Back home...strange.
Well, after all the waiting, counting down the days, I'm actually home. 30 hours of travel later, I was in pretty severe culture shock coming back to the States. After 5 months out of the country, I feel like I'm seeing everything here as a visitor would. This is a good thing, though. My time abroad has given me an entirely different perspective on the country I call home, a greater sense of objectivity. I see America's many admirable aspects in much clearer relief now, but I also understand its faults more acutely. This puts me in a difficult position; I'm happy to be home, to see my family and friends, but I feel like I'm in a kind of limbo. I don't know where I belong.
I know this is normal for people who've gone through such intense experiences--reentry is always difficult. It's going to take a while to sort things out. For this reason, I'm going to keep this blog up, for now. Hopefully it will be a place where I can write down memories as I'm looking through pictures or more thoughts about how the trip affected me. I might not update it much, but feel free to keep checking back occasionally. I'll also keep the link to my pictures up, and I'm working on getting all of them online!
5 days and counting
Well, as usual I've not been updating nearly as much as I wanted to, and somehow I've suddenly only got 5 more days until I go home and the door to the last five months of my life closes on an unimaginably influetial experience. Some part of me doesn't quite believe I'm actually going home, because I've gotten used to this life of hopping between countries and changing scenery every 5 weeks. But in all honesty, I'm feeling a little worn out; I don't know if I could handle any more stops. So it's good to be going home. I have to keep saying that to myself so that the reality of it will start to sink in.
Life moves on and things come to an end while new things begin; new experiences overlap with memories in the ebb and flow of life. I know that the experience of traveling these last 5 months will be part of my daily life when I go home and continue to remember everything we've done and seen and process the overwhelming amounts of mental and experiential information I've been exposed to and have tried to absorb.
How do you sum up 5 months of your life? How do you explain what life has been like--the magnitude of what I've seen and done-- even to friends and family who I've been in contact with regularly, much less those who I haven't been able to talk to? The thought of attempting to do this scares me, in a way, because it's not really possible. Photos and words help, but only to approximate. But at the same time, I'm excited to come home and share (with anyone willing to listen!) some part of what I've taken and learned from my 5 months abroad. Reminiscing and discussing with friends here this past week has reminded me just how much I've learned and absorbed.
Since my last update, we've been busy around here. We've had two mini-excursions --no sweat compared to our week-long epic voyages through Morocco, Turkey and Egypt! The first was an overnight in Nafplio, a wonderful seaside town on the gulf of Corinth, where we stayed in a modern
pansion in a neat 17th century house on the side of a hill with a view of a 17th century Venetian fortress rising above the town. On the way there we visited ancient Corinth, a powerful trading town in classical times and famous for its Jewish community which hosted St. Paul for 9 months in Roman times. We also saw the Asklepeion (pilgrimage site of the Greek god of healing Asklepios) and the largely intact 14,000 seat theatre at Epidauros, and visited the site of ancient Mycenae, where archeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered the famous Mask of Agamemnon and proved once and for all that Homer's Iliad was based in historical fact.
Yesterday we took a day trip up to Delphi, the site of the renowned oracle of Apollo where (according to Sophocles) Oedipus received his fateful prophecy which began the spiral of that famous tragedy. We drove through the Swiss Alps-esque ski-resort town of Arahova, and even caught some flurries ourselves as we shivered in the 5 degree celsius weather. On our way back to Athens we visited the monastery of Housias Loukas, where it began to snow heavily and added an atmospheric sense of mystery as we looked at the beautifully preserved mosaics in the church and the frescoes in the crypt.
We have class every day this week and are also busy going to museums with our professor, so time is filling up. We even have 3 papers to write this week, which should be interesting after not having done anything beyond essay tests and informal writing for the last five months. I guess it's a good way to ease back into the overwhelming insanity that will be classes at St. Olaf when I get back: 2 history courses, one theology with writing credit, and a philosophy/ethics course. I may be living in the library second semester, so please come visit me sometime on the north corner of the fifth floor ;-)
This may be my last update until I get home, so I want to say thanks to everyone who put up with my inconsistency and semi-incoherence these past 5 months. I hope some of what I've written about was interesting and can be a starting point for discussions in the future. See you stateside soon!
