Break from blogging

When I was back in the States in May, several people made comments about how much they enjoy keeping up with what I’m doing through this blog. Their comments reminded me that I should get back into the habit of writing and posting interesting stories, and I began to wonder what had led me to stop in the first place.

I noticed almost immediately that my blog posts trailed off right around the one-year anniversary of my time in Egypt. In that year, everything was so foreign and interesting – Islamic holidays, strange fruits and vegetables, trucks piled high with fifteen feet of God-knows-what wobbling down the highway, cases of H5N1 influenza, peaceful felucca rides on the Nile, even travels to nearby countries like Israel and Djibouti. Then everything was new. And strange. And fascinating. It was truly, as Paul Coelho writes, “an act of rebirth” in which “you confront completely new situations, the day passes more slowly, and...you don’t even understand the language the people speak.”

However, over the course of the first nine months of my second year in Egypt, situations are no longer “completely new”. Many things that were once strange and unusual have become routine pieces of daily life. Sights that I would have once photographed immediately and situations about which I would have loved to write and analyze are hardly notable. Thus blogging has become less of a priority.

While part of me feels like this familiarity could mean that it’s time to move on to a new country, another part of me recognizes that there is still much to learn and experience here, and perhaps I just need to pay a bit more attention to the environment around me.

As much as I would like to promise that I’ll revert to my former habit of regular blogging, I don’t think I can make that promise, but I do recognize that many of these things that have become routine for me may still be interesting to some of you, so I will try to continue sharing the more interesting aspects of this southern girl’s life in the Middle East.