Tomas Espedal describes at the end of his book “Leaving, or the Art of Living a Wild and Poetic Life” how nice it is to answer the call of homesickness and come home again. I have always felt homesick towards the end of my travels – in the last week or the last few days. No matter how long the trip was. Always at the end and not after a certain time. This time it will be different. First, I don’t have a defined end after which my homesickness could be directed and second, I don’t have a home anymore. With the latter one can of course still object, what home or homeland actually means

I can still remember very well what Kai von Luck said during orientation week at the university. Since I studied at a university of applied sciences and he had a view from the perspective of a computer scientist, his definition of home was also correspondingly modern. Where home used to be defined as the place where you grew up or where you spent your whole life, nowadays it is much more difficult to define our home as a permanent location. Kai asked why cities like Hamburg (where my and his university is) or Amsterdam are so popular places to live?
Home is where you feel comfortable or where you feel you belong. In the next sentence he questioned the physical home. Because, in his view, social media is trying to create exactly that sense of belonging. In my view, with much success.

Recently, in my Spanish class, I was asked how much time everyone spends on social media each day. I was on the lower spectrum with just 30 minutes a day (WhatsApp included). What surprised me were the numbers that more than half of the participants gave. Six hours was still low. One even spends her entire life online. For her, therefore, the term home has a different connotation than for many of those I call my social network

So I guess home is where you feel you belong, not where a particular sofa or bed is.

So now I have defined the where. Now I only have to wait for the when. Here, time will tell when it will be until I feel homesick.