nearly finished packing up my belongings — home in a little less than two days. seeing my room so bare made me wonder about all the times i’ve packed up and left in the past year. is this normal? going home scares me in that i always fear that i’ll get stuck there; true i’m probably still not a huge fan of morocco but it’s a very real fear of mine.

yesterday i went to the old souq in rabat to buy some things, and i suddenly felt all of the things that i first felt in cairo. for awhile i really thought that perhaps i had grown bored of the middle east or maybe just of traveling in general, but one year later i realized that i still love it all: the people, colors, cacophony of sounds, sights and smells. i like all of the inside jokes that i have with the teenager who works at the tiny grocery store beneath my flat, the fact that i can count five people named mohamed at just my school, the pointless chats with taxi drivers in my ridiculously formal classical arabic, so on and so forth. despite all of the feelings of being an alien sometimes, i can’t imagine not living the expatriate life in my near future.

it’s dumb that spent so much time counting down the days, but i’m glad i’m leaving on a positive (albeit a bit sad) note. don’t know when but i’ll be back — maybe not morocco but definitely somewhere in the arab world.

12:01 pm  •  3 December 2011