How to Get Lost

It’s 4:00am and I’m awake. Since 12:35. I was afraid of this.

It’s getting light in the east, and birds are chirping away. I just chatted on the phone with my dear friend Mandy who typically is awake until 6:30 or so every night, which is 7:30 my time. Handy! And nice and distracting. There’s not much else to do at 4:00am. I’ve already written, already caught up with some work stuff. My eyes hurt too much to read for any length of time. I could start editing the video… oh wait, that’s a brilliant idea!

But maybe I’ll save it for the next night. If this is anything like my trip to Thailand… it might take me awhile to readjust.

Um… someone stop the world, please? I wanna get off.

Wow.

The world is a lot bigger than one would expect. Sure, Disney says it’s a “Small, Small World”, but trying going around it sometime. And I don’t mean by plane — go around it by surface. It takes a lot longer, and you’ll see a lot more.

Biggest surprise in the whole trip? Reverse culture shock. Didn’t see that coming, I tell ya. After seven weeks of blocking out all other languages to concentrate on the rare blips of English (signage and speech), arriving in San Francisco about overloaded me. Ouch.

The Bow River is flooding. The main highway was renamed. And those are the only two things we knew about on the road. Adjusting back is going to take some time…

Looking out your office window and seeing this.

Weird. Perfect kelly-green lawns, near-identical houses, SUVs.

Had some of this feeling in San Francisco yesterday. So much English everywhere it sort of made my head hurt, being able to understand every single conversation going on around me.

and just like that,

we are home.

more to come. much more.

the right words for me are bitter and sweet.