never-ever do in your 20s is to acquire a loan from the bank. If the object/ gadget you wish to purchase is too expensive for your budget, then you'd better save up money for it and buy it, but don't go all credit-frenzy (like the marketing campaigns in Romania urge you to), just because you wanted that product now and you don't want to wait out some months until you save up the money and can afford to buy it. You might have the surprise that in some months that product's price decreased and you can afford it sooner than you thought.
Saving for a product will also have the added benefit, that you will enjoy and not throw it away after the first weeks of using it.
This being said, keep in mind saying that has been demonstrated to me time and again - (regardless of your income) we are to poor to buy cheap things. Which means that by buying something just because it is the cheaper version of something more expensive, you might end up paying more: the cheaper, reparations and the more expensive thing, than you would have, if you would have purchased the more expensive product from the beginning.

Rent. Housing.
Living on your own without your parents and not within the Uni housing facilities might be expensive. Therefore renting a flat together with room mates might actually be a good idea. Given, living with unknown people might be weird at first, but if you move in with people you know or with whom you have something in common (school, work, hobbies, a.s.o.) it might be easier.
Another thing you must learn to so in these situations is to be open and free about any topics you want to discuss with your room/ flat mates. If it is a difficult discussion you feel you need to have, try to explain to yourself the reasoning behind that discussion and then to the other person. All with calm and patience.
When you look for a place to rent, look at the various areas, prices are established based on areas. If you fee unsure about the place you will rent, especially if for the first time, bring someone who can advise with you.

Lifestyle.
Regardless of what you were used to do during high school, you should try to adopt a healthy diet (learn to cook at home - it might be difficult at first, but no food is better than home made food and it has the added benefit that it will also help you lower your food budget), have a regular workout routine (which will also help clear your mind) and sleep a lot (brain cells need sleep even during exam periods). If you always wanted to learn a sport, now you should try.
When you will have eventually survived your 20s, then you will see that an organized lifestyle is really good for your health and that dreaded slowed metabolism after 26-30 years is not that slow.

Social media.
In recent years the development of social media brought with it a cult of self fulfillment. Let's be honest, who doesn't want to pose in the perfect life, with the perfect significant other in various marital statuses and with or without a rising number of kids and/or pets?
But these photos or posts or events you see on social media are just the condensed version of the life of its protagonists and their life is not yours. You should not feel pressured in getting married (especially if you are single - running desperately after beautiful strangers on the street might get you in trouble of the Police kind) or having a baby (refer to previous parenthesis). You should live your life and populate your social media page with the events, people, things and emotions that you feel represent you. And if you don't it is fine to. There isn't a rule set in stone (like the three rules of Thermodynamics) that everyone must post their lives on social media. If you don't feel comfortable posting on Facebook every meal your cat or dog has, then I think nobody will blame you in any way.

Milestones.
Have a plan. I don't mean an exact plan with what you will do every day, detailed to the second, but a general idea of the milestones you want to achieve. With time frames and what you have to do to get there added to them would be even better!
Most jobs have a career path attached to them and most companies set goals for their employees in their various jobs.
And when you get there - Celebrate!

These are my advises on how to survive your 20s. The most beautiful and scary of the decades.
I hope they help you as they helped me as I discovered them in the past 10 years.
Does this help you? Do you think I missed something?
Let me know!

Live long and prosper!
Alex.


Find me on Goodreads and Instagram.
Snapchat alex-andreea.

My Kindle Experience and Review

Hello Happy Readers,

I love books. I love reading them, reading about them, research them and their authors. I love the feel of the pages whilst reading a book and I love their covers.
I hate it when my books get worn out in my bags when I carry them around me as I read them or are too bulky to carry around.
Therefore, after years of debating with myself (and even reading from my phone and tablet), I finally broke down and got myself a Kindle. Since I never like getting anything without doing some research beforehand, I googled, compared and checked the Romanian market for a Kindle. Eventually I  decided to get a Kindle Paperwhite, because it had a good price/ capability ratio, which I found on a pretty decent price in a store in Bucharest - ordering it from amazon wasn't a cost effective option.

Now, two months after I got it, I can give my honest opinion about it.
Good for on the road reading. I use it mainly when I am not at home to read on my way to work or while on vacation. Since I never leave the house without a book, this way I don't have to haul 1.000 pages volumes in my bag and get them ruined in the process, and as an added bonus it is light and small enough to fit in any of my bags.
Speaking of bags, I got a case for it right away to keep it from getting damaged in the bag.
Battery isn't a problem (so far). Since I got it, I only charged its batteries twice, the first time some weeks after I started using it, since the battery was partially charged and then about 5 weeks after, during which time I used it constantly in the mornings and evenings on my way to and from work. It also charges easily with the same cable I use for my HTC M9.

Have more books on the go. It has a 4 GB memory, good enough to store a lot of books. No need to carry around 2 books, as I approach the ending of one of them.
Easy to use. The packaging has a Certified Frustration-Free Packaging stamp on it, which can also be translated to the way the Kindle can be setup and accessed. Books can be saved on the Kindle easily via the charging cable (it comes with) by connecting it to a laptop. And it supports a wide variety of formats. It also connects to the internet via WiFi like any other gadget you own and to your Facebook and Goodreads accounts, if you want to. You also need an Amazon Kindle account, which you can use to purchase books.
Amazon Kindle Books. The software is designed to advertise various Kindle book offers from Amazon, which can sometimes get annoying and some of which, however, are not available for Romania, hence extra annoyance. Don't get me wrong, I do understand that Amazon has to make a living, but I cannot see how they can do that if their offers are exclusive only to some countries. The good part is that after the recent software update, you can opt to hide some of the advertisements.

Reading experience. You can read on the Kindle comfortably on all levels of lighting (or lack thereof) with no glare (which is one of the main reasons I decided to get it - reading from the tablet is not something I enjoy) and it shows your reading progress throughout the book. It also calculates the time remained in a book based on how fast you read. Other perks are a vocabulary database and dictionaries - I have the "Oxford American", "Oxford English" and "Oxford German - English", but I believe you can add more dictionaries.

Overall I like my kindle, I found a lot of cool books at very good prices and my physical books don't get damaged anymore. But getting a Kindle doesn't mean I don't buy physical books anymore - I actually purchased 8 physical books since I got the Kindle - which I read at home, because nothing can replace the experience of reading actual books and flipping actual pages - although in my opnion

the smell of new books is sometimes doesn't rise to its fame.

I hope this helped you book readers out there.
How do you like to read your books? Do you also own a Kindle? You still read paper books?

Cheers,
Alex.
Find me on Goodreads and Instagram.
Snapchat alex-andreea.