December 28, 2013: There's No Place Like Home

"Maybe you had to leave in order to miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting place was." -Jodi Picoult

          Getting to go abroad for the semester was one the greatest and scariest things I have ever done.  I loved that I got to go study in the UK at such a internationally flavoured university. You could walk up the stairwells of the library and hear phone conversations in 3 different languages. As interesting as it was to study abroad, the experience of being on my own for the first time, magnified by living in a different country has given me a greater appreciation for the stability and familiarity of home. For the first 18 years of your life, you take for granted the house you live in, the parents who feed and love you, the friends you've known for years and the routine you've crafted for yourself.  When you leave for the first time, it feels as if the world is suddenly upside down.  The things in your life that have been constants for your entire life are suddenly not there. 
   
          The reality starts to settle in when you have your first fever and suddenly you have to set reminders on your phone to self-medicate with Advil because your mother isn't there. You don't realize how much she means to you until you are thousands of miles away because before you were a college student, she was always there for you. And now, she is replaced by words from an email and pixels from a webcam.

          After staying in Boston for a night, I was ready to head home.  After a total of about 4 hours and one final boarding pass printout, one final security checkpoint and one final plane boarding, I was off to DFW.  I saw my mom and my brother greeting me at the airport. I hadn't seen their faces in nearly four months! It was so glad to be back home and get reoriented with my home. Was my bathroom sink always that low? Were the lights always that bright? Anyways, that was the conclusion of my semester abroad and subsequent two weeks around Europe. There were highs and lows to this trip but everything is a learning experience and I definitely became a wiser person after this.  To end it with a cliche: there's no place like home.

P.S. If you have read my entire travel diary, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking the time to listen to my story. Whether you know me personally or not, whether you clicked on a link that I advertised for found this my mistake, thank you. I know these are not uploaded in real time and these last posts are six weeks overdue but I really do appreciate everyone reading. I don't care if there's two or two hundred of you all. As long as there is an audience, there is a blogger.