holidays

We were called home just in time for Thanksgiving. After we arrived home we found out the Keralan guys had in fact been able to depart. We were just happy to be home for turkey. My friend Holly had a whole lot of us over and a wonderful day of eating happened. Afterwards we headed to another colleague's house for dessert. Although the holiday months had a lot of really fun gatherings and plenty of fellowship, I hit my wall during the season. I had been hoping that I wouldn't go through the standard period of absolute resistance and "honeymoon over" that is common to people living abroad. But it hit me. And it hit me hard. Right during the holidays. I experienced more homesickness than I'd ever had, probably due to now having a niece and a nephew both uunder 5 years old to miss. It's been hard for me to blog mostly because I didn't want to talk about this time. There were lots of party and bollywood dancing was still going on and Natalie was with me but I went through a supreme funk. Everything I had once thought was cute or quaint or cool about India started to infuriate me. I had been warned that this was normal. There are charts showing the cycle of emotions that people go through...I had just thought that since I knew about the cycle I would be able to avoid the down part. Unfortunately I was unable to control the flood of frustration with never being able to get as many menus as there are people or constantly being followed all around any store getting harassed or the interminable cacophony or the inability to think a few steps down the line. As hard as I tried to check myself and remind myself how fortunate I am to have my dream job and to have been posted in such a great country, I kept going to the dark side and feeling down. Because of this, I don't feel like writing about a lot of the holidays. So I'll skip talking about the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas and pick back up with my mom showing up at the end of December.