I really miss my hometown now. So I'm writing a post about my favorite place in the world: My grandpa's study.

Three years ago I was a middle school student somewhere in Indonesia. I lived with my grandparents and my aunts and uncles. We had no internet connection and the only electronics we had were a black-and-white TV and a ten year-old refrigerator that didn't really work. My bedroom was on the second floor and when you open the window you can only see ricefields.

Unlike my friends I didn't really like watching TV, because our TV made our eyes hurt, so as much as I want to see the comedy show everybody was talking about, I just couldn't stand sitting in front of that ancient box more than five minutes. The only entertainment I had were the newspaper and my grandpa's bookshelf.

The bookshelf was really big and it had so many books that everytime you stand in front of it you're afraid it could fall off and hit you and you will literally get killed by books. When I was a kid I never walked nearby. But then time went by and I have read all the books in the house except the ones on that giant shelf so I forced myself to approach it. And that was when I found heaven in the house.

I didn't really care our TV sucked, or no matter how many hours I had put my water bottle in the fridge it never really got cold. Everyday after school I would run upstairs and pick one book out of the shelf. It turned out that my grandparents put all of their "treasure" books on there. My grandmother was an English teacher in a local college and my Grandpa was a politician and a former science teacher so there were all kinds of books from Doctor Zhivago to Euler's Geometry to French Existentialism; there were books written in Dutch, German, Arabic, and English.

I didn't really understand the books but I read them anyway. I finished Anne of Green Gables when I was eight. It was in English and my Grandma would read aloud every single sentence and translate it into Indonesian. She also had me finished The Last of The Mohiccans. I first learned and got interested in World History from my Granpa when he told me that the writer of Doctor Zhivago (what's his name again) was forced by his home-country, Soviet Union to decline the Nobel award. I think I learned everything from that bookshelf. I got interested in learning other languages, especially English and what's more interesting, and strange, was that I was never run out of books to read. I would always find books that I haven't read.

Sorry for the long and boring post. I just really miss my house now. Last year they changed the TV and we got ourselves a new refridgerator and almost everything else in the house has changed. But not that bookshelf. It is still standing there, I think. And I am dying to go home and stand in front of it, feeling creepy and afraid the books will fall off and hit me.

 

 

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