It's been 11 months now that I moved home to Budapest from the Netherlands. Nearing the 1-year mark I am planning to do a post on the whole process and learnings of the whole moving back thing, but before doing that I did want to write about another, somewhat related topic.

In these past months, I have been wandering around quite a bit in Budapest, and I also went on quite a few hikes in the area. And frankly, even though I was going on these trips because I knew I will like what I see, still I've been really surprised by the wonderful sights everywhere. Some of the sights I went to see I have never seen before, and they were breathtakingly beautiful. Like the views at Hegyestű:

Since I'm back to Hungary, I've been feeling like a tourist in my own country. Not because I feel out of place, but because I am simply fascinated by everything around me - as if I *was* a tourist. And that's an awesome feeling.

And the weirdest thing is, I've been also exposed to a lot of stuff I *have* already seen before - and even those were mesmerizing to me.  I mean, I've seen a lot of them before, and I knew they were pretty, but they seemed even prettier than I remembered.

I mean look at this lake at Bánk.

Or look at Vajdahunyad vára, a little castle so enchanted that no matter how much I stare at because it's 10 minutes walking away from where I live, I still can't always believe that it's real (ok, yes, I have a thing for enchanted little castles, so I might be biased here).

And yes, maybe all of this is just the after-effect of the homesickness. I will try to reflect on that in more detail when I reminisce about what it feels like to move home after 5.5 years of living abroad.

Either way, point is, that these above experiences have just reaffirmed the hunch that I've been developing over the past couple years:

International travel is overrated.

Don't get me wrong, not all forms of it, I think it's fascinating to travel abroad and I still want to do it - but much more rare, for longer times, and much more consciously. I'm more and more despising 'fast-food-like' tourism: city hopping weekends within Europe with low-cost flights just so we can consume another country/city and its landmarks in a day and spend our night in a sterile hotel room which could be just as well anywhere else in the world, only to then go off in the morning to see one more sight after complaining about the hotel breakfast before getting into a cab that takes us back to the sterile airport where we'll buy some crappy souvenirs while we complain about having to stand in line - all of this while there is *so* much we haven't seen at an arm's length all around us?

I mean, when was the last time you took a sightseeing trip in your own city? Or to a domestic destination? Have you ever looked at that beautiful building at the end of your street or that church in the park near your house? 

Maybe you have done all of these things already, in which case good for you! I myself have some serious catching up to do, and I can't wait to explore more things around me. 

Hungary, here I come! :)