It is a sign of an overly circumscribed life to pine for the familiar. And yet. To generally hope to be in a better place doesn't get you much when lost in the woods. Best to set out for the known bivouac, and places where you could work -- hence, I set my face to countries of tall mountains, woodsy violin sections in the orchestras, generally accessible coffee and theatre, and Cyrillic grocery receipts.
The difficulty last time was the books, mostly. But I'm shifting everything to ebooks now, and I'm going to compel myself to like it. Getting sufficient vegetarian protein might have been more of an issue than I thought -- will have to budget a bit extra for eggs and nuts. Smoking is another difficulty. I/m sure half of Sarajevo thinks me a rude and uncultivated person for getting up and moving away whenever someone lights up, or worse, puts a vape to their mouth.
But these are minor difficulties, and I am facing major difficulties here, so...
The trick, of course, even with the degrees and experience, is to find a way of paying for the worldly goods. Which is frustrating, as many of the folks who studied law with me, and who unlike me, went along with everything placed before them, are making millions of dollars per year after this many years out of school. And even those at the immense, corrupt and mediocre state university who went along with things are likely almost reaching the six-figure mark.
Money is the dung of the Devil, as a recent pope observed. Which means, among other things, that it's occasionally very rare and difficult to find.