40 Days

Today its exactly forty days until I come home. I am enjoying my time here, I am, but I am ready to be back in Iowa, back at Wartburg. I have made some wonderful friends, I have an amazing host family that I hope I will stay in touch with, but I don't feel the same pull here that I do at home. This, for me, is not home. I had a really interesting conversation with Caitlin and Christine last night while we got gelato. They're both kind of feeling the same way. You always hear about the people who go abroad and whose lives are changed by the things they experience while they're gone. As of right now, I don't really feel like I've changed that much. Not that I've stayed stagnant, I feel more independant and more confident, but I just don't click here the way I hoped I would. I feel like there are so many things waiting for me at home that I've just put on hold for the semester to do....well I'm not sure what. I had goals that I laid out at the beginning of the semester, and I've achieved almost all of them already, but I still don't feel like I've gotten that magic sparkly feeling you hear about. Maybe it doesn't happen to everyone, I don't know. I just know that I want to go back where I can work with French Club and Alliance and Wartburg Democrats. I want to be back in band, and I want to give Deena hugs when I visit her in the Den and I want to use the "W". I want to impress Dr. Hagan with the fact that I can actually carry on conversations in French, comfortably. And most of all I want to get away from these feeling of being suspended in time while everything else passes me by. I have never been somewhere and had it not feel like home, and here just feels like an interesting place to be. Every time I step onto Wartburg's campus...the first time I was there or every time since, I've known that it was the place for me. Ankeny is where I was raised, it is where my family is, it is where my roots are. But here....here it's just kind of a holding tank, while I'm waiting to go back. It's a beautiful holding tank, but I just don't feel like this is where I am supposed to be, and it makes me wonder what I've missed, and where I WAS supposed to be at.