A Place to Call Home People always want to live and travel abroad, to experience new sensations and create life time memories, but as the cliche goes “you can take the boy out of the town but not the town out of the boy” pertains to be very true. When people go abroad they bring with them little things that remind of them home. Sometimes its pictures, sometimes its lucky coins or tokens, but when people move abroad they tend to adjust their entire living space to what makes them feel most comfortable at home.
Sometimes its posters, framed pictures of family and pets, but often times it’s in the details of how you live that really reflect the things that make you most comfortable. In this room’s case, the living room of my current abroad apartment, it is the convenient set up and the scattered trash that reflects the way in which I attempt to make this room feel like a little bit of home. The convenient set up refers most specifically to the way in which the electronics are hooked into the walls and into each other.
On the desk, the same one that this computer is sitting on, the stereo system is set up. There is a simple braided wooden box that serves as the stereo’s humble stand, and the two small speakers are stacked on top with chords not bothered to be hidden. The computer is plugged into the internet with a long gray chord which winds itself around your feet. When you turn the speakers on, it shakes the key board and the surrounding trash lying about. The trash consists of everything from subway wrappers, plastic water bottles, ticket stubs, receipts and an old cigarette box.
An inhaler lays about not being used. The ash tray, aka a glass cup, has that unmistakable trace of old tobacco. The Pepsi bottle is on its side, with the leftover traces of Pepsi forming a puddle on the side of the bottle. The Hungarian change, a 50, 50, 20, 10, and 5 have been tossed aside, purely adding a little bit of silver and gold to the trashy mix. The way in which I attempted to make this room feel like a little bit of home are reflected in both the convenience and the scattered trash, and it is this combination that makes it work.
This works well because it adds comfort in an otherwise steril home. The biggest way to make yourself feel at home is to reflect the most comfortable way you see to live. In this case, it is the computer next to the tv with a cable connected to the outlet that stretches to below this desk adding a natural border. It reflects the way this allows me to watch movies on my computer such as the one playing, within the comfort of a computer click. The trash lays about to remind me, that this is the place I can leave my trash.
While trash and convience may be a weird thing to claim as the best way to make a foreign place feel home, as this room shows it works the best. It allows you to use the room as you feel, assuring yourself that this second braided box with my briefcase on top is mine, and I can use it as I like. Rather than hanging posters and allowing the prefamed pictures of flowers that cover the walls, I instead adjusted to be able to live the way that made me feel most comfortable, as I wished. It is the way I live and the details in its set up that are how I bring my home town, abroad.
