It is a Wednesday afternoon and this is my view right now.  I am sitting at the bar downstairs from our flat and sipping a cappuccino while I have my laptop out.  We live on Innstrasse.  I still can’t pronounce without sounding very very American.  I have been here since May 23rd, so a little over three months if you don’t count leaving for travels to Belgrade and Prague, Bodensee and Sicily, Helsinki and Tallinn, Copenhagen, and an overnight in Budapest. I have been putting off writing this post all day.  I am not sure why.  Is it because I don’t quite know what to say? What I should be writing about even though everyone tells me I should be blogging about my day to day life here?  Is it because I am not quite sure what my next steps will be besides tomorrow and the next day?  Is it because I just got lost in the minutiae of the day?

When you aren’t working in the same way, the day seems different. All of a sudden, meetings become more of an event in some ways.  In a different life than what was my life just four months ago, the days seem wide open but planning those days is a different kind of busy.

So here we are, in the beginning again. As you can see, it has been a while since I have blogged and now I yearn to write even when I don’t want to and my writing sucks and I have no time for it.  I want to write about peregrination at times, or the search for places of new life.  I want to write about encounters with people who are so different from me. I want to write about when I volunteer with refugees and when I go to language school starting tomorrow.  I want to write about how it feels to not understand things in a setting. I want to write about the stuff that happens, the American stuff I miss and don’t miss. I will write about theology in the midst of that and funny things that seem to happen. I will write about the travels we go on and the things we learn. I want to remember the things I have already discovered as I transition to here…

the appointment to get my Visa.

the days when homesickness hits me real hard like a wave.

the pastry and cake I can’t get enough of.

the time I preached in a church a ways away and it was only six African students and me.

the ways that I have had to explore on my own and other ways that I have been accompanied.

the time in Sicily when we couldn’t figure out how to catch a bus or the time at the Lake we paddled out into it or the time in Tallinn we sat in a Depeche Mode bar for hours with other fans or the time when..

I want to write about what brought me here, what keeps me here for now, and how the Camino continues on this journey.

You get the point.  And we have to start somewhere. So today we begin the blog again.  I hope you will join me.