Homesickness: My perception of a very weird feeling
Instead of talking about my latest location change and the new place I am in at the moment (just for the record, I am in Dong Hoi) I am in the mood to write down a few thoughts that came to be during the many hours of train riding today. For whatever reason, I started thinking about home…a lot. More than that, I felt really really homesick.
Now homesickness is no stranger to me, even though I am much less affected of it than many others. In the past, whenever I travelled, I rarely felt really homesick. That was mostly due to the short timeframe of my trips that hardly ever lasted longer than 2 weeks. So much happened in these few days that I was too busy with all the new impressions to really think about home too much. In the end, I knew I would be there rather sooner than later.
This trip that I call “Asia Adventure” is a whole different category. Just yesterday my sixth month of travelling began, so thats already ten times of my usual travel time. While preparing for Asia, a lot of my concerns were connected with homesickness. “How much will I miss home?”, “how long can I stand it before having to go back?” or “How lonely will I feel?”. I was quite certain that homesickness would become an issue at some point during this trip.
To my big surprise, these thoughts came up only very rarely during the first five months of my trip. It may be the amount of new impressions I was confronted with, the changing of locations every three days or so or simply the fact that Skype makes it so easy to keep contact with all the important people. I don’t know why but I was so involved in this trip that I did not live through any real “down-moments”.
However, now that I am officially in my last month in Asia (I will head back to Europe on December 1st) I am starting to think much more about home. Did my brain simply switch all these thoughts off and only now, that the deadline is coming close, I feel like preparing for coming back? Or is five month my magical breaking point where the homesickness officially begins, independendly of the amount of time left?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that the amount of time that I have left feels so long, even though its nothing compared to the months of time I already travelled. I feel like time is not passing at all and I would love to be back in Berlin. Not that I wouldn’t have enough things to look forward to in the next weeks, after spending my first two weeks in the north of Vietnam I am slowly making my way to the real interesting places such as Hue, Hoi An, Ho Chi Minh and the Mekong Delta. I would hate to miss all that. But I still miss home badly.
I realize that I am asking plenty of questions but can’t really answer them. But for me, homesickness is something unusual so I feel its necessary to write these thoughts down. And perhaps the next days will deliver answers.
Yours
Crazy Ivory
Follow my photos, travel route and stories on the Asia Adventure Page.