I received a frantic call from Mom this evening because she wanted to find out when we were moving! Sorry to have caused such a commotion!
It's just that the last couple of months - particularly since I got into this homeschooling thing - I've realized how much I feel like my life is on hold here. I enjoy being here, or at least I enjoy the experience of living here. We LOVE serving in our branch. YOu just can't beat the diversity of languages, cultures, nationalities, etc. (You CAN beat the weather; it's rather dreary.) But I often find myself saying, "If I were in the US, I could be _____." On my bad days, the list of things that I put in that blank is rather long! Yesterday was a great day but I came home wondering how I'll ever make friends with people here. It just seems to be a different world here. Most of the time I'm fine because my world is basically my home, homelife, homeschool, and church callings. My efforts to socialize are usually among church members/inactives/investigators. Maybe that's the problem too. Everything is an effort for me here. Not a lot is in my comfort zone (except Primary now). I like that in a way, but sometimes it's tiring. I'm just painting a negative picture because I've been thinking about it a lot lately. So for fun I threw out that question about where we should move to next. I didn't consider how you'd all respond, just thought you'd share your ideas like, "we always thought it would be interesting to live in ______." So if you could move, where would you move to? Yes, dangling preposition and all.
On a patriotic note... There's lots of negative in the US and things that I don't agree with but there is a lot of freedom as well. I appreciate the overall open-mindedness of Americans. (For example I met an American lady in my village in Germany and we ended up walking home together and I invited her in for a minute. We talked maybe half an hour and like she said, we knew more about each other than most Germans do after knowing someone for 5 years!) I have a testimony that the gospel could never have been restored here in Europe. The traditions and cultures get in the way. There's too much history here and people are not very open.
Anyway, I just thought I'd clarify a bit about our next move, in the semi-distant future! Like Patrice reminded me tonight, he has to have a job wherever we go. Darn, that complicates things a bit!
OK, just rambling and procrastinating going to sleep.
Have a great day.
Jocelyn