I came home twice this summer. Yet, these two homecomings couldn’t have been more different.

Due to a ticket mix-up, I flew home later than the majority of students at NYU Abu Dhabi. I left a scorching hot campus full of either excited graduating seniors or dejected underclassmen staying for summer term. I packed what felt like a month earlier because all I wanted to do was go home. Home to green trees and a stress-free life. When I finally arrived in Düsseldorf, nothing felt more homely. My beloved home hadn’t changed, and seeing the green trees on my way back from the airport made me grin. I took in the familiar buildings — my high school, my best friend’s house and the pool I used to train in. After a stressful semester, you couldn’t remove the smile from my face. I was finally able to relax and do nothing for a month, laze around my favourite city and hang out with my old friends. There wasn’t anything I would have rather done at that time.

By the time I had slept out all of my sleep deprivation from the semester, I was finally fully at home. I enjoyed the benefits of the carelessness that home brought, from riding my bicycle along the Rhine to having coffee with a friend to spending a rainy day lying in bed exclusively watching old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. It was one of the laziest times in my life, but I wouldn’t have wanted to do anything else. This laziness was finally a thing I could actively do and not feel terrible about. I wasn’t procrastinating work that I should be doing, and I was allowed to do whatever I wanted. I wasn’t being pressured to do anything by NYUAD Student Life posts or by professors for classes.

Yet, I couldn’t have stayed at home all summer. At a certain point, there was a time that I had to go back to the home I actually live in now — Abu Dhabi. I wasn’t too excited to come back to work, the stress on campus and all of the socializing. Yes, I missed my friends and wanted to have my independence again, but the heat and the extremely close-knit community didn’t really excite me. I wanted it to be like my summer, when I could be anonymous and do whatever I wanted rather than constantly bumping into a professor or a friend.

However, when I flew into Abu Dhabi, things changed. I loved being at my second home. I ultimately saw what I should’ve missed all summer. I was back to where Nela the student was supposed to be. When my plane flew over Saadiyat and Yas and I saw Ferrari World and the Louvre, I knew I was back. I sprinted through immigration and the rest of the airport because I wanted to be back on campus. I wanted to be back with my friends, back with the dining hall staff and back to working on endless papers. I hadn’t missed all of these things over the summer, but once they were in reach, I didn’t want anything more.

It was in that moment that I realized that these things about Abu Dhabi were actually home now and that the past year had made me come to love them, even though they were extremely different from my previous culture. I now found comfort in these new aspects of my life.

The first few days were weird. I lived in a new building with different security guards, and the campus areas were filled with freshmen and upperclassmen I didn’t know. My room was empty except for my storage boxes. It wasn’t home at all, except everything was like it had always been: the same common area, the same interiors of my room and familiar faces. Although the dining hall lines were long and the conversations with classmates were always similar, I also considered it home. I guess this was the first time I came home to Abu Dhabi, and that’s why it was so weird — at first I wasn’t excited to do that.

I realized that over the past year in the Middle East, I missed Europe. I missed the greenery, I missed the freedom and I missed going to the Netherlands for an afternoon coffee. But then again, during my summer I missed the Middle East and NYUAD. I missed karak, random conversations with other students in the dining hall and the heat.

There doesn’t seem to be a benefit or loss in this situation. However, there is always a home I’m missing, be it Germany or the UAE. There is always a part of me that wishes I was in the other home I have. I guess time will allow me to come to terms with this situation and allow myself to love both homes that I have. I like to call myself bi-homeial.