Going away to understand your country

The first time I really understood what Italy, my homecountry, meant and represented to me was during my exchange program in Brazil. I spent six months there, living with a Brazilian family, and during that period I often defended Italy and its traditions, re-evaluating them and looking at them from a different point of view as it had never happened to me. Going abroad means having the opportunity to compare your country -and what it has to offer- to other realities, that can be both better and worse. You look critically around you, realizing that what in your country bothered and annoyed you is something you miss if you live away. But the opposite can happen too! There were aspects of Italy I found perfect, without the possibility of being improved, that really worked better in Brazil. We can learn from every population, because a country that is better than the others in every aspect of life doesn't really exist.
Crossing a border doesn't always mean travelling a lot and moving from a country to another one. There a lot of barriers you must cross in your home country! Right now I'm in Sicily and I'm living a completely different life than the one I face everyday in Triest, the city where I live. Sometimes you can find more difficult to understand a different part of your own country than another one that apparently should be different and in reality reveals very familiar and simple to understand to you. I must also say that Triest is in the border with Slovenia, so we are used to people coming from other realities that bring with them new traditions, habits,... which in a while become familiar to you too. Having a border near you helps you to be more open-minded and curious, always trying to find points in common and not differences that can't be surrendered.
There are a lot of opportunities you lose if you don't cross a border and don't meet different people. I dare say that Europe for me means opportunity, that's the first word that comes to my mind when I think about it. There are worlds and different territories that coexist in a short space here in Europe, so you can do short trips and at the same time meet completely different people, that have the power to enrich you in different ways. When my host-parents went to Triest to visit me my host-mum took a picture of a landscape you can see from the upper part of the city: it was a picture that included Italy, Slovenia and Croatia, everything in a single shot. I found it was fantstic, you have so many worlds in 50 kilometers!
I mentioned my host-parents visiting me and my family in Italy. That's an awesome aspect of going to live abroad: you meet people that mark you for life, that remain in your heart forever and will always be there if you need them. That's what happened to me, I really trust them and I know that I have a second family in the other part of the world; there is a chain that links Triest to Rio de Janeiro, an Italian family and a Brazilian one, two different cultures.
Once a writer that comes form Triest wrote that crossing a border always means finding a piece of you on the other part of it. I think this is very true and really -really- beautiful: there are points in common with everybody, and moreover you will never be able to really understand and know you if you don't meet the others. Men are made to stay together, to live together and share our beautiful, divided -in a positive way- and unite world.