Thursday, June 16, 2011

Impacts

A fair amount has happened since returning to the US. My brother graduated from high school. I have caught up with many of my friends including many opportunities to experience the 21+ libations Oman failed to include. I haven’t done the whole reverse culture “it’s so much better over there” feeling that my colleagues sometimes express upon returning from Norway, France and Spain. It is not better in Oman, and many times is downright frustrating, but it is different.
That difference, and my knowledge of has probably been the hardest part. The other evening I met up with one of my friends from the trip at a place which boasted a large selection of beer. He is the foremost expert on the Dhofari insurgency, and I think I am pretty well versed in most of the country. This woman still proceeded to judge us and imply we lacked culture because of the particular beer we chose. We both have a massive wealth of information about a subject which I don’t want to say is useless, but rather dormant right now. However I have gotten to use it briefly at lunches and graduation parties when I feel fully confident giving an opinion on the Arab Spring. It is an odd feeling though, going from full immersion in a society to almost entirely turning it off.

Most of my blog posts were still saved in a folder called Egypt blogs (even when I was in Oman.) All things must change, and having been stateside for 3 weeks now (Had I stayed in Egypt, I would have returned this past weekend, and still would probably be jet lagged.) Now I get to start a direction for this blog.

Today is the first day I start work, without a car...
All Drake bloggers are compensated for their time. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of Drake University.