Rather than being back in the USSR, I’m back in the Bing. And I’m trying to figure out how lucky I really am.

I seem to have gone from one extreme to another; from a hip, cosmopolitan city to an old, industrial blue-collar working town. I’ve tried to see the good in both, though it is rather hard to sort out.

Once my internship in Washington, D.C., finished I had to fill out a survey, and one of the symptoms of spending the semester away from Binghamton was reverse culture shock, a condition that sounds much more ominous and obscure than it actually is. Simply put, it is the sentimental attachment that people develop toward the previous place they lived.

What is ironic is how assimilating and adapting to a new and different place is not necessarily as difficult as adjusting to the familiar place you once inhabited. Somehow what we once associated as familiar becomes unknown, and as a result, we view the place we once knew with a new perspective.

What is it about these certain structures and landscapes that define the significance of a place? After walking around the Capitol building, touring the White House, visiting Arlington National Cemetery and being immersed in American history for four months, it seemed all too strange that I could come back to the same place that gave me the academic foundation to pursue my internship abroad in the first place: Binghamton.

It is hard to believe that objects themselves don’t ever change; it is just that in our minds we have assigned a certain intrinsic worth or meaning to them, based on our experiences at a certain time. When you come back to that same place at a later date, your mind automatically recalculates the emotional value. After studying world-renowned sites in Washington, I came back with a newfound appreciation for the different places on campus that had no historical significance to the masses, but plenty to me.

I feel as though I’ve created a three-headed emotional dilemma between where I grew up, the college I attended and Washington, that distorts the concept of “home” to me. Once you branch out to live in new places, you aren’t quite sure which is the one place you owe your sense of belonging to. I’ve come to realize that we acquire satisfaction in different places for different reasons at different times. Perhaps the concept of home isn’t really tied down to one place, but mobile and transient throughout our lives.

There’s no guarantee that the places we’ve spent a period of time will remain as they once were, but “home” shouldn’t be thought of as physical movement from one locale to another. Home, as Verlyn Klinkenborg said in his New York Times op-ed piece, is “a place we carry inside ourselves.”

We should always welcome an unfamiliar place because, someday, we may just call it home too.