Bitten by Wanderlust

I am back on Georgian soil. It is kind of hard to believe, to be back a little over a year after I left, to hear the familiar - albeit chaotic - din of traffic and loud voices filling the air. I have neither had the time nor energy to do much more than go to the market and pick up some groceries. Even that was too taxing and I collapsed on my bed after I returned. I have been up for around thirty hours, if not more, and it will be more by the time I can actually close my eyes tonight. But the sights and sounds and smells, it's all so familiar. Did I ever leave? Was I really gone for a year? Sometimes things like time are incomprehensible. There is no use to reason with it - time, that is. I know that in no time I will be back in America. But not yet.

To have wanderlust is to have the desire not just to see the world, but to experience it, to be able to call a place home even if you have only been there for a day. Fernweh is to be homesick for a place you have never been. These two elements - wanderlust and fernweh - they go hand in hand. This is my third time to Georgia, but I remember the first time I ever saw a picture of the Caucasus Mountains. I felt an ache and a desire to visit these mountains. Nowhere had I felt such a strong force before, not for a place I have never been, much less at the time knew anything about. But I just knew. I knew I had to go, somehow, someway and now this is my third time. There will undoubtedly be a fourth and a fifth...

Tbilisi at dawn