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| Group shot outside our house |
Homer’s mythological Greek hero Odysseus wept and rolled
on the ground in despair thinking of home and his family, while trapped on
Ogygia Island by the beautiful nymph Calypso. While I haven’t witnessed any of
us here resorting to topophilic floor-rolling (or, for that matter, being
trapped here by beautiful nymphs), it’s nonetheless clear that some are
finding it hard to be so far away from their friends and families, in a culture
so foreign to their own. Some days it’s worse, because after an especially
bad or boring day naturally you miss your support network, and the people who know
and understand you best. It becomes easy to slip into nostalgic thoughts of
what fun everyone at home might be having, while they could also be
dreaming up similarly idyllic scenarios about you.
During my time
at university, I lived away from home more often than not, sometimes in a
different country for months at a time, so this couple of months is not a
big deal. All the same, over the past year I have gotten used to living close
enough to home to see my family almost every weekend and I miss that. Last
Friday was my first night to go out on the town with everyone. One of our group,
who had come out with us, clearly wasn’t really in the mood to for partying. It is
his first time living away from home, so I asked him if he was feeling homesick.
He answered, “I am… But it’s not so much about
missing home, because I am having a
good time here. It’s more that I can’t believe that they are all so easily
carrying on as normal without me there.” Touché.
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