THE EXPERIENCE OF LIVING ON MY OWN

Yesterday I had a dream, it was a little bit strange but now I will explain it to all of you...

It was September, when I started a Graphic Design career in Barcelona, I decided to start living on my own. I had always lived in a little village called Sant Julià de Vilatorta with my parents and my sister, but it was too far from my new university, so I decided to move. During the summer I was looking for an apartment for rent in the big city. It took me about one month and a half to figure it out, but I finally found a nice place to live. It was a shared apartment with three more girls who had been living there for four years. I didn’t know them when I first moved there but they seemed to be nice people.

It was a sunny Sunday morning when I moved to Barcelona with my parents’ help. We had been packing all my things the day before in order to have everything ready on Sunday. We left Sant Julià really early in the morning, in a large jeep with lots of big cartoon boxes cointaining clothes, personal items, art materials and so on. It was pretty hard for me to take all my things off my house and leave my hometown. When we arrived at Barcelona’s apartment, we had to climb all the belongings upstairs and unpack them. Opening that door for the first time, I felt excited, but also a little bit nostalgic. I was sure I would be perfect there and that it would be a great experience, but I also knew that it would take me a while to get used to my new life. Once we finished tidying my new bedroom my parents came back to the village and I stayed at the apartment with my new roomates. We were all sitting on the sofa talking about ourselves in order to know the others a little bit when a loud and repetitive noise started. It came from the apartment over ours, so we decided to go upstairs and see what was happening. We knocked on our neighbour’s door to ask what was that noise. It was him hanging a picture on the wall, but he had just finished when we arrived there. It was a curious way to meet him, but he seemed friendly. We came back home and went to sleep. The next day I had to start classes at Elisava, my new college; everything was new then: the city, the people who I lived with, and the college. That night I was extremely nervous wondering how everything would go on and it took me about two hours to fall asleep. When my alarm clock rang I woke up, had a shower and went to school. I got lost in the middle of my way because I didn’t know the city and arrived late to my first class. It was an embarrassing situation but all my classes were so good. After that hard day I came back to my apartment and went to sleep quite early because of my tiredness. The first week went on so slowly and it was pretty hard, but little by little weeks went better and better.

My flatmates soon became my friends and I always felt very comfortable there. We used to spend evenings cooking something to eat, eating together and talk a lot about what we had done during the day and how we felt.  Some days we went to the city center and had a walk under the stars, laughing and talking and talking again. I had my family, a little far away, but I had found nice people to trust to. I used to call my parents three times a week and visit them every fifteen days. I liked living on my own because I could organize my life and my time as I wanted, but I also needed to see and talk to my family every now and then. I found it difficult to get used to doing all the house tasks because they took too much time to me, but in spite of this fact, I enjoyed the experience. I lived there for two years and a half until I came here, the United States.

At the begining of the next year, on January , I left my Barcelona apartment and came to California as an exchange student for spring semester. I have exchanged my apartment with an American girl, Elizabeth. I came here with a friend of mine and we are living in a small studio situated in Oakland. When I first arrived there it was so great; everything was new for me and it was like a dream which started to become real. This time, the difficult thing was leaving my land and starting in a new place with a different culture and language, far away from my family and friends. It has been one month since we arrived and I feel pretty good and comfortable here, more than my roomate who had not lived on her own before.

I think that living on one’s own is something which helps you to grow up and learn lots of beautiful and useful things such as organizing your time, enjoying what you really like and, in the case of a shared apartment, learning how to coexist with other people. I love my family, but I don’t want to live at home anymore! Living on your own makes you feel better.