I wrote this post on my iPad back in January while waiting for a flight at the Frankfurt airport after about 24 hours of travel but when I looked for it in my drive to finish it and post it, I couldn’t find it. I just came across it in my notes app.

I have read many posts by people living abroad (or who have at some point) about how to answer the question, “Where’s home?” I find this a trickier question then “Where are you from?” My short answer for the latter is, “I grew up in Calgary” which while basically true – I moved there at age 10 and stayed through university and a few years after – skips a lot of the story.

I’m on way home from a trip to Melbourne (and Tasmania). I think this was my fifth trip to Melbourne and along the way it has become another home. Each time I go, I have more friends to catch up with. When I visited the first time in 1999, it was to visit Ingrid (as was this trip) and Margaret (who now lives in the US). I met their friends some of whom have now become my friends too. These friendships were reinforced when I moved in with Ingrid for 7 weeks in 2006 during my first long school holidays while I was living in Singapore. The next time I visited I spent a day at the beach with a friend from Singapore, Manjusha, who was visiting her parents. By the time I visited in 2011, I also had a friend from Twitter, Edna, and a friend I met on a trip in Morocco, Chak, to catch up with and I had the opportunity to meet Ingrid’s partner, Jo. This time I caught up with Ingrid, our mutual friends, Edna, Chak, Manjusha (visiting from Perth), Adrienne (who was visiting from Singapore – we met via Twitter, she moved to Singapore shortly before I moved to Tanzania and inherited all my kitchen stuff), and a heap of people who I worked with in Tanzania (some are living in Melbourne, others were visiting from other places).

Melbourne is unique in that I seem to be adding more friends there rather than people moving away as is the case with other places I have lived and visit – namely Calgary, Ottawa and Singapore.