Going home

It has been a little over a week since I’ve been back to the Bay Area, and I must say I am still taking some time adjusting to being home again. It has been my experience that upon returning home from being abroad for a while, some transitioning is always necessary. Sometimes it really isn’t until you have come back home that you really get to reflect upon how much being in a certain place has affected you... The 10-hour difference alone is enough to throw you off balance for at least about a week; that was the case for me both going there and coming back. On another note, I have had quite a laugh at the amount of times I’ve been tempted to greet and answer people in Arabic (even though that Arabic is still quite limited; it’s no easy language!) and in some ways, the extreme summer heat we are now having is somewhat making me feel as though I never left the desert at all…

Perhaps in order to readjust being home, we tend to look for similarities in our surroundings that will remind us of our recent experience(s)? How do I answer the question of ‘if I’m glad to be home’? Of course I am glad; there is no place like home… but perhaps after being somewhere for an extended amount of time, that ‘new’ place also becomes our home, albeit in a different way.

Maybe that is the aspect I love the most about traveling: when you come back, you are never really the same exact person you were when you’d left.

Even though I am home now, I still have much to share, and I look forward to doing so promptly! It seems that sometimes when you are caught in the midst of so much activity, it leaves little time for writing about it--perhaps because you are too busy experiencing it. Even if you do have some time, you may not be in the mood at that particular moment to write about it... You can't predict how some things will affect you or your goals, so I suppose when the time is right, that is when you get down to it. +