Where am I?

Being away from home gives you plenty of time to think about things - and of course for me that means fodder for blog entries!

So, the last few days I've been thinking about the importance of home to me. Even though I looooooooooove travelling, I like coming home even more. "Home" is hard to define...! For example, it's not just my address. I can be living somewhere but it's not "home".

I have to be surrounded by my things, look, I can't help it, I'm a Cancerian!!! Let me quote

"...one of the strongest urges in this watery sign is the urge for security. For what's known and familiar, comforting and safe..."

Dan mocks me unmercifully for (a) the amount of stuff I bring with me when we go away and (b) the fact that I like to unpack it all and arrange it in the hotel room in order to make me feel 'at home'! In fact, I'm looking round the hotel room in Raleigh and seeing all my little bits and bobs around me now! Yes I'm feeling quite at home here...!

One of the things that is contributing to that though is that this is my second stay here. I knew it already, from the previous stay in August. Whilst I'm happy going to new places, I'm happier when I already know what to expect. I think this is partly my Cancerian nature, and partly just because humans are creatures of habit.

How many times, when you're on holiday, do you go back to the same bar, same restaurant, same beach? In fact, how many times have you been on the same holiday? When you have a limited amount of holiday, it takes all the guesswork and risk out of the equation. There's a guaranteed success that you'll get what you want.

But what do I do when I have to navigate the unknown, like when I was pootling around Brussels for my Visa? It's not like I want to only ever go to places I've been before. How do I cope?

Well I get an awful lot of info about places I haven't been to before just by doing a bit of gratuitous browsing. Also, maps help. What did I do before Google Maps, and the internet? Well actually to answer my own question, I collected alot of leaflets in folders, and spent alot of time ringing people to ask for information! My own personal interweb.

I remember feeling really really lost when 1st moving to Portsmouth. No car, no real 'getting about' skills learned at that point. Took me about a year to get my head round what I needed to do. The year *after* starting at the Poly, I joined all the student societies, went to all the freshers events, got bags of leaflets, timetables and info. I actually got the skills to organise and orientate myself.

Sometimes it takes a while to recognise my feelings of lostness. I just feel unsettled, and unhappy and don't always know why. It's usually not until afterwards, sometimes several years later, once I'm familiar with a place, once I feel 'at home' there, that I can look back and see where my distress stemmed from. So I can look back now and say that I saw those symptoms when I 1st moved to Portsmouth, to Leeds, and even on my 1st visit to Raleigh.

So where is home now? Funnily enough it's a place and a person! Dan is definitely part of where my home is. Although having all my bits and bobs around me helps; which is why we need a BIG house ;-)