Sunday, August 10, 2008

Home

I've been home for over a week now, and am slowly getting back in the swing of things.

My plane arrive on Thurs (7/31) evening, and the next day I was shopping for WS's dorm room. I highly recommend being jet-lagged for such an occasion, as you are too tried and disoriented (even with a triple-shot from Starbucks) to really get into the emotional aspect of what you are doing. Instead to thinking, "Oh my God, my baby is going off to college," I was thinking, "Please God, get me through this so I can go home and take a really long nap."

A couple of culture shock points:

-Driving. It's been two months, and Egypt was a pretty scary place to be in a car, or on the road. (I neglected to mention in my blog, that we did witness someone getting hit by a car while attempting to cross the road in Alexandria. Not a happy moment.) I feel my driving skills are just fine - but I have noticed that I do speed a little more than I normally would. The Egyptian mentality of "If the road is clear - GO" may have rubbed off on me; but I don't believe a police officer would let me off the hook for that.

-Suburbia. Except for Cinque Terre and Lake Maggiore, I've really been in urban spaces. I currently live in a beautiful example of suburbia; and for some reason it does feel a little odd. It is so clean here, I feel like I could lick my sidewalk. My house seems stinkin' HUGE, the yard even huge-er. I'm starting to resent the fact that I have to driver nearly everywhere. (I will be taking the bus into work three-days a week this Fall, maybe that will help.) Now don't get me wrong, I love my neighbors and I don't see us putting up our house for sale any time soon. It just seems to be so big... so American, to live this way.

-Walking. I've been trying to keep up my walking from Europe/Egypt; and it will require determination. It's not like I lost a lot of weight (my stomach would not let me eat a salad in Egypt), but I do feel better (and sleep better) when I walk more. In an attempt to keep up with the walking (and raise money for a worthy cause), I've signed up for the AIDS Walk on September 6th. I know it's only a 5K (3.1 miles) but it's a start.

-Food. Not only are our supermarkets huge, they are filled with crap. How many twinkie/ho-ho variations do we as a culture need? Or types of cereal? Or cans of soup? When we were in Cairo, our hotel was right across from a "Metro" which was "Egypt's largest supermarket chain." It was maybe a quarter of the size of my local market. Granted in America there is a larger market for "ethnic foods" than there was in Egypt; but why do we need so much?

-Normalcy. This may sound very odd, but there are moments when I'm sitting on my sofa, or laying in my own bed, that I wondered if the last two months really happened. Was I really out of the country? Did I really see all of those things? Almost like the trip was an outer body experience and I've been thrown back into reality.

Now I don't want to say this will be my last blog post, and I did want to set up this blog as "Thoughts on Travel and Life" not just one particular trip. With that said, a slight hiatus is in order. My teaching srarts tomorrow (our school is starting early, but closing down during the Democratic National Convention) and WS will be leaving soon. Life and its demands will be knocking.

In any case, thank you for reading. I hope it didn't bore you, or that my typos drove you nuts.

Ciao!

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