I can vividly recall sitting in the Istanbul airport over a year ago, waiting to fly to Iraq for the first time, and hearing this song play in the lobby:

God forbid you ever had to walk a mile in her shoes
Then you really might know what it’s like,
Then you really might know what it’s like to have to choose

I scribbled the lyrics furiously in my journal and commented on the irony of the intersection of foreign and familiar.

Two summers abroad later, it’s a memory I laugh at. This intersection of mundanely familiar relics of America and the West with the utter alienness of a foreign country has emerged as a salient feature of being abroad.

* * * * *

It’s uneasy to admit, as an easily-amazed idealist, that I may have become a bit jaded. Yet despite the ubiquitousness of the AK-47, the sweltering heat, and the attitudes about women that will never feel natural to me, I’ve been feeling strangely at home here. I know my way around this city. The shocking heat doesn’t surprise me. I’m about as comfortable shaking hands with a prominent politician as I am sitting cross legged on a bare cement floor and eating l with my hands. I may never decode the rules of proper greetings– a nod or handshake? one, two, three, or four kisses on the cheek?– but I’ve even come to terms with this perpetual blunder.

When I was in Kurdistan last summer, I think I mentally added “…in Iraq” to every activity I did, adding novelty in the same way teenagers tack on “…in bed” to fortune cookie predictions. Watching TV in Iraq. Taking roadtrips in Iraq. Celebrating birthdays in Iraq. Eating dinner in Iraq.

This mental game has worn out (as has my inclination to call this place Iraq and not Kurdistan, the preferred and more correct term). It all seems kind of ordinary.

Perhaps I’ve just never been abroad for so long. I imagine this is something routinely experienced on study abroad trips that last four months, six months or longer. Perhaps its a symptom of returning to a place a second time. No one here believed me, I’ve been informed, that I’d be back. Perhaps it’s that I’m planning to return a third time, for an entire year, after I graduate this spring (which now, as a returner, is a plan taken seriously).

I’m a little less naive this time around and with that things have changed. I asked a lot of questions last summer and needed a new set this time around. Underneath the surface of this place are answers that aren’t always pleasant to swallow. This summer I feel much less like an outsider visiting and more like an insider who is — either blessed or cursed– to be here for the long haul. As a result I’ve been putting off commenting on the things I’ve been thinking about most. Women’s rights and gender relations. Wasta, an Arabic term that translates to “clout” or “who you know” and is a concept that runs this place. Freedom of speech. Health as a human right at the distortion of that idea in this place. It’s not that I can’t or won’t comment on these– I plan to– but the more mired I am in Kurdistan, the more difficult and increasingly personal it is to say anything at all.

I guess I have a bad case of “the more I learn, the less I know” (and sometimes the less I like it). It’s frustrating, disappointing, and it means sometimes I just want to go to the American gym, eat Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese for lunch, and stop asking all these damn questions. In the end, it’s a good thing: I don’t know what I’m doing here if it’s not to get a better grasp on the reality of this slippery world we live in.