Stay at home GreenBitch

  

I had planned to first wait for the greetings of our Asian explorers, but since they have assimilated to the local culture so well they are busy (or, are stuck with Chinese censorship like Weeber. Can you feel the… irony? :D) I decided it’s time for GreenBitch to show up.
So, I’m the anti-itinerant of us, the one who truly was left behind. In fact, most of my friends have fled from Finland by now, to study abroad or just to chase the sun with a backpack on. When I explain the situation to some people, they always ask me “so why did you stay?” It seems like staying at home, not adventuring the world, has become a statement too.

 So, Why did I stay indeed?

Hmm.

*Thinking*

 

Well looking out of the window doesn’t help much…

Why did I?

I didn’t feel ready to leave. I had just settled down in my new home in Tampere when everybody started applying for foreign universities. The idea of changing place and people around me felt too distant, too soon. Before studying international relations I was traveling around from place to place, from continent to continent, feeling greedy to see and experience as much as possible, and it was awesome!

 

…At the time. But after two years I started to get sick of constant hellos and goodbyes, language barriers, culture shocks, packing and unpacking, the sense of rootlessness, which is often the reverse side of the feel of freedom while travels.

 

 I wanted to feel home again. I missed my Shire. And that was Finland, with all its trees, sauna, lakes, fresh air, grumpy and shy people, my own weird language, and of course family and friends too. And, at times, life has treated me well up here. I try to appreciate the little things that make life beautiful. As one of my friends once said, you can travel to the end of the world but you can never escape from yourself. You have to learn to feel comfortable in your skin, walking in your shoes, wherever you are.

 

Okay, after all this beautiful blah blah philosophy I have to admit that sometimes I really miss traveling! I can’t help getting jealous to my traveling friends, throwing longing glances to the World’s map on my wall, or feeling guilty about neglecting my backpack under the dust in the corner of my room. And when I’m copying the words of my professor to my notebook “Learning diary deadline: no avant-garde, no creativity, dull and formal = good”, the little traveller inside me screams: “Let’s go to India!!!”

On the other hand, I think I should feel a little embarrassed about having existential anxiety that most of the people can’t afford. As a member of the privileged Western fat-ass generation, I can circle around the questions like ‘to see or not to see the world’, because I have so many choices what to do with my life. My passport works as a VIP ticket to anywhere. And what I do with this lucky position? Whine and make an issue out of it!

A little more whining now when I got the taste of it: I often miss my friends abroad, Finns and non-Finns. My dear posse of itinerants! Where’s Sportesse when I have to make foam out of eggs and sugar by hand? Where is TeroGilbert to make parties more eventful by spiking the punch with her deadly 80% vodka from the east, and where’s.. how the hell I’m supposed to write his name anyhoo the guy from Lapland getting intoxicated and funny by it? Where’s Lassemon when there’s something politically incorrect to be said? Where’s Weeber taking us to some hipster activities?

It’s not all about complaining. In the middle of the yearning, petty existential crisis and “something bad happened”-phone calls, I’m happy to have a lovely someone bringing me Ben&Jerry’s from the darkness and coldness, reminding me that ice-cream still tastes delicious and all in all,

life is good.