Taken a while to firmly be back in this time zone. Even though we spread out our trip back, my body and mind were still in the East. Everything I saw looked so completely different albeit familiar. Very odd, feeling somewhat displaced yet so completely happy to be with family...to reconnect with them. Girls have so grown, yet they are the same.
Really, it's like not riding a bike for a long time and then remembering how. The body remembers.
Everything is so familiar yet so foreign, we know how it all works, we just haven't experienced it in a while.
We get behind the wheel of a car and drive like we were just driving yesterday, amazed that there is such a thing as right-of-way for cars as well as for pedestrians. Traffic is orderly, so one is trying the crowd/push their way through each and every small opening. Sidewalks are for walking, not for motorbikes, parking and/or street vendors.
No fires and smoke on sidewalks and front doorsteps. No outdoor kitchens.
It's so odd to be able to go to one place to buy any kind of food. And to have so many different choices, not just one type the same few products. All neatly arranged and fresh and clean. You can actually walk down the produce aisles without dodging speeding motorbikes. And it's all perfectly familiar--the same products are on the same shelves on the same aisles as before we left. I don't even have to think about where my favorite cereal is, it's right where it's always been. So everything is so utterly familiar that dealing with the world is pretty much automatic in a way that it never was in Vietnam, where even the simplest trip to the corner market was fraught with odd encounters and interesting discoveries, even after a year.
O.
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