I am getting closer and closer to the Romanian holiday I have so been looking forward to. With each hour that passes, I get more and more nervous although I have stopped drinking coffee a couple of days ago.

I did a lot of midnight laundry since I am going to take a lot of clothing to Romania and they had to be clean of any smell.  My luck was that I was being kept company by one of the most caring people that I have met whom I will not see again at least for the following 6 months. Therefore, time passed by fast and I didn’t even realise when it got to be 2 o’clock.

A couple of minutes ago, I decided to make a little bit of order through my stuff and separate the needed stuff from the useless. That is when I ran over some old documents which now belong to my personal history: my first days in Denmark. Among the things that I have found, I can count the luggage sticker from the plane, my first bus ticket bought in Aarhus, the first receipt from the store we have in the campus and it all seems such a long time ago…

I feel like I have grown up and that now I am a lot more mature. During these (almost) 11 months I have managed to separate good from bad, realise who of the people I know are my friends and who are not, realise who can be my friend because we might have a special connection and so on. There are a lot of scenes that I could talk about but I’ll just remember a few. First of all, I will never forget my first flight to Denmark. I will never forget how embarassingly disoriented I was when I got off the plane and I had to claim my luggage. Nor will I ever forget the moment when I bought the train ticket to Aarhus and some random bloke was just standing in front of me with a Carlsberg in his hand. IN THE AIRPORT! (It all seems so natural at the moment) I’ll always remember the floor that I have slept on in my first night in Aarhus or the way I pronounced “Skjoldhoj kollegiet” at the beginning. I’ll always keep in mind my best friends’ face when she realised that the laptop she had forgotten outside the cantine was delivered by me to her seat in the class. May I also count the first time we went out at McDonalds (the school cantine was closed) and we developed this odd but twinish friendship and school cooperation? The list could go on and on and if I were to tell at least a story about each of the people I care about, the scroll of your web browser would be as tiny as an ant.

My room has a view to the street and for the past 2 weeks I have seen dousins of people carrying their luggage towards the bus station. I have mostly ignored them until I saw someone that I know and I realised that that’s the way things work when you study abroad: people come and people go. I was having a talk while eating an ice-cream with another friend of mine and she told me about the future whereabouts of most of the people I know and whom, most likely, I will never see again. That didn’t make me sad…

It didn’t make me sad just because I realised that we all have a path to follow in life and no matter how much others will miss us, we have to do what we feel inclined to do. It made me realise that although you spend a limited ammount of time around some people, only some of them are the chosen ones and are destined to be your friends. These friends will keep in contact with you even if they are 10.000 kilometers away and they will never think anything bad about you just because they heard something or saw some silly picture of you on Facebook. Can true friendship be achieved in such an environment? I say it does but it’s all up to you: if you deserve to have friends, you will surely have them.

Since I have derailed a little from the main nostalgy topic, I am going to go back to it. Denmark has taught me, over the past months, how it’s like to live and survive by myself. Before I left, I was called a coward just because I didn’t enjoy the idea of studying in the Romanian educational system and I was criticised for “trying to avoid problems”. I am not going to make any further comments except: whoever criticised me was wrong. I would like to see them struggling for survival, asking themselves whether to buy pasta or potatoes, doing their own laundry and cleaning their own room just because you have to. I would also like to see them able to sustain such a learning rhytm at school and meet with all the expectations the teacher or the employer might have. I am not bragging, I am just showing the middle finger to the people that tried to descourage me before coming here and almost convinced me to postpone the meeting with life.

I sometimes miss the problemless (wtf word) life I used to have but now I wouldn’t trade this path of life for anything else. Although I have the feeling that I am not in the right place, I do know that I know the right persons and this will always be the most important. I don’t have to say any names, you people know who you are.

I used to be naive. Now I’m a dreamer with falling hearts around my head.