home is where the heart is

I’ve never felt that I have been able to settle down while in Egypt and really make the place I am staying feel like home (perhaps it is not meant to be done). I feel like I have lived these past five months in a state of transition (i.e. living out of suitcase). Certainly living in a hotel for four of those months didn’t help, but I had hoped moving to an apartment would’ve helped. It didn’t really, most likely because I am only staying here for two months. This is just another transition for me until I get back home.

I wish I had been able to get past that feeling, but I don’t think I will especially as my time left in Cairo dwindles. I don’t get that feeling though when I am in my dorm at UMBC. I don’t think I suffer from this despite it being a similar time, four months, because I am close to home. I usually feel this way during the month transition between fall and spring semesters but not during the summer. Perhaps I don’t feel this way at school because it is really an eight month stay with only that break for the minimester session in January.

Another factor that I know has affected me and which is equally obvious is that this is a study abroad. I came with one suitcase leaving behind all that was familiar and worked to carve out a space in a faceless patterned hotel room. That impersonality coupled with my inability and lack of desire to decorate my room kept it impersonal and transitional. It is the little things I left behind that I wanted which surprised me the most like tape or scissors or posters. I won’t buy them here because I won’t use them enough to warrant the expense, but I know they exist at home, bought and resting in drawers for long periods of time (but you don’t have to lug them around when you travel if you had brought them abroad). But this is also an idiosyncrasy of my character that forces me to do this and not a comment on the whole study abroad experience.

I guess home is what you make it and how you live in it. For me these past six months have been transitional in all mental and physical aspects. This jaunt was not permanent, I knew that, which created sets of decisions to be made that would affect how I would see my life here. I don’t prefer transition. I like having the same place to come home to over and over again and I’ll be there soon enough.

Perhaps the best adage is home is where the heart is, and I know where that will put me: Catonsville.