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Bok prijatelji!

It’s a beautiful winter day which even feels more like a first sign of spring; the sun lets the tiles on the roof of the castle in front of my kitchen window shine their red light on my computer keyboard. The sky is blue, it’s comfortingly warm, and I start to write a special post.

This is how I would have started this post if I had published it one week ago. Well, yeah, now I started like that anyway, but I lied. Actually it’s a grey, cloudy, quite depressing day, it’s pretty cold and I’m tired as hell. Nonetheless it’s a special post: My stay in Varazdin is exactly half over today.
168 days in Varazdin lay behind me, 168 days before me. Time for looking back and time for looking forward. Time for making conclusions and time for making plans. Time to think.

The past half year was naturally one full of events, full of people who became friends and full of places which became familiar. Especially at work I have already learnt a lot and gained many beautiful and useful experiences. I learnt what it means to live alone, to be independent, to have to care for myself; I also learnt what it means to be a stranger – and how heartwarming the feeling is when you start to not be one here and there anymore. I have reconsidered some prejudices that I brought here and I made others reconsider their prejudices against me. However, amongst all the things I have experienced and learnt so far, I have got to know time the most, its paradoxical nature, its unchangeable move and the fact that it is never objective.
In half a year, I’m thinking, I made my first steps at learning a foreign language at school. In this half-year I have got to know a foreign language well enough to understand quite a lot and say some things, and most of all it sounds familiar when I hear it.
In half a year, I’m thinking, I had to take some tests as a pupil, learnt some stuff at school, hung out with my friends in the rest of the time and just let life pass by. In this half-year however I have got to know a new culture, a new country, new working methods; I gained life experience and reached a better understanding of people, the differences between them and the mutual things they share.
In half a year, I’m thinking, I discovered a few new street names at home and knew nothing but my own place I call home. In this half-year I found a second home, and now I know what it means to be a man between Here and There, somebody who doesn’t only feel at home when at home, but also in the world.

A place is only as good as the people in it. – Pittacus Lore, „I Am Number Four“

I have experienced that “home” does not primarily become home because one likes the place or the country or the language; “home” is a place where you know people who can make you feel at home. The fact that this is already the case for me in Varazdin – after half a year – slightly surprised me, but it perfectly fits the title of this very blog: strange becomes familiar.

I have learnt that time is relative. That in half a year so many things can happen and still it feels like it’s been only a week. That you often get a feeling like you can never enjoy and use the time that is given to you at a certain place or in life as much as you had imagined it, because especially the beautiful moments rush by so fast that you often can’t believe they’re already over. I realize now that I struggle with classifying periods of time – the period that is over now awaits me once again, and I don’t know whether I shall look forward to an endless half-year or an incredibly short half-year. At the same time I’m also aware that the second half of my stay will never seem as long or as short as the first one in my memories because time is always subjective, and depending on what happens in the forthcoming time the next six months will either feel like half a life or like an instant. (Or actually like half a year.)

I have learnt to be much more thankful for what is being made possible for me and for what I am given, to be more thankful for things I took for granted before. Even though there’s no great differences between my „two homes“, talking to people around here I more and more realized how lucky I always was and still am and how much I should actually honor that.

I have also learnt what it means to not somehow automatically belong to a group but being dependent on people who introduce you and make you part of this group. This made me realize my independence and my dependence at the same time – a very odd, but instructive feeling.

You see, my year abroad is dominated by learning and experiencing. It might not be anything new to you that people learn things while they live abroad, but how unconsciously and continuously and especially to what extent that happens is revealing to me only now that I’m writing this to be honest, now that I am really taking my time to look back on what has happened so far. At the same time of course I look forward towards what is coming; probably a big project, definitely many more experiences in the field of teaching, a bigger language knowledge, even more foreign countries and cities and many things I can’t foresee at the moment.
Thinking about time and my voluntary service, there is naturally always a bit of melancholy in the back of my head. Although it is really beautiful right now and it is giving me so much, it’s going to be over in half a year forever – the year I am allowed to experience at the moment will never come back. This sometimes leads to the thought I have to force myself to use my time as much as I can and to do everything now “as long as I still can”; I realized though that one of the best aspects of this year is to enjoy it exactly without any self-made restraints and compulsions because that is particularly the part that will most likely never return.

I could narrate forever and still I’m lacking words to express everything that’s in my head at the moment. But yeah, blah-blah, “you gotta experience it to know what it’s like” – there’s a lot of things I can’t even describe.
For the forthcoming time I hope that a lot of things stay the same, that a lot of new things happen, that some things don’t happen again; however, no matter what happens, I will do my best to take the second half as it comes and to fully enjoy it. Looking back on the last months, I managed to do that quite well so far.

The next post will go online in a few days, stuffed with less excessively philosophic thinking orgies and more experience reports, more things out of my life than out of my head.

The solution for the last riddle: the dark.

Greetings

Florin.

Old but gold (I did my best to maintain a poem-like form when translating from German):
Always eating, all-consuming
Never finished, all-destroying
Never ever really done
Until the whole wide world is gone.