I now sit in my bed at home, in the humidity of St. Louis with heat indexes reaching up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. And yes- I am back to the world of Fahrenheit, driving on the left side of the road and highly processed American food that stays good four times as long as London groceries.
I sit here feeling like I woke up from some sort of dream. I have a poster of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in my room, and still even right now when I look at it, my head is telling me that there is no possible way that I went to Paris this summer and ventured on top of it to marvel the city.
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| Arc de Triomphe |
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| View from the top of Arc de Triomphe |
I am also haunted by the dead silence the town of Kirkwood is sitting in at the moment. Last night, I fell asleep to the sound of crickets instead of the constant traffic- the honking of taxis, ambulance alarms and drunken yelling until the sun rises again in the morning.
I can't really explain how I feel right now to be back- we were told before even leaving for London this summer that we would most likely have an even worse culture shock to coming back home than we would in London. My stomach was in knots when I landed in Chicago, wondering how I would react: how do I go back to the life I lived before when I just spent a summer in one of the greatest cities in the world? One that never sleeps, runs by tube and double-decker bus and where the workplace breaks for tea every 5 minutes. A place where you can hop on a sketchy flight through Ryanair and get to Barcelona in four hours, or hop on the Eurostar to Paris that takes as much time to make a commute to Columbia. A place where everywhere you look, you see a building that is thousands of years old, has battle scars from WWII and blows any piece of architecture you have ever seen in your life out of the water. How was I going to feel coming back home and leaving all of it?
The first thing I did this morning was wake up and look around my room, trying to think of where I had just been and where I am now. And honestly- I feel nothing. I don't know if it is initial shock. I don't know if it is because I don't want to let myself believe I have just found the city I want to live in the future.
I honestly feel like... almost as if I am heading back there in a week. I'm just home visiting, and heading back in a week or so. I guess as time goes on I will start to realize that it will be a while before I go back to Britain. I just can't believe that right now- I won't believe it until it smacks me in the face that there aren't any more cues, no soft spoken accents that make American accents seem foreign to me. No more global presence- no more Muslim women fully clothed in black with just their eyes showing (which was seen a lot where I lived- I will go in more detail of it later), no more French, Australian, New Zelanders or "Kiwis" as they are called. No more pubs on every corner. No more running through Hyde Park that is somehow so peaceful, even with the buzzing city around it. No more shopping in Oxford Circus- no more clothes that set the trends all around the world. None of this will be a part of my everyday life for years, if not longer. So how do I feel nothing right now when all of it is running through my head as I write?
Whenever I do start to realize all of this- I feel that I can hit two birds with one stone by continuing this blog: 1. To make up for never writing about the rest of my trip before this 2. To give myself an outlet to relive the experience. To maybe, just for a moment when times get hard, to throw myself back into the dream and savor it.
So again, I apologize for a couple of things. I am sorry I am a terrible blogger- that will change after this. And, I apologize to London, since nothing I will ever write in this blog, no matter how hard I try, will do the city justice. I can never begin to describe how it truly feels to be a part of, and for that I am sorry. But I will do my best.
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