Cycles of life

No, I'm not a hermit, but I have been rather contemplative recently. I look at my blog and realise that I haven't posted since September 17th. I'm a bit disappointed about that. There is still much in daily life that fascinates me and also that annoys me at times. These kinds of things have been the fodder of my blog in the past. I guess I have been internalising a lot of my thoughts.
It actually started when we went on our failed holiday. It was during that time that it hit us again; it's not easy living in Russia at times. Over all our Summer was good. We felt settled in to our apartment fairly early on. We know the local area. But let's face it, the majority of our social network from our life here a couple years disappeared. Settling in to a place is not only physical but emotional.
Our team mates went away to America at the start of July. We had spent six weeks in country with them before they traveled. The last three months we have been without team mates. There is one other family in the city that speaks English. There are a couple of single people also. Our security is not in having friendships with native English speakers though. We have been working hard at developing relationships with our Russian speaking contacts. But English language relationships really do help the balance of sanity.
It was probably at the end of August, when our weekly schedule had disintegrated, and I was feeling a distinct lack of meaningful relationships that things started to break down. I had hit the wall. The first four months back in Russia were great. Then ouch. It wasn't so great after all. Without realising it or expecting it, circumstances had crept up on me. We were isolated socially. This is a form of culture shock. "Culture shock?  Surely not, I've lived here enough in the past. I know the culture, language and city fairly well." But, if I am honest with myself, I also suffered a bout of reverse culture shock when we went back to Australia. Will this be a regular fixture in my life? Probably, so long as we continue to move countries. But it doesn't last for always.