Vánoce Vánoce přicházejí!

Ho ho ho, it is Sunday, and you already know what it means: time for my weekly therapy. I write my blog and empty here my thoughts about what is bothering me. I write this in VSCode, which is where I spend most of my time anyway these days, so it kind of feels like I am productive anyway.

I wrote the title of the blog in Czech, but just because I felt like it. This is how I roll these days with languages—I just use the words that come first. For example, I cannot call the chopped tomatoes I get in the supermarket anything else than “tomatoblokjes,” because that is how they call them in the Netherlands. There are a couple of words in my vocabulary that are German. And Christmas will always be Vánoce, because that is how it has always been back at home.

Yes, home! It is the time of the year when I get to go back there. Since 2021, I have joined this special club called “the expats.” How do you spot one? They are flying back home for Christmas, and all their friends do too. Some people from further away stay behind, but in the expat community this will never feel like home one can come back to.

I was usually never eager to go back home. But coming back to Czechia lately, I have realized how much I have missed from the lives of other people that I left behind. I was silently just typing my blog from afar, but I have done too little visiting and have been visited way too little. Creating this blog has been therapy for that, for sure, but I am trying to catch up more. I book tickets for someone’s birthday, making sure that I see my family when I am back. I love what I do, but I was surely isolating myself from others and overweighting work too much. I want to be included in the lives of people around me, and for that I have to be there physically. Christmas is just the time for that. I am taking some time off in Czechia before returning to the pits of despair before exams.

That is the plan, and I am looking forward.

See you all soon, and if not, then after New Year’s. Merry Christmas!

Michal