Christmas holidays at home in Whitby was brilliantly, wonderfully, amazingly nice and leaving was not something I was looking forward to at all.
After a delayed flight, annoyingly due to technical problems, not the huge amounts of snow blanketing Europe, the eventual return to a cosy living room with endless supplies of tea, food, and family love was very much welcomed! Cute as my family are, they’d saved the decorating of the tree until I got back, so that’s what we did on the first morning. Then in the last week before Christmas we played in the snow, sat and chatted, played a lot of scrabble, went out for coffee and cakes and visited family; nothing spectacular but just what was needed.
Of course Christmas day being Christmas day, me and my sister ate far too much chocolate including before breakfast, surrounded by wrapping paper and new gifts! Santa (and my parents) were incredibly generous with me this year, and gave me a shiny new camera to take photos of all Erasmus antics from now on, along with a lot of nice little things like books, CDs, perfume and the like. Dinner was, as usual, epic and scrummy, even the sprouts!
The next day we had a bracing boxing day walk along the clifftop to watch the boxing day dip, where all the crazy people run into the sea for charity, followed by breakfast at Nana’s house, quickly becoming one of my favourite traditions!
After a few more relaxing days at home, I headed up to Newcastle for New Year celebrations! It was so nice to see Rhona, Vicky and Jim for an afternoon catch up, friends that I haven’t seen in a long while, especially seeing as two of them have just finished/are just starting semesters abroad! For the first time since leaving Italy, I got slightly excited about coming back and saw that actually it’s pretty good to be living here doing all the things I do. The weekend then consisted of meeting up with Lorna and Mark, shopping for the new year’s roast dinner feast, getting ready for the party at Caitlin’s, cooking said feast, catching up with all the girls and guys there, drinking copious amounts of wine, celebrating in the street at midnight and playing pictionary with lots of questionable drawing skills! I had the best time chatting to everyone, friends that I have only seen a couple of times in the last two years due to both years abroad, and friends that I spent a lot of last year with! Had lots of encouraging words from those on Erasmus last year, which was lovely.
And the last of my three weeks at home were mainly spent relaxing and trying not to let myself slip into the trough of despond called ‘I hate Italy, I want to stay at home, don’t make me go back!’ Luckily somewhere in there I was inspired, or probably just came to my senses, and decided that actually it’s not so bad, in fact it’s rather good most of the time, and if I survived the last three months I can definitely do the rest of it! The promise of better weather in a couple of months and having friends and a house to come back to made it a lot less stressful than my previous experience of coming here, and I don’t think I quite realised how much easier it was going to be! Of course, I still miss family and friends back home, and others that I didn’t get to see, but ultimately, being back is good! It’s a lot calmer, less stressful (so far), and less extreme at the moment; I’m starting to feel like I know how to live here, how to live my version of la dolce vita, you could say.
