Hello wonderful people!

If you usually enjoyed my skillfully crafted English-is-my-second-language sentences, you might have noticed I've been missing for a while. Letting go of a hobby is not very hard once college is crippling you with anxiety and you have multiple jobs because you want to be semi-financially stable without your parents' money. So while I have put my blog on the side tracks for an indefinite amount of time, I still wish to be able to write something every once in a while.

As you've probably figured out, I've been extremely mobile these past few months - college, three part-time jobs, and trying to maintain a somewhat social life can do that to you - and since I didn't spend that much time at home, I've been thinking a lot about what my hometown actually means to me.

I couldn't just focus on one particular part of the world, though.

Obviously, the place where I grew up will always be my favorite. There's a certain wonderfulness of knowing the paths like they're the only paths you've ever taken. Knowing the exact speed with which you can drive into a crossroad behind your house, and that there's a pothole - or twelve - about a feet away from the sidewalk that you have to avoid.

But I guess every town where you linger for more than the average minute becomes a part of you. Every street you've walked in that city somehow becomes special and you don't realize it until you leave, feeling the emptiness inside you.

The thing is, the place that you call home is more often than not everything but the house you live in.
It's the people, the experience that make it feel like home.
It's the feeling you get when your country's basketball team wins the Eurobasket championship and you're suddenly a part of something amazingly huge.
It's the feeling when you finally hug someone after a really long time.
Or the feeling you get when you see your home country from the plane on your return flight.
And the feeling when you cross the border and start seeing signs in your language.

So even though I've been struggling with a lot of changes and with moving around, I've accepted that changing my surroundings and meeting new people is just another opportunity: another home that's waiting to be discovered.

My new goal in life is to find as many places that make me think "This is home. This is what I love". Because even though it might hurt when you leave, it's nothing compared to the joy it brings when you return one day.