No Place Like Home
Tahir Elsarrag documents his around-the-world search for a better place to live.
"I used to hate Cardiff, or at least I thought I did.
At 23 it was the only place I'd ever known and it had started to feel like a prison. So I decided to leave. I was convinced that life was something that only happened somewhere else, anywhere but here. So I went to look for it. I looked and looked, from one side of the world to the other.
One Christmas Eve I came back, reluctantly...
As the train approached the City I started to recognise the landscape and the memories started to flow... I remembered summer holidays, days at the beach, picnics on Caerphilly Mountain. I remembered my father taking me to the docks to see the ships. I laughed about the countless nights me and my friends would sit in the same pub and the lost weekends in Metros.
A wave of nostalgia overwhelmed me as I stepped off the train in tears. For the first time in my life Cardiff felt like home.
I realised then that it's only when you leave your hometown that you really get to know it. And the answers you're looking for can't always be found with a plane ticket. The ships are gone now and I'm too old for Metros. The City centre's like a zoo at the weekends and the weather still sucks, but 12 years later I'm still here.
I guess I didn't really hate it that much after all."
Tahir Elsarrag
