Back to Society and East Coast Reunion (Dec 2012/Jan 2013

My beautiful mother

*Again, it only took me a year to get these up but the blogs finally made it!*
 Upon returning to O'Hare airport from wherever in the world I'm coming from, I've made it a tradition to grab a Starbucks coffee as it represents everything that is America (i.e. Capitalism and crap). So after grabbing my first non-instant coffee in monntthhhs I was greeted by a gigantic hug from Kev at the airport. We threw my stuff in the back of his car and jetted back towards Naperville with our heads out the window screaming "We're in America!!!!" while drinking

My brother's dog on Christmas after he took down the whole
Christmas tree

my favorite road beer that he had waiting in the car for me. Best. Friend. Ever.
 I took my first hot shower in weeks and ate veggies for the first time in a lonnng time. Towards the end of my stay all the veggies from the garden were dead and gone so we were solely eating fried potatoes and bread in Georgia. The next day we met up with my brother and Annie to go surprise my mom in the hotel her and my sister were staying at before Rheanna's appointment in the city the following day. She was shocked to say the least and we spent the following day walking around the city before heading back to good ol' Rantoul.

Me and the fam!

 I had anticipated that going from no heat, no electricity, no showers, no indoor toilets, no English speaking but also no waste, to the abundance of sh*t that is America would be hard but I really underestimated it. I had become accustomed to my simple life in Georgia where nothing was really that easy; if you were hungry you had to wait the 20 minutes for the water to heat up on top of the fire and if you wanted a hot shower you were totally out of luck. After coming home from teaching at school I would literally play with Nata all afternoon or go help outside with the farm work, never stopping to turn on the TV and no lengthy meaningless conversations given the language barrier. It was so beautiful just to be able to sit and read or have interactions with Gia and Irma in which we would laugh until we cried and didn't even have to say a word. At night Irma, Nino, Gia, and I would watch the Georgian version of Dancing with the Stars if we had electricity and give our own scores and critiques and spend our evenings playing weird Georgian card games that I still don't understand. It was great just to literally spend time together as a family. Working, playing, laughing, and just being together. So needless to say going from that back to the States was simply overstimulating and something that I wasn't prepared to handle.

Our attempt to recreate a lunging photo from our adventure in
Poland next to the largest tree this side of the Mississippi

 Even to this day, a whopping 5 months later, I still prefer to hole myself up in my room or go walk out into the middle of nowhere just so I can sit and think and not have my mind filled with seemingly meaningless interactions. I literally couldn't talk to people for the first couple weeks when I got back and I still find it hard. It's definitely made think in a whole new way about how as people we interact with eachother and how convenience has changed our lives indefinitely. My brothers joke about it, but I'm always halfway serious when I say that I'm going to just go drop off the face of the earth somewhere someday.
  So with the me wanting to silently slit my wrists after watching so much food being thrown out all the time and taking out more trash in one day than my host family would see in 3 months I was ready for a good societal break. One night while Max, Carly, and I were nearly blacked out in the hostel in T'bilisi we made plans and even booked flights for a reunion on the East Coast which

Carly, her friend, and I working on houses for Habitat for Humanity

could not have come soon enough. So with Kev being a champ among champs, I said good-bye yet again to go fly into Atlanta to meet up with Max so we could road trip up to Folley Beach, South Carolina to meet up with Carles.

Carly and Max before our epic volleyball sesh

  It was quite possibly the best trip ever as we could all talk about our transition back into the normal world and how it impacted us and it was great to help Carly get ready (both mentally and physically) to go back to Georgia for the next 5 months. We spent our days walking on the beach, playing sand volleyball and working on a Habitat for Humanity site for a few days with some of Carly's friends. All in all it was great visit and we got to meet Al-delicious, Carly's future 40 year old roommate who was super accommodating and a riot all the while.

Me and Carls

 I'd been on the job hunt before I left Rantoul and knew that eventually I would run out of money (story of my life) and that I'd need to get a job soon. I had been offered to take my job back up at the hospital working full-time graveyard shift again but wasn't really ready to be stuck in Champaign as I was still planning on doing nursing school there in the Fall which would tie me to the area for the next 2 years at least. So while in good ol' South Carolina I got a call from Meg at a ski lodge in Utah giving me the offer to come out for the rest of the season and work which could not have come soon enough. So after roadtripping back down the East Coast with Carly and Max and hopping on the plane back to Chicago I said goodbye and helped Kev leave for New Zealand then jumped a plane to Alta, Utah to go spend my winter at a ski resort. The fact that I had no idea how to ski and absolutely zero gear seemed like a bad idea at the time but life works in funny ways.