When you travel the world, it’s beautiful. It is highly suggested by everybody and one of the cool hobbies people answer when asked what they like.

Although by traveling you get to see all the incredible places this Earth has to offer, it is incredibly expensive – it does not have to be, but this is the case most of the times.

I have the luck of spending four years of my life studying what I love abroad. Thanks to my family, who have made a LOT of sacrifices for me to be here, I get to meet great, new people from other cultures and visit gorgeous places I would have never even thought about visiting when I was younger. All of this while I immerse myself into my passion: literature.

I am so deeply grateful for all of this,, but being a human being is hard and unfortunately sometimes, I take it all for granted. As soon as I realize it, I feel terrible because I am well-aware of the sacrifices from my part and my family’s.

So when I reach the point that I cannot ignore how awful I feel about myself, I realize I actually miss home.

I come from a very small town in Italy where we speak, other than Italian, a dialect. Here's what I do when I can't stand being with my thoughts any longer - this is excluding the very obvious message or Skype call home:

1. The first thing I do is listen to my national anthem while proudly inflating the chest supporting my right hand.
   
2. Then, I listen to pop songs in my language that will be soon transformed into old Italian songs from the 1960s.
   
3. After that, when you think your heart can’t take any more, the dialect comes to play. I found some beautiful songs my grandmother used to sing me when I was a kid. They are very funny and joyful, just like her. Every time I’m really, really, really sad I listen to them. The dialect is part of my heritage, of who I am, so I try to speak it as much as possible when I visit my country.
   
4. Another thing I like to do, is look at all the picture on my laptop taken over the years. At this point, warm, fat tears roll down my face, but I don’t pay attention to them because they are happy tears, from a moment in time that gave me joy and freedom of being who I am.
   
   
5. Lastly, the infamous step, *drum roll*... food. I surround myself with food from my country every time I have the opportunity. It really warms my heart just to find something I see back home on shelves in some grocery store here. The first time it happened was my freshman year. I was grocery shopping with a friend and while strolling down the pasta sauce aisle I see it. A revelation. The sky brightens and clouds open up to let the sunlight pass through making my item shine.
   
   Okay, I might have exaggerated a bit… but you have no idea of the feeling it gave me. My precious pasta sauce that my family used for generations to cook with back at home was in front of me. In another country. Thousands of miles away from my boot shaped country. I legitimately almost cried of joy. I only didn’t because my friend started looking at me weird, not understanding what was going on, either if I was having a stroke or just gone completely out of my mind. To this day she doesn’t get what it felt like. And it is very hard to explain to someone who never had to call home another place, a place where home is not really HOME, where you know the people but you don’t really KNOW them, where the culture is familiar but isn’t really the SAME.