Finding Your Home Away From Home
Travelling around the globe, moving and experiencing new cultures are constant aspects of life in a world of globalization and continuous development. But can you truly find your home in every place you go? Or is “home” just the place you return to at the end of the journey, regardless of how long it might be?
I tend to believe that we leave pieces of ourselves everywhere we go, and each place we visit or move to leaves its marks on us, in a perfect symbiosis of life, love and history.
My first real, long-term home-away-from-home welcomed my excited self in Bucharest: the place where I was going to start my university years. An old, small apartment provided me with some of the best views of the sunset, only to be later replaced by shared dorm rooms that were hiding some of the best friendships and waiting to hear all our dreams and fears.
The past months offered me another adventure: re-learning how to live in my childhood home, having to move back here due to the pandemics. Coming back was something I dreaded, but which turned out to be exactly what I needed, helping me look back to a different “me” and enjoy my journey.
Besides these places, you should find pieces of me on the terraces in Rome, on the parallel streets of Barcelona and in the old town of San Juan. And you shall most certainly find all of these places in different chambers of my heart. But if you were to follow me deep inside my mind, you’d find that there is one place that managed to leave its mark on me the most. You'd find a little town up north, the place where I studied a semester abroad. There, you’d find wine bottles and pizza boxes scattered on the floor. Between them, you'd see dreams and hopes, heartbreaks and pains, smiles and tears floating in the dim light of the room. You'd find your home far away from home and you'd learn that Groningen is no longer just the place you moved to for a little while, but a state of mind, a love for life and a life of love, the reason you’d start to look at the world differently.
I believe that the people I was with in all of these places are one of the biggest reasons that made me think of them as “home”. Be it my boyfriend, my family, close friends or total strangers that turned into so much more than that, they all played a significant part in me finding my peace wherever I was going. But I also do believe that each of those places had their magic zest that is able to imprint itself on you on its own. And while finding your home away from home might be a challenge, it is also one of the most exciting and enriching experiences of life.
