Archives
Note #142: Back from Texas (2022.7.18)
Traveling overseas has always felt a little like dreaming to me, in that you find yourself in a completely new environment and your “real” life feels remote and suspended. Then, upon your return home, you wake up again and try to pick up where you left off. I say this, of course, because we just got home last night from a nearly month-long trip to visit family in Texas. It was a long flight, although not quite as long as it was when we used to fly to New York. Still, it was long, and it didn’t help that the flight was delayed by about forty-five minutes. We made up that time along the way, and we were out of the airport twenty minutes after we got off the plane. This was a new record for me, and I’ve been in a lot of airports. We got home shortly before seven, went out for dinner, and then spent the rest of the evening unpacking everything we lugged back from the States.
Today was a slow day, but I did head out to meet a professor from Italy who was visiting Korea—we met today because she is leaving tomorrow morning, and today was the only day that our schedules overlapped. Other than that, HJ and I finished unpacking and setting everything in order, and tomorrow I will be heading back out to the office and attempting to return to my normal life.
There are a lot of things I want to write about, but I’m going to save those things for the coming days and weeks. Today I’m going to keep things short and simply mark our return. As a taste of things to come, though, here are three posts I have in mind: 1) a comparison of a few aspects of life in Texas and Korea, 2) a contemplation of city versus country living, and 3) a write-up of a week-long road trip to western Texas we took with my parents. There’s probably more that I could write, but I think those topics will be most interesting. The first two topics shouldn’t take that long, but the third topic will require going through all the photos I took and choosing the highlights, which is why I am leaving that for last.
Anyway, it’s good to be back, even if I am still a little tired. Jet lag is usually not nearly as bad coming back from the US, so I’m hoping that I will be able to get things back on track tomorrow. See you next time.