Visiting Budapest

It's been 3 years. At the start, I came to visit when I had time away from uni. Then I didn't have time. Then I didn't feel like it. Now I am back. Walking on the streets of Budapest. For the first time in the last year and a half. I am stranger to my own motherland. Like a tourist in my home country. I look at the buildings I used to walk by daily, like I have never seen them before. I wonder when were they built. Who designed them, what did they look like when they were new. I look at the architecture and I admire it. I look at the view from my window and it still startles me day and night, overseeing to the other side of the river. I watch the television, I walk in the crowd, sit down in the park and just listen. My head gets dizzy from the noise of the city, it's full of people shouting in Hungarian, and I still raise my head every time I hear someone speaking next to me, as if Hungarian would be so rare. But not here, obviously. Just to me, it is.
I feel like I want to walk around and see the city I grew up in again. To take it in as a whole and see every little part of it at the same time. The hidden café around the corner, the new playground in the park, my old school from a different angle, a new crowd at our local, and the new names of familiar roads. My legs still take me in autopilot mode on the usual routes, I could still name the tram, bus, and metro stops. But I look around, and feel like as if I was in a different world, or even dimension. Like I am from somewhere else.
Maybe I did create a new life, and now that's where my home is, and this is just a place I have some connection with through family and friends. I don't get homesick when I don't visit for a while. But when I do come here, from time to time, it reminds me, how beautiful this city is, and maybe I get to see its beauty even more as someone from the outside, rather than walking on the streets every day, when I used to be just one passenger with earphones in, and with my head in a book on the crowded morning bus.