Why did I ever decide to come here? Every time I get homesick I ask this to myself and subsequently enter a minor depression. Everybody can get homesick, but people have different ways of dealing with it. My way usually takes the path of retreating to personal reflection, writes columnist Anindyaningrum Chrisant Rystiasih.
The thing with homesickness is the haze of negative emotion makes the whole world look grey. In Lund, the weather is often actually grey, which doesn’t help much either. I am actually used to being away from home, so I wouldn’t say I get easily homesick. But as the days have become shorter, the workload has piled up at school and group projects seem to linger on and on, I find myself starting to regret ever leaving home and coming to study in a foreign country.
Besides the obvious of missing my parents and my little siblings, I miss the most mundane things I hadn’t really thought about before. To elaborate, I remember the smell of jasmine tea in the early morning brewed by my mom, a certain brand that is the only one she will buy.
I see myself watching TV late at night while listening for the ‘clang-clang’ sound from a passing food wagon and promptly running to the gate of the house shouting to catch the seller’s attention. Oh, how I miss eating deliciously cheap food from those food wagons!
Then I scold myself, “You have a great thing going on here!” I know being abroad is not an opportunity every person can get, so I start to think about the positive experiences I’ve been having.
I have made many friends in my corridor, and it is the first time I’ve lived in this type of communal housing. My room is bigger than my room at home, and I don’t have to share my bathroom with anyone else. The corridor also has a kitchen with an oven. I get to bake and roast, something I don’t do at home as it is not a common thing to have an oven in Indonesia. I get to experience the trees changing their colors, from green to a beautiful array of yellows and reds, and I discover autumn is my favorite season.
I have seen an amazing degree of organization such as displayed in International introduction week. You could see a lot of thought and planning was done to help new students settle in. Other observations include the busses coming (almost) every 7 minutes, and the procedure to get my personal number was super clear and easy.
Now I am not saying all of Sweden is like this, but in comparison to what I find at home in Indonesia, it is a huge difference. This is actually a refreshing contrast to having to physically push in line to get on to a bus to commute to work.
Things are different, but it is irrelevant which is ‘better’. What’s important for me is to acknowledging a new point of view that may give me a little shift in my paradigm. The negative feelings of being homesick may initially manifest as regret, but after some reflection, I do gain appreciation and respect. That’s respect both for the country I am in, and the country I come from.
