count on having clouded vision for at least a little while

Well, I'm not sure if anyone ever looks here anymore, but I thought I should give a quick update, just in case. I thought about posting occasionally over the last month, but it's too hard to juggle a blog and facebook.....at least, when the whole world is on facebook and only two people look at your blog. :)

I've been crazy happy here with Cosima's family in Germany. It's a little weird how removed I feel from my life back in the states. I remember that last couple of months, every day I was just thinking "get me out of here." Not that I was in a hurry to leave my family or my friends or my church.....actually leaving was super hard. But there were a lot of things I wanted so badly to get away from. Now I am "out of here" and I'm still adjusting to life as my own person. I spent 19 years as a child in a household, and (though it's actually been fairly similar here, to some extent) I'm learning how to be an adult, all on my own. It's strange to realize how many choices a person has to make as they grow up. You really get to decide how you want a lot of things to be, possibly for the rest of your life. You might see your own beliefs and opinions from an outsider's perspective and change the way you think about things. And let me tell you, doing all of this in another country is quite the adventure.

So tomorrow I leave Westerstede, this tiny little town in NW Germany. I'm staying with my dad's cousin and her family (she's American actually, and really sweet) in Hamburg until Saturday, when I take an overnight bus to Paris. Then I'm really truly on my own.

One of the most interesting things for me so far has been just this idea of how I relate to my parents, while I'm transitioning from child to adult. I mean, I will always be their child, and already to some extent my parents are my friends. But it's far more exaggerated now....my parents don't (and really can't) tell me what to do anymore. While I'll always respect and love them, the time for such authority is over. They've raised me all the way up to womanhood and in most respects they aren't responsible for me or my actions anymore. So now we redefine our relationship, which - I've been told - will probably take years. I'm looking forward to it, and I'm glad my parents and I have a really good relationship already and always have. But I imagine there will still be many bumps in the road and, well......growing up is just tough.

It's interesting - as I said, I've been very happy here. But in so many ways I'm ready to move on. Even here I am very much part of a family, and I think it's necessary for me to be on my own for awhile. I can't really explain it, but somehow I think I have things to learn between just me and God. I get really distracted within a family. Not that I want to always be away from family - by no means! Just a temporary hiatus while I'm figuring out whatever it is I need to figure out.
And beyond that, the truth is I really enjoy travelling alone. I'm one of those weird people who could spend five times longer at a museum than most "normal" people (cough-homeschooler-cough). Sometimes I just want to walk through the garden or sit and journal. I eat at weird times of the day. I want to listen to every track on the audioguide. I get ridiculously excited about Gothic cathedrals. So when I'm in a group, either everyone else is bored or I'm disappointed. Not that I don't have so many opportunities of enjoying myself.......let's just say that travel is always good, but for me it becomes truly great when I'm going solo.

I've been a month in Germany. Although my main motive in being here at all was simply to spend time with Cosi's family, I've seen some of the country and it's been really lovely. I guess when you come back to your roots, no matter how distant those roots are, it feels a bit like coming home. I got to go to Braunschweig and stand places where my ancestors may have stood. I went to the port that my great-great-great-grandfather and grandmother left from, when they came to America, and today went to an emmigration museum at the last port in Germany they would have stopped at. We found their records and I got to see a picture of the ship they sailed on. In this sense, my stay in Germany has been kind of like finding an alternate home.
And I have to say, I'm very excited to be with my dad's family in Hamburg. His cousin Jen grew up in Kent, somehow married an Iranian and ended up in Hamburg, them and their two little ones. She teaches English and I think he's an elementary school teacher. And I've travelled just enough to know that, no matter how much you love the foreign and exotic, there's nothing like finding an expat and talking about home. And it's like twenty times better when the expat is family.
Especially the Braunschweig family, haha. My dad's family may be crazy, and stubborn, and occasionally rather stupid, but they love each other to death and any family member or friend of the family may as well be a brother or sister, even if you've never met them before. Even though I'm not very close with a lot of my relatives on that side (and many I've never even met, or don't remember.....they just know me as "Mark's daughter"), any time I'm with them it's always like coming home. I guess I just really appreciate a family that doesn't stand on ceremony when it's completely unnecessary, and loves people just because they are people and innately need it - like Jesus did.

Anyway, new subject. I'm going to try and write on here every now and then - maybe just when I leave a country, as I'm about to do with Germany. Write about my thoughts and experiences and what's going on inside me. What I'm learning. What's hard. What I like and what I miss.

Until then - tschüss!