This experience is coming to an end and I can only be grateful. What an amazing group of people I have met, each one with their own culture, language, customs, political ideas... sometimes we feel unique, special... and we are. But when you share differences and similarities with other people, you realise that in the end we all have the same values in common: family, love, friendships, work. Then everyone has their hobbies... traveling, meeting people, Netflix, reading...
How many interesting people there are in the world and how difficult it is to get out of your comfort zone to reach them. It's also increasingly difficult to find someone interesting, as many of them look alike and are no longer special.
Time is money, so there is no need to share it with people we don't feel like sharing it with. But I have been lucky in this volunteering, as I have met wonderful people who have taught me so much and I hope I have taught something too. I am not formally saying goodbye yet, as this is not my last blog, but inwardly I am beginning to do so. I am living things more intensely, I know there is a limit, there is a day when I will take the flight and say goodbye to Budapest. Maybe it's not forever and I'll come back for a new job, maybe I'll come back to visit (visiting of course, it's not a maybe), who knows?
Three years ago I was living in Prague as an Erasmus student, and I thought I had learned how to say goodbye to a city. But I'm discovering that you never learn how to manage goodbyes. You don't say goodbye to the city, you say goodbye to the experiences, to your favourite bar, to the guests who came to visit you... but above all you say goodbye to the people who made your everyday life wonderful.
I would recommend volunteering to anyone, I would recommend it to anyone who can spend a year abroad, it fills you with a magic that cannot be explained. You connect with yourself, you discover things about yourself that you didn't know, you forge friendships in a language that is not your own language. And the more you travel, the more people you meet, the more you discover about yourself, the more you realise how much you still have to learn.
So I can only say that I feel gratitude for everything I have learned this year personally and for everything I have learned from the people around me. It has been a great opportunity to meet you.