To be apart from my family for a long time

To be apart from my family for a long time

 

Lourdes & Jiyun

 

Have you ever been living abroad for a few months? We did. So, now, we are going to tell you what Lourdes and Jiyun feel and how is it going while we have to spend much time without meeting our family and friends. We decided to write this blog to see how different we feel based on personal differences.

For Lourdes, it was quite hard. It has only been 4 months since she came to live in another country and she is already looking forward to seeing his family and friends. Two months ago, her parents and best friends came to visit her and her new country. In Spain, they are always spending time together and it’s very hard not to share these new moments with them.

Lourdes has been living away from home for 3 years in Granada, which is 3h by car from home, and she goes to see her family once or twice a month, and almost always another week her boyfriend goes to see her too. Although she lives apart from his loved ones, she is very present in their lives and they do everything together.

For example, two weeks ago her family put the Christmas tree and they made a video call to put the whole family together as they do every year, and just a month ago her cousin, who is like her sister, bought a house that nobody had seen and she called her on Skype so she could see her new home at the same time of all.

Although she lives outside the home, she feels that she will always have them with her wherever she goes. His grandfather died very recently and she felt great support from his family even without being there. They called her every day and they kept asking her how she was going. She really misses them and she couldn’t wait to see them. So, she couldn’t resist and she bought some flights to visit them in a few days by surprise at Christmas.

For Jiyun, at first, it was hard too but not that much. Even though other Korean girls said they want to go back to Korea as soon as possible, Jiyun wanted to stay here longer even though she really loves her family. Sometimes as a joke she said, “The only thing that I miss is Korean food”. Let’s see what makes Jiyun feel like that.

Jiyun has been lived apart from her family for 7 years since she was 15 years old. She lived in a school dormitory not only when she was in high school but also when she was in home University.  Jiyun’s home University located in Seoul is almost 2 hours far away from home city. When she was a high school student, she visited her home to see family once a week. As time goes by, a frequency of visiting family is getting lower and lower. Before she came to the Netherlands, she usually goes to see her family at most once a month. This is because she is getting used to being apart from her family and also became too busy to spend time with them. Last year, Jiyun didn’t spend time with her family even on Christmas day and New Year day. She was busy on that day because of a speech contest. Jiyun thought that she is in a process of becoming an independent person by leaving her parent.

And now it’s been 4 months abroad without seeing them. As spending time without her family, Jiyun learned something new in the Netherlands from her classmates including Lourdes. She was surprised that when she asked classmates about a plan for Christmas day. All of them answered that they did and will spend time with their family on Christmas day. She realized that planning a special day for meeting up with family would be needed to show how she loves them. Also, she finally decided to visit them as much as she can when she goes back to Korea. Because she already knew that the more she grows up, the less they can spend time together.

In Relationship of future class, Jiyun and Lourdes learned that trying to be connected is one of the ways to keep long distance relationships. As they have lived in abroad for a long time, they finally found how important to spend time together with whom they love. They are struggling to keep the relationship with their lovers with own ways until now.