I am currently trying to maintain the conviction that any person who transplants themself as totally as I have feels the urge to pack it in and return to something more familiar, and has a greater than normal ability to find fault with the new surroundings. For this reason, I refuse to allow myself to be swayed in my resolve on solely on the basis of lifestyle things - dealing with bureaucracy, living arrangements, and so on. However, I think I may need to reserve the right to assess very critically factors like the academic merits of being here, that is, whether I am at a disadvantage by being here relative to being back home, in terms of access to people and resources that help me write a better thesis. I should stress, in the event that some context-aware person reads this, that such a disadvantage is not a reflection on the quality of the surroundings, so much as a mismatch between the surroundings and the surrounded. I am beginning to wonder.