Thursday, January 5, 2012

Daheim Ist Daheim

When living abroad, you quite easily refer to the country you came from as 'home'.

My family spent the holidays back 'home' in Finland. Although Finland is not that far from Germany (the flight takes only 2-2.5 hours), traveling with a child is a bit challenging and I like to spent at least two weeks in Finland at a time.

Our families are spread all over the southern and western Finland, so it takes time to travel from town to town and to meet everyone. Actually, two weeks is a very short time, if you plan to meet all your family and friends. As our relatives do not have the possibility to see our daughter very often, the family meetings seem to take majority of our time. And after visiting all the relatives, you notice that it is time to fly back home, and you haven't had the time to meet all your friends, like you planned...

But from another perspective, two weeks is a long time. As we do not have a place of our own in Finland anymore, we need to stay with our relatives (or in a hotel) whenever we travel to Finland. This means storing all your things in your luggages and packing everything up in every couple of days when changing to another town.

The travel bed is all set up, so it is time to unpack all the toys.

Fortunately, my grandparents have not sold my great-grandmother's old apartment, so when we are staying in the village where I grew up, we have a whole apartment to ourselves. What a luxury! Unfortunately, the distances are too long for us to camp here for our whole stay in Finland.

Our daughter scattered her Christmas cookies all over the floor in our 'apartment hotel'

After two weeks of the luggage life, I was ready to fly back to our real home, where I can take clean clothes from the cabinet and sleep in my own bed.

So, here we are, back home in Wiesbaden.

Daheim Ist Daheim - Home Sweet Home!

Although we did not have White Christmas in Finland,
 we did have the opportunity enjoy some winter sports before flying back home.



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We have four children and if we all go back to Scotland it's really difficult staying somewhere or mobilizing us from visit to visit.
Mostly now, one of us stays here and the other (normally me) flies back with just one child. That's difficult too as then we all miss each other.

Frau Welle said...

Thank you for your comment! Oh, I cannot even imagine what it would be like to travel with four kids!