Home is where the heart is

"Home, the spot of earth supremely blest, A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest."

Robert Montgomery

What if your heart is in different places at the same time? What if you can't decide where your heart lies? What if every time you go back to a place where you used to live, you discover a part of your heart is still there? How many cities can find a place in your heart? Do you encourage this love or do you move on and try to forget about it? Is it the place or the people that have conquered your heart? How strong do your children feel this heartache? How do you explain this constant moving to them? How do you cure it? Is there a cure to expat globetrotting?

So many questions. I imagine the answers will be different for every person and each family going through the relocation experiences. 

Our family's cure is to visit the places and friends we left behind. It means we don't necessarily explore new destinations every holidays but then again "We are lucky enough to actually live in a different place every three years so why bother with a superficial 2-week holiday only to scratch the surface of a foreign culture", says Expat hubby. We travel to the same spots again and again. We meet up with friends and enjoy the activities we always did when we used live in that country. I do admit the list of places to visit does get longer the more you move and therefore we started planning our pilgrimage in a family reunion.

Our two favourite spots are Madrid in Spain and Lugano in Switzerland. Here are a few impressions of our last visit to Lugano which we called home from 2007 to 2011.