Somewhere you could never find me. Well, I read somewhere you love tigers. We'll find you somewhere you can dry off. I'll take you somewhere you can call from. There's somewhere you need to go with me. Must be going somewhere you want to make an impression. What I hated was being somewhere you weren't. He's somewhere you 'll never find him. Make it somewhere you want to go after a day's work. Stare at the road ahead, and hope it leads somewhere you want to go.
Then let's go somewhere you can write. And it's true that part of why my home feels like mine is because I'm the one paying for it, not my parents, not a college scholarship.
The endless options can leave us constantly wondering if there isn't some place with better schools, a better neighborhood, more green space, and on and on.
We may leave a pretty good thing behind, hoping that the next place will be even more desirable. In some ways, this mobility has become part of the natural course of a life. The script is a familiar one: you move out of your parents' house, maybe go to college, get a place of your own, get a bigger house when you have kids, then a smaller one when the kids move out. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Even if we did stay in one place, it's unlikely we would ever have the same deep attachment to our environment as those from some South Asian communities do.
It just doesn't fit with our culture. But in spite of everything -- in spite of the mobility, the individualism, and the economy -- on some level we do recognize the importance of place. The first thing we ask someone when we meet them, after their name, is where they are from, or the much more interestingly-phrased "where's home for you? My answer for "where are you from? If home is where the heart is, then by its most literal definition, my home is wherever I am.
I've always been liberal in my use of the word. If I'm going to visit my parents, I'm going home and if I'm returning to Chicago, I'm also going home. My host parents' apartment in Paris was home while I lived there, as was my college dorm and my aunt's place on the Upper West Side, where I stayed during my internship. And the truth is, the location of your heart, as well as the rest of your body, does affect who you are.
The differences may seem trivial a new subculture means new friends, more open spaces make you want to go outside more , but they can lead to lifestyle changes that are significant. They supplemented their personal travelogues by engaging with the travel narrative Afropean: Notes from Black Europe by Johny Pitts Penguin , which explores the comparative dynamics of race relations across the continent in historical context.
It feels kind of unreal that we've been in Luxembourg for just over a month now. In that month, I have become comfortable with the everyday things that felt a little overwhelming at the beginning, like navigating Luxembourgish transportation where everything is in French, going to Auchan one of the local grocery stores , and going to the post office. I think that the longer I stay here, the more I have to look for "foreign" things, but the more rewarding they are when I find them.
The cobblestoned streets no longer classify as the "reward;" they are simply a part of the landscape. Instead, it's the stumbling stones that I notice for the first time, even though I've walked over them a million times; and finally learning why the bus stops, the names of which I always took at face value, are named what they are, that gives me a little jolt and reminds me that I'm in a foreign country.
All of that to say that I think to have really lived somewhere, you need to have found a routine and allow small details to be the ones that make you change your thinking or see something differently. Though most of my short weekend travel has been in Luxembourg, I still consider myself as only having been to those locations, where I feel like I live in Differdange.
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