Bit of a Bad Day

So here I sit the in the common room of a hippie-style hostel- sick of living out of backpack, climbing up to the top bunk to feel like I have any sliver of privacy, sniffling because I have a horrible head cold, sucking on a throat losenge because my throat hurts, and not looking forward to work tonight. Also feeling guilty because I have only left the hostel today once to go across the street to buy said losenges and a day/medicine for my cold. It is bitterly cold and I haven't even once thought how cool it is to be in Edinburgh and working and living in a completely different country. While most of the time I can appreciate and expound on that, all I want today is to curl up somewhere where there aren't 40-odd people trapsing in and out of the room or 5 other bunk beds looking at me with their foreign pillows and bedsheets taken up by other people's backpacks.
Not homesick. I'm not homesick. I say this after saying outloud yesterday "I want my mommy," when at work I could feel my sinuses start to clog and my throat start to close up and that sore tired feeling creeping up my already sore feet. But no, today I am just feeling crappy. I am reading a Stephen King novel called "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" about a nine-year old who gets lost while hiking the Appalachian Trail and I feel that I am starting to pull some of her survival instincts (as narrated by Mr. King) into my own experience. I buy as few groceries as possible and try to make them last for as long as they possibly can, I look for something new to do- hoping for some small hope that this city isn't my last, and feel grateful for little things like free hot chocolate and tea in the hostel and a staff dinner at the hotel. My life has been reduced to meager means of survival in some foreign country where everytime I speak I feel as if I stand out like a sore thumb. For example, last night I tried so hard to say "tomahto" rather than "tomayto" to customers at the restaurant that they found it more odd than I did! And yet therein lies the humor and my meager means for survival. If going abroad means finding new things and new strenthgs for yourself, and being sick calls out that survival instinct, then I am indeed surviving and finding new strenghts in myself to do so.

But that's just today, and perhaps by the end of the week I will again be excited to be staying in a place where there is a castle (!) nearby and amazing architecture wherever I go.