There's no place like home

As a kid we moved quite a lot. In my first 12 years of education I managed to go to 11 different schools. One of things it taught me was that home was whatever place I kept my stuff it, be it in our one and only purchased house or the hotel suite we stayed in Houston for about 2 months while we waited for our stuff to arrive in a container from Norway. When I left Mexico last November I expected it to work the same way this time. I'd pack up 50kg of crap, drag it to the other side of the planet and instantly make a new home on Oslo. After being back in Mexico to visit my wife and friends I'm starting to think that it might get more complicated as you grow older and attach yourself of certain places and the people there. I feel much more at home in Mexico, even when I'm not in the city, but in Diego's house at Zicatela beach. At the same time there are certain aspects about Norway that also makes it home. Even if I complain about the weather here I can't help myself from getting just a little bit emotional when watching the snow fall and there are certain ways about how the Norwegians act that makes me realize that no matter how many tacos I eat at the end of the day I'm always going to be different in Mexico.

So home is now a feeling and not a place, a feeling of being calm and safe and surrounded by people you love and not by familiar things. This is great because it makes it much more flexible, but it also makes it harder to get there. Harder because I used to go home to my apartment in order to relax and feel at home and now I have to learn to relax in order to feel at home.

This Christmas and New Years was exhausting and I expect that it's only a preview of how the rest of this year will turn out. The idea of having Oslo and Mexico City as bases seems quite good if it weren't for the 20 hours of travel it takes from one place to the next. The whole notion of friends is also more complicated now. I've always just left them behind and forgotten about them when I moved before, but I now have people in my life who I want to keep close for a very long time. The Internet is all well and great, but you need more than a postcard amount of communication in order to have a significant relationship with anyone. The only advantage the Internet provides is that you can avoid having to give a compressed summary of the events on your life when you see people again, but the real stuff takes place over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.

Some more pictures from the trip to Zicatela and Guadua: