out like Shout

The reason my other blog has gone silent is because the time has come to leave Iceland, and I haven't wanted to write about it there where my colleagues read sometimes. My job's not aware of my plan to leave, and I plan to keep it that way until the details are a bit more sorted out.

So why now? The reality of Iceland is that it's a place where almost nobody stays unless they're married to an Icelander or had kids with an Icelander and are sticking around to raise them. Everyone else leaves eventually. It's just not a friendly place to be if you're not connected to the society through family. Otherwise for all those holidays you're either flying somewhere at often great expense, borrowing your way into Icelandic family, assembling your own festivity from the rapidly dwindling crowd of expats, or spending it alone. Not the plan I've got for my life long-term.

Additionally, my yearning to master this language has disappeared. I don't speak it at home, and I don't speak it at work frequently enough to make a difference. It's not the language of my future and what I know already is workable enough. This definitely indicates to me that Iceland's not where I ever wanted to be long term, especially when factored with my reluctance to ever purchase any expensive appliances until only a few months ago.

Finally, volcanoes mixed with economic uncertainty don't really inspire the desire to stick around. Ever since I've discovered the environmental agency's air quality graph, I've been appalled by the frequency many of their measurements go into the unhealthy ranges. The ash/dust levels alone go into unhealthy territory at least once a month, covering the cars (and our lungs too, no doubt) in foul sticky gray dust. So much for that "pure clean air of Iceland".

So, what's next? The oft-mentioned S, being German, has proposed his native land as our next choice. Sure, it sounds like here I go again with yet another following-a-boy-to-foreign-lands adventure but it's not quite the same this time. The circumstances of the move are quite different. I'm not tagging along on his grand adventure because I have nothing better to do- we're doing this together. We're building this together, and while it's triggered a lot of the feelings I remember from years ago, I hope that with those feelings come some of the things I learned the first time around.

Over the next few months there's a lot to do before the plan can come to fruition, but I'm ready to do it. It's time to find my real home.