Dress: Forever 21 (similar here)| Shoes: Nordstrom (similar here) | Hat: Cotton On (similar here) | Sunglasses: Ulta (exact here)

Photo Credits: Lalo Silva

The beginning of the semester always calls for goal setting and lots of planning for me at least (otherwise I would go crazy) and while my Lilly Pulitzer agenda is adorned with post it notes and color coded pages of to-do's and goals for each day and week, I was never really quite able to sum all that up into one single goal. That is until someone asked me what my goal was for the month for an activity we were doing (I was tempted to just list it all, but I knew I had to be reasonable) and I finally came up with one, pretty vague but all encompassing goal: Find the extraordinary in ordinary. 

Coming back from a semester of literally living my dream life in my dream country and traveling to places I have only ever seen in pictures (and probably in most of my dreams), my biggest concern was having to return to an ordinary and "mundane" life. Not that my life before moving abroad was not exciting, it was just the fact that when I compared spending weekends in a new city/country or trying cool and extraordinary things on a daily basis, my "normal" life sounded less than appealing. My transition and reverse culture shock was (and still is) anything but easy but I knew I had to stop comparing my life here and what my life was in Madrid otherwise I would never be happy.

Once I started to let go of that, I realized that I live in a place that most people spend a good portion of their lives dying to visit! Not only that, but I am also only a few hours away from other pretty extraordinary cities! So instead of moping about not being in Madrid anymore, I decided to find some extraordinary things to do right here, at home. Often times, we focus too much on what we want (which is not a bad thing) but the problem with that is that we forget to appreciate what we already have! So here is to the living the rest of my September (and year) finding the extraordinary in ordinary, after all there's nothing mundane about living in Sin City. 

Till next time,