OPINION: Feeling nostalgic

I’ve recently been working to sort and file away all my photos from my year studying abroad in college.

While in Europe, I didn’t have enough room on my phone to save the hundreds of photos I was taking each week, so I would upload them to Facebook. This way my friends and family back home got to see what I was up to and they were all saved somewhere online.

However, about a year or two ago, I stopped feeling so secure about this option. My mom’s Facebook was hacked and the hacker started sharing some very inappropriate things. While my mom did change the password and the posts stopped, the damage was already done and Facebook deleted her profile.

Gone were all the old posts and photos she had made. Luckily, the oldest ones were also printed out and the newer ones could be found on the profiles of other family members, but it still wasn’t fun to figure out.

Unfortunately for me and many others my age, our social media profiles are the only places many of our photos exist. It would be devastating to lose all my photos from my time abroad because one person decided to hack my profile.

Because of this, I’ve started the long journey of downloading all my photos onto a hard drive, a long and arduous task. It doesn’t help that Facebook gives each photo a random name, meaning I have to take extra steps to keep my photos in general order of date and location.

Once I’m done with these photos, I’ll move to other Facebook albums and grab the ones from off my phone.

I’m sure some people will find this funny, considering different companies offer external storages like the iCloud or Google Photos. However, these only hold so many photos, and I already had a massive hard drive from college, so I figured I might as well use it.

Because I’ve been sorting through all these photos, I’ve been feeling nostalgic for that time. It’s hard not to when I go through photo after photo of gorgeous architecture, new food and friends I haven’t seen in since coming back to the U.S.

While I’ll never get that exact time back, it’s easy to dream of trips back to Europe. I’d love to take my family to Edinburgh and give them a tour of one of my favorite ever places. I want to return to Paris and see the Notre Dame now that the fire damage has been repaired. I want to visit new countries and cities I never had the chance to see.

Unfortunately, as everyone knows, travel is expensive. A flight overseas costs hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Once you’re actually there, you have to worry about housing and food. While I’m happy to stay in a room with a handful of strangers for only €20 a night, most people I’d travel with are not.

On top of all of that, I have a feeling my coworkers would have certain feelings about me taking a couple weeks off to go travel the world.

So where does that leave me now? Unless my family decides to do a family vacation abroad (unlikely due to my father’s hatred of being a tall man stuck in a small seat for 8-plus hours), it will probably be a while until I can take myself back. Sure, I can look at the photos and talk about the memories, but that only does so much.

One thing I’ve started looking into more is trying to cook some of my favorite meals from that time period. I’ll never be able to recreate the perfect Italian pizza Margherita or cook myself some haggis (it’s actually illegal to make here in the U.S.), but I can attempt some of the easier dishes.

This week, I made the Spanish comfort dish tortilla. This is not the corn or wheat wrap we often think of, but instead an egg and potato dish. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s often what I had as a packed lunch when traveling in Spain.

For this meal, eggs and potatoes are cooked into a puck-like shape along with salt and olive oil. Once room temperature, the tortilla is sliced up and eaten between slices of fresh baguettes. There’s not much to it, ingredients or flavor, but I’ve been craving it ever since I started going through these photos.

I successfully made it earlier this week and have been enjoying it as my work lunch. However, it certainly isn’t as good when you switch out the amazing European bread for some less exciting American bread.

The food I am most desperate to eat again is probably one of the hardest to make: sticky toffee pudding. We’ll see if I even attempt to make that; it might just live in my nostalgia forever instead.