My blog has been feeling rather disjointed recently. I guess this happens when you don't have as much time to write as you'd like because your spending all of it eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, drinking and traveling.  I logged a lot of hours on airplanes, trains and buses this summer.

But I also think that it happens when you're pushed and pulled in unexpected ways between two cultures, two language and a slew of different time zones.

It's made my speech disjointed like when I caught myself talking about "the nature" even though in English it's incorrect to say "the nature." Or when my MoM rolls her eyes when I tell her I have to go and use the toilet rather than the bathroom.

It happens when I find that I want to correct other people's grammar. Frankly though this isn't okay to do to your friends or family. I mean if you want them to remain your friends.

There have also been moments where I am surprised to be able to read menus.  And I catch myself thinking: this is so <em>easy</em>. (But why is everything on the menu so expensive?!)

I am equally thrilled when I order and the waitress shrugs with my order in recognition and I don't have to resort to pointing. Sometimes this makes me want to do a little dance but I don't. I have a little self respect. <!--more-->

Then there was this week at the Chinese restaurant where I was speaking to the Chinese owner and caught myself agreeing with her by saying yes, yes and shaking my head with a Bulgarian yes (or in this case the American no).  I was glad that my English far outweighed the body language. Still I felt a little sheepish.

It's not easy this push and pull between cultures, places, attitudes and roles. This feeling that you might not actually belong anywhere.  That you are still you but the you, you are, isn't the you that you were and now you don't know what to do with yourself. <em>Sorry for using too many yous in that last sentence. </em>

That's the thing, I knew all of this going into my cross cultural experience but I didn't know how these feelings and thoughts about being disjointed were going to appear in my life. Now, I've begun to think that this has been reflected on my blog over the last two months.

In some ways I feel a little bad about that. You come here expecting one thing--an American in Bulgaria and you end up with an American anywhere but Sofia for two months.

Instead you've got a series of posts about travel in the Balkans. Mostly the highlights. Mixed in with this are some rambling posts Walla Walla and Washington DC. So over the last week, I've begun to feel a little bad about this but it helped me realize that this is life. My experience is disjointed and I am not sure that there's a neat way for me to wrap all of these stories, thoughts or posts together.  Rather this is what life is.

Sometimes it's an adventure. Sometimes it's not.  I guess that it's just about voicing what you know, what you've done and how you've attempted to make sense of all of it that really matters. So, this blog is about story telling. Me trying to capture and tell my own story and it's messy. But I guess that this totally to be expected.  This is after all part of the experience and it's not as if you can write this experience into being until you've had it. Until you've had a chance to think about it, process it and write through it.

So if you go back and read July and August as a whole, as I've just done you'll see that I am struggling to make sense of the disjointed nature of my life in as seamless a process as I can.  But really what's the point? Life is messy. I narrative my life and my experiences as best I can but it's not as if I know where anything is headed in the moment I am living it or even in the moment that I am writing it. The narrative, the structure and the so whats, these all come later.

And there you have it, I've just justified everything I've written on the blog in the last two months! I love it. But I can't promise you anything better in the next two months aside from the fact I'll actually be in Bulgaria.