Early Departure

I find that when I travel, I usually mentally go to the place before I'm ever there. Right now, I'd say I'm about half in Senegal and half here. Meaning, almost half of the time I am thinking about, planning for, worrying or wondering about Senegal. In the other half of my life, I still have to work, do laundry, and be sad to say goodbye to people for a while.

I'm very bad at planning this time into my brain. (It's also inconvenient that it's around Christmas, which feels a lot different than summer when everyone else is leaving too.) I expect to be fully here until I step on the plan January 8 and fully in Senegal January 9. But that is definitely not the case. Really, I have become homesick before ever leaving. This happened when I went to Kenya as well. All of the sudden I'm asking, "Why am I doing this again? Why was this a good idea?"

I'm trying to remember all of the good reasons that I chose to go to Senegal while giving full emotional quality to the bad reasons. I don't want to pretend like I'm not saying goodbye to the friends that I'm leaving. On the other hand, this feeling will definitely remain while I'm in Senegal because my brain and my language is American. So I'll be there but culturally and linguistically isolated. I'm not sure when I'll feel like I've actually touched down in Dakar. I'll let you know.

I guess this is another reason to Skype!

Passport update: Still not back. Still.
Flight update: Booked but not officially booked. Not sure if I should have trusted my cheap option.