This year for my summer vacation I went on a surprise trip to the USA. Surprise to most people, including my dad who wasn’t aware I’d be coming home. (Luckily this didn’t cause a heart attack) My sisters did a lot of the planning including a mini vacation in Lexington Kentucky which will be the next couple of weeks of blog posts.
Returning home was weird. For a multiple of reasons and being constantly moving trying to fit as much into a two week vacation sandwiched between work was exasperated by utter exhaustion. In two weeks I hit up 5 states, flew 6 times, lost my phone (my first smart phone that survived through every other trip), saw 2 musicals (Aladdin and Hamilton), and ate a ridiculous amount of avocado.
As you can already tell there aren’t any photos. The only photos I managed to take were during my 5 or so days in Kentucky where my dad let me adopt his phone for the trip. My journey through Texas, Tampa, Indiana and return to Chicago are without photos, and were mostly rushed socialization to see as many people as possible and to run as many errands as I could. Which has left me at O’hare feeling like a very sickly zombie and not looking forward to arriving without a buffer of time to recover since I’ll be arriving home Sunday night and the new semester starts Monday morning. I’ve been going non-stop since camp ended two weeks ago and I bolted out of my classroom after lunch to catch a flight that night. Never again.
I think living abroad and having such a short period of time to see people has left me a bit bolder than the skittish person I left as. I talked with people, asked strangers for directions since I had to go old school to get around in Chicago, and asked the questions that I had when they occurred to me rather than just quietly keeping to myself. I still hate making phone calls and I still plan to be a homebody for a couple weekends to recover after fixing the damage of loosing my phone has caused.
I’ve also found that I can’t eat as much. Which I had expected and richer foods were too much. I also learned that my acute awareness to English means that if I’m sitting next to a group of people speaking while I’m trying to read that I might as well just close my book because otherwise I get to the bottom of the page and have retained nothing of which I’d read but instead know everything about the local school programs, or whatever my neighbors were talking about.
My trip to the US was fun, a bit Twilight Zone-esq, and utterly too short. Hopefully by Wednesday I’ll have recovered from this enough to start the sharing my journey through horse and bourbon country. I’m hoping I sleep a bit on the flight to help.