Nine Months Home

I'm sitting in front of the t.v., once again obsessed with Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations. It was a little over three years ago that I first got hooked on the show, sitting on the floor of our house packing books and dishes (which have yet to be unpacked) ready for adventure. We were preparing to leave for Azerbaijan and the show encompasses all of our excited expectations. I have a feeling this sort of thing is cyclical-or will be for Mathias and I.
Step 1-Wanderlust. The undeniable pull in the belly to foreign lands and different people. Enter obsessive Bourdain watching and jealousy, and reminiscing about past trips.
Step 2-Arrival. For a week or two everything is magical and perfect, simply because you wish it to be so. Bourdain's visit to Kurdistan is an excellent example. The food is amazing, severed cow heads charming and everything pin-prickingly special.
Step3-Disillusionment. Exhausted from spending so much energy deliberately ignoring those things which don't match your expectations of the place, your manic swings to depressive. Everything is horrible. This is the most boring/frustrating/backward (insert your own adjective here) country in the world. You spend a lot of time being angry with taxi drivers.
Step 4-Acceptance. Or whatever mix you can find. There are things you'll always hate, but you're ready to appreciate your favorite foods again and some of the local oddities. You make friends and appreciate them. Perhaps you are so bored that you spend all of your time making home videos of your cat.
Step 5-The joy of returning home. Eat all the donuts you can. Endure mild own-culture shock in the supermarket.
Step 6-Amnesia. Like a woman who's forgotten her 13 hour labor while holding her newborn, you cannot for the life of you remember what was so bad (something about taxi drivers?) Nostalgia sets in. It was such a great experience, why didn't I appreciate it more? You make your very first attempt at cooking indigenous recipes. You must find these recipes on the Internet because while you were in country you couldn't have been less interested in a cooking lesson from a local. You go back over all the photos and videos you took and wonder why there are so many of your cat. You realize that maybe you don't want to go back there, specifically, but you want to go again. Somewhere else. Next time you'll do better.
You watch No Reservations. The cycle begins again.