<<        I personally feel it is so hard to decide what to bring when I go away from home for one year, which I think is relatively long period of time. There are so many thing that I would like to have with me all the time, but at the same time I do not bring very important thing for my travel, because I would not find them if I lost them. If I am asked I could take only one thing that I can bring for my one-year away from home, I would choose to bring some pictures of home, hometown and friends.        Actually there are so many things that I would like to bring with me if I am away from one year, which troubles me most of the times whenever I go on a trip or move to some other places. Besides my pictures, I would like to camera to take pictures to make memories, journals to record what I did during the stay, address books to write to or make phone calls to my friends, some of my favourite CDs and books not to get bored and so on. I come up with so many things that I want to and need to have when I go away from home. Now, you may wonder why my choice is pictures from home. My answer will be that I can purchase these goods such as camera at my new place, so there is no need that I have to worry about. Plus, as for the CDs and books, I think I can try other tastes that I can get at the new place and try something new because my stay there is only on year. It may be beneficial for me to try something new.        The pictures from home will help me make friends at new place and find some fun topic to talk about with them. When I go to a new place, I do not usually have anyone I know, thus I need to make new friends. It is usually hard to talk with them when we do not have anything in common until you get to know the places and then have something common to talk about, on the basis of my own experience in home stay. In this case, I usually talk about myself showing my pictures of my friends, home town, home country, family and so forth in order not to let them know more about myself but also to make some topics to talk about. Of course, we can talk about ourselves without any pictures but people are usually interesting in pictures because they enable them to have exact image of what I am talking about. Moreover, pictures can draw attention of people so that I can get them listen to my stories. This is, I think, important thing until we find some common topic that we can talk about.        The pictures can also encourage you at times, because they can remind of me people back home. It is not always a good idea to look back and think of things back home, but it can be my help at times. It may remind you that you somehow have somewhere you can go back, which can possibly help not to get upset too much when the things seem tough in the new place. Talking about myself who has been away from home for a long while, even though I am not the one who misses anything, it helped me feel better looking back home with pictures sometimes during the first year of being away from home. Having being away from home for three years, I now hardly see the pictures from home, I think they were important to me in the first place.