Lately I’ve found myself increasingly homesick, just longing to be back in America. Every frustration I have with my life in Belgium is magnified these days.

I find myself ranting over issues I’d accepted as part and parcel of my expat experience. Road construction always has the potential to create traffic nightmares, but now it's worse than ever. The main road serving my village and many neighborhoods is closed down in both directions. When you get within a mile or two of my house, you’re now forced to take a five-mile detour down narrow streets clogged with parked cars and speed bumps and wacky traffic patterns that see two-way streets brought down to one lane, with cars backed up in each direction waiting for a turn to go through.

Today the kids had a packed schedule, and I had to take this detour THREE times, sometimes spending 30 minutes to go that extra five miles. Because of the detour, I can no longer catch a bus home from the Metro station. The closest drop off to my house is almost two miles from it. This makes heading into the city an even bigger ordeal than it already is.  With the road closed and the school bus having to navigate all this, the kids are getting home from school 30 minutes later in the afternoon now, and we're told to expect this until DECEMBER.

I hate the lack of alternate routes here, how narrow the streets are and how people with perfectly good driveways park in the street and block traffic. I hate that drivers constantly pass in no passing zones and create their own lanes and engage in all sorts of annoying and dangerous road behaviors, even in residential neighborhoods where you wouldn’t expect to encounter aggressive drivers. Don’t get me started on the complicated system that governs right of way. Even after two and a half years, I’m still not used to how people drive. I feel grounded in the worst way. Driving is so frustrating, that I hate every minute I spend in the car and refuse to drive many places.

I miss being able to buy what I need, when I need it, close to home. I’m tired of stores that are closed on Sundays and that open late and lock their doors early, that don’t have parking lots, or are located in places that are so hard to get to.

I’m tired of dealing with two different currencies and multiple bank accounts. E gets paid in dollars and we’re always juggling when and how to convert dollars to euros. The exchange rate has been horrible so we have less buying power than ever, E can only do his currency exchanges on Tuesdays and Thursdays at his workplace and he has to carefully plan when to transfer funds because he’s limited on the frequency and size of his transactions. I can’t easily get cash, and I’m just sick of all the hassles associated with finances here. I want to be able to write checks again!!!

We’re fortunate to be able to use a military mail system that allows us to send and receive mail to and from America and pay normal U.S. postage rates, not international or air rates. This is an enormous advantage because I can subscribe to U.S. magazines and order goods from many American companies and not pay exorbitant shipping costs. The down side of this privilege is that all of our mail arrives at a special post office located in the compound where E works. He can pick up the mail. I can’t. When he travels a lot, as he is doing now, our mail languishes at the post office for a week or two, which is hard to take when you’re waiting for a package or a magazine to arrive.

I miss being able to go out for an American breakfast on the weekends.

I miss grabbing a bagel and a large decaf vanilla hazelnut coffee at Einstein’s.

I miss being able to attend concerts, plays, movies, lectures, and classes.

I miss hearing English everywhere.

I miss going to video stores and renting movies.

I miss Halloween.

I miss my girlfriends.

And my family.

And being in the same time zone as most of the people I love.

Tonight I’ve had enough of expat life, and I just want to go home.