While all my last 6 posts or so have been written in advance and scheduled for my blog as I expected not to have much time available to write during my trip home, this is my first official post in 2025, written and shared today.
Before I share what's everything about and why it's so special to me, I hope everyone had a holiday season filled with joy, warmth, and endless blessings. May 2025 bring you boundless opportunities, cherished memories, and the courage to chase your dreams, or in short, may 2025 look exactly as you wish.
For me, 2024 ended in a way that I have been missing terribly for the last 6 years as I am part of a large family where we all used to celebrate the holidays together since I was a kid. However, starting with the pandemic, then my move to a new city and then lots of work around Christmas in the last 2 years, made me take a break from this unwritten tradition of meeting and celebrating together.
Happily, 2024 came with a beautiful surprise, arranging all the things in my life in the way of being available to travel home in December for 3 days, so starting from 24th to 26th December, I went to Slatina, the city I was born in. Obviously, the Christmas dinner and all the joy sharing and receiving gifts did take place, but what excited me the most, was to finally see my hometown and even be able to show the surroundings to my boyfriend.
The single thing that was not in our favour was the bad weather conditions, having torrential rain. But being a unique opportunity as I can't be sure of the future anymore, we decided to take the night walk anyway, even if the umbrella turned out useless as we still returned home with our shoes and clothes soaked in water, which brought a cold to my boyfriend too.
Back when I was living here, everything was pretty modest, without too many Christmas decorations or even a Christmas Market. Hence why, our walk turned quickly from showing the surroundings to chasing the Christmas lights which were all new for me too.
I know that seeing too many of these might seem a bit kitschy but where I am currently living, the Christmas Market and decorations were all the same for the last 5 years, so seeing something different was more than welcome.
Our first destination is known as "The Esplanade" and more or less it represents the point of interest for anyone visiting Slatina whether you are from this part of the country or not. This place is the modern center of the town where you can find pretty much anything, but also enjoy a walk to a beautiful park that starts from here, after having a great view over the old town of the city.
Sadly, I failed to take pictures of any of these just because it was night outside and couldn't capture anything with my phone camera, but we were still happy to discover some more Christmas decorations here.
Being 24th December, I expected to see more activity around, but all the stalls were closed, as well as the skating rink that was soaked in water anyway.
However, while we had our first stop at "The Esplanade", it also turned out as the last place we visited because of having our clothes soaked in water. And travelling home just for 3 days, made us not bring too many clothes with us. So we failed terribly to reach the actual Christmas Market that is slowly becoming more and more famous for its beauty. But hopefully, we will get to discover it in 2025!
Gabriela Travels is the FOUNDER of "Festival Mania" who started this community from the passion of attending various festivals and with the purpose of encouraging more people to explore festivals all around the world and share their experiences. At the same time, Gabriela is an independent Graphic Design Freelancer since 2019 completing over 600+ orders in this time and collaborating with various businesses and people from all over the globe. Additionally, Gabriela has her own corner on the internet since 2017 where she writes various articles for her blog, the most popular being the travel ones (300+ articles written on this field), but also approaching other topics as well, like game reviews, movie and series reviews, photography posts, cooking recipes and more, boosting the total number of articles written to 750+ blog posts. Gabriela is also a gamer since she was 11 years old and gaming remains one of her biggest passions along with traveling, editing, cooking, and doing various sports activities.
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Been part also of a big family and since I leave home to find my luck; few times I celebrated Christmas with them.
Same here. This becomes rarer and rarer...
The decorations are very beautiful, it must have been very nice to walk there...✨
Indeed. If only the rain was stopping so we could see even more! 😔
I love all the christams decorations, and glad you were able to spend the holidays with family, when I worked over seas for so many years I missed the holidays at home with family for far too many years
Thanks for joining the Wednesday walk
Have a great day
Thank you so much and I totally feel you. Hope you have a great day also!
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