write memoirs from my gap year

One of the issues of living abroad is the perception of the home country that you have left behind. For me it goes both ways round, when I am aborad I think of Poland as a more perfect place and when I go back to Poland I think of the places I visited as idyllic and better than Poland.
As Horace puts it: “In Rome you long for the country; in the country – oh inconstant! – you praise the distant city to the stars.”
Now I’m again abroad, in Finland. What do i miss about Poland? What comes to my mind when I think of Poland? In fact, dirty, rocky buses with steam on the windows and mud on the floor. But I like it the way it is. This is my idealization of Poland. This is the Polishness that I yearn for while being abroad. A kind of roughness. I like the authenticity of the bus driver who sits behind the wheel thinking about his wife and children. I like the image of noisy, lively streets.
And food. Fresh warm rolls, true bread that actually tastes like bread and you can hear the crack of the crust when you bite it.
Old ladies who are happy with what they have or don’t have. Their simple wisdom. Last year when I came back from my ‘journeys’ one of my old neighbours told me: “You have seen so much of the world. And you know, we haven’t seen it, still we are alive.”

Today I was wondering, a gap year from what? why should it be called a year off or a gap year? supposedly, it is a year-off break from a life filled with routine and ordinariness you shouldn’t have ever let into your life. Today, I realized I want it to last. Break the routine forever. Feel the life, live and appreciate every moment of it.

From the flight to the UK, I remember gradually changing landscape below me, the further west we went, the more ‘organized’ and developed the land seemed. I was a bit uneasy about the flight, as it was the first time in my life so when I got to the airport in Balice and saw my aeroplane I got a bit scared because it was much smaller and fragile than I imagined. Feeling like being inside a paper aeroplane-toy finally I said farewell to the continent and greeted mythological island of Great Britian. London buildings below me so soon, it almost couldn’t get to my consciousness. With paradoxically rainy weather in Poland, England greeted me with almost 30degrees and sunny weather. Neverending corridors, moving lanes, omnipresent modernity, English in the loudspeakers. I envied Polish girl who was just calling her friends that she had landed and wanted them to pick her up from the airport. I wish I knew where I was going. But, I was picked up too, by the family I was going to be au pair for. Soon, I found myself in a car on the highway with a sweet boy asking me multum of questions, and only partially did I realize that it is no longer listening comprehension exercise:) 4 lanes on the highway, left-hand traffic, and 2 hours back in time I was still in my calm Poland. It’s gonna be party time here, I thought.