Baseball and Childhood Obesity and Apple Pie, Oh My!

In case the title didn't give it away: I am back in the United States, suckas! Have been for four weeks, but nothing says "I'm back in America" like laziness and procrastination, am I right?

I've gotta say, as awesome as traveling around Europe was, being back to my boring floss-every-night-and-in-bed-by-eleven routine is pretty great, too. It sounds really cheesy, but there are lots of things about home that I have a new appreciation for. I still haven't gotten over how luxurious regular bath towels feel after five weeks of using my wimpy microfiber travel towel. Every time I dry off I feel like I'm being hugged by angels or something.

The downside to my homecoming was that I instantly got sick. Predictable, perhaps, but I've had nary a sniffle for the past year and a half and I was really hoping that I had somehow become immune to everything. (Yes, everything.) I've got the remnants of a hacking cough that tells me I was sadly mistaken.

I've also acquired a brief soundbite that I use whenever someone asks about how my trip was: "It was awesome, but I'm so glad to be back. It's nice to take long showers and sleep in my own bed." BAM. Five weeks of traipsing across an entire continent, encountering everything from hailstorms to the inefficient French train system to neo-Nazis, reduced down to a cliché about how there's no place like home. I feel like my English degree is going to waste. (Although, to be fair, I imagine most English majors feel that way.)

The truth is that it's really hard to encapsulate five weeks' worth of activities in some polite conversational small talk. Hell, I can't even summarize a forty-minute TV episode in fewer than five minutes, with extra time taken to analyze every character's motivations. ("And then he said nothing was wrong, but they did a close-up on his face and you could just tell something was wrong, you know what I mean? But everyone just accepted it and you could see in the background of the shot that he was all upset that no one pressed the issue. And then they cut to a commercial and I was like, 'Noooooo! Can't you people see he's dying inside?!'")

Luckily (for me, maybe not so luckily for you), I have a blog, which allows me to ramble on for however long I want. So I can say here that I have a lot of mixed feelings about my trip. It was awesome, don't get me wrong, and I am glad to be back. But it wasn't all rainbows and ponies and non-stop adventurous fun like I had hoped/sort of expected it to be. Some parts of it really, really sucked. By about week four I was wishing I could just hop a bus to Heathrow and fly straight back to Boston. And yet, I was still sad to leave.

Saying that I liked my trip seems too simple. It's more apt to say that I respected it.

I realize this doesn't really make sense, because I'm talking about my trip, an abstract concept essentially created by me, as if it's a separate, animate entity that holds some power over my life. But that's how it feels.

Lots of things about this trip did not go as planned. (See Paris, re: everything.) Destinations didn't live up to my expectations, either because I was too tired to really appreciate them or had built them up in my head too much or because by week five I had just seen too many damn cathedrals. (Europe is lousy with cathedrals, guys. You might think, "But cathedrals are beautiful! I'll never get tired of them!" Oh, yes. Yes, you will.) I'm sort of ashamed to admit it, but when I think back on my favorite trip memories one of the first ones that springs to mind is watching an entire episode of Sherlock on BBC One. Just sitting there with like four other random strangers at the hostel, none of us talking, all of us transfixed by the television. Ninety minutes of mindless entertainment. Excellent.

And really, that was it: the mindlessness of it. I've just spent a whole stiflingly hot New England afternoon flopping around my house like a wet dish towel, and it's been kind of boring. But this just didn't happen while I was traveling. There is something to be said for being lazy and bored every so often. If you don't ever take time out to be bored you start getting bored by non-boring things, like jaw-dropping eight-hundred-year-old cathedrals, and that's just a shame. I never want to be the person who looks at, say, a magnificent piece of art or priceless historical artifact and goes, "YAWN, another one?" I want to be thrilled, excited, amazed by all the wonderful stuff in the world. I don't want to force myself to take an interest when I'd really rather be napping. And in order for all the amazement and whatnot to happen, you need to take time out to process everything, sometimes by watching slickly-produced British crime procedurals.

So, lesson one from my trip: take time to be bored. Not too much time, but a little time. It may seem like a waste of time and money to fly to Europe and then spend an afternoon doing the same stupid stuff you could do for free in America (I'm looking at you, Buzzfeed), but honestly, it probably would have made my trip a little less one-note in some ways. (If I ever do a trip like this again, however, I fully expect to ignore this insight and keep scheduling things wall-to-wall, dawn-until-dusk. There's just so much stuff to see and so little time to see it all!)

Lesson two has been less of a "lesson," per se, and more of a slow-burning observation, and that is: Whatever. I don't really care.

This sounds really negative and spoiled-teenager-y, but I assure you I mean it in the most positive way possible. Since I've returned home I've found it a lot easier to get over minor embarrassments and setbacks. I'm not saying I am impervious to social awkwardness. (Nay, I unfortunately continue to thrive upon it. For a prime example, see my use of "nay" just now.) I'm just saying that my recovery time seems to be much quicker and far more painless than previously. Because really, once you're forced to solve all your problems on your own in a foreign country, stumbling over your words no longer provokes agonizing mortification.

In a similar vein, people don't really scare me anymore. (I mean average joe people--your garden variety bullies, rudesters, unpleasants. For the record, I am still terrified of serial killers, rapists, and horror movie antagonists--or I would be, should any of them ever cross my path.) Since I was traveling by myself, I settled into a pattern of not really caring about others. I mean, I was polite and considerate of people and all that jazz. I just did nothing to accommodate them when doing so ran contrary to my own desires or momentary whims. From day one, I stopped wearing make-up. (I only used it a couple times over the course of my trip when I felt like gettin' fancy.) My hair was basically a windblown rats' nest for a month. By week two, I was wearing the same outfits over and over until they started to smell. By three-and-a-half weeks in, I was wearing clothes even after they started to smell. Who was going to judge me? Other travelers? Big deal, when would I ever see them again? As long as I kept my personal hygiene at a level that was acceptable for sharing a room with other human beings (and I did at least manage that), what did it really matter what other people thought of my laundry habits (or lack thereof)?

Furthermore, I learned really quickly that no one else was going to take care of my whiny life issues, so I became my own problem-solver. There was no passing the buck, no "I'll just take care of that later," nothing. So I became great at fake confidence. And then real confidence. And bizarrely enough, it started to spill over into my interactions with others. When I met people and we did things as a group, I found myself in charge. I picked the restaurant. I got directions to wherever we were going. I pulled together a delicious dinner from £5 of groceries. I got things DONE, and other people noticed. For the first time in my life, I ended up the de facto group leader in random social situations, even though I was just as clueless as everyone else. Not gonna lie, it was a pretty cool feeling, being on top of everything and having people...look up to me, I guess. The whole "fake it 'til you make it" thing really is true; the more other faith people put into my apparent problem-solving abilities, the more confident I acted. And the more confident I acted, the more actually secure I felt. It was like a vicious circle, but pleasant. (A pleasant circle? Someone needs to coin a better term for this.)

I realize that this entire blog post detailing my backpacking voyage of self-discovery sounds really pretentious and self-absorbed, so I think I'd better just cut things off now before I start using shudder-worthy phrases like "a simpler way of life" and "finding myself." And I know this was all pretty rambly and nonsensical. I'm still trying to find the words to convey what I'm trying to say. But for all its faults, this description comes a lot closer to doing the whole experience justice than my line about long showers and fluffy towels and sleeping in my own bed.

But really. Long showers. Towels. Bed. You can't beat 'em.