I am finally elsewhere.  I am also quite happy with the vast majority of the decisions I have had to make to get here.  Just about everything jives and vibes as it should.  I should stop here – clearly, I am not going to talk about any of these things; they are provided as a sort of a meta-backdrop for this thought.

Being about two and a half months completely away from most of the things I have come to consider as familiar, I have experienced this conscious notion that I should start missing people, places, things.  Most of the time, however, I feel caught up in the here and now.  It is different than the stress experienced back home; the all too well known information overload syndrom is absent.  Although in some ways it does feel just as tiring – the necessity to speak another language all day long while still experiencing the novelties of everyday life here, only to come back at the end of the day to e-mails, homework to be checked, self-designed lessons to be learned, dinner cooked, agenda updated, lessons planned, researched and created…  One easily forgets about the rest of one’s life.