“You can’t go home again”

Thomas Wolfe

Nostalgic thoughts are crowding my mind as I look out the window on the bus, I am riding to Budapest airport. The memories of the people I met, the friends I made, the adventures I lived, the sad periods I went through, the joy shared with those that became forever part of my life… a family, a new family!

Kosice has been all this and more for me…

I arrived to this city by chance: I had just graduated high school and had no idea of what I wanted to do!

“What do you want to become?”, people would ask… I had to take a decision that would surely have an impact on the rest of my life and yet, no idea…

I have always been a dreamer and my true passions were philosophy and art, but society can worry about thinking and beauty once it has solved the basic needs, in 2019 we still haven’t…

Medicine! I chose to study medicine. Nobody really pushed me to this decision, but I was making my father happy and I knew it.

He was willing to let me study anywhere if I studied medicine, and I probably got carried away by the idea of living abroad.

The application process started and finally an entrance exam and Kosice it was!

I had never been to Slovakia, had no idea what the university looked like, what society would be like or what was going on in 2007 in eastern Europe.

I arrived by plane and went to the dorms. The building was very old, it seemed as if it had never been renewed. The rooms had a cold appearence as the lack of decoration made the ambience look sterile.

In this building I made my first friends: other foreign students had just left their family, friends, home to pursue a dream and we all were in the same condition: alone.

Solitude did not last long. Lifelong friendships were born in that grey building in Povazska street. I will never forget the nights spent eating together in the corridor where we would join all the tables we had to eat all together and learning about each other’s countries, lives, families…

Slowly slowly Kosice became my second home. I used to look forward to going back after the summer vacations and to rejoin my dearest friends.

I have liked living in slovakia and time thought me that so much more was going on over there than in my own country or in other countries in western Europe. Everytime I would go back home things were as I left them, so little was changing, staticity seemed the motto. On the contrary when I would go back to Slovakia there was always something new and most importantly society was changing.

People were hungry to travel, to discover, to know. In the west people had lost that hunger!

I loved studying medicine. I don’t know if I would have liked it so much if I have taken the plane my parents booked for me when I got accepted in the University of Bologna.

I have gone back to this town many times because my sister and my brother studied in the same university, but things were not exactly the same. It’s true, you can never bathe in the same river. Nevertheless going back has always been a pleasure and I always felt welcome. Something about this city is and will always be part of me.

I leave today without an excuse to come back. An era is finished.

Goodbye Kosice and thank you for the friends, the knowledge, the openmindness and the opportunities!

P.S.: more pictures and videos on my instagram profile!