Home

I am home. Not sure what that really means anymore, you know the feeling you usually get when you think of home? The feeling of being safe and secure. I still have this feeling, but it is altered. It is not exciting to come home, I don't like that I am not going to be in a different country next week. The night before we got off the ship we had a meeting about returning home and what to expect. One girl who had studied abroad before said that when she came home for the first time she sat in her bathtub for two weeks. When she said this I thought to myself it's not going to be that bad. Well now I understand. I have no desire to do anything. Every chance I get I find myself lying in my bed looking at pictures from my trip. I have no energy or will to get up and do anything.
Throughout the whole voyage I would try to step back and evaluate myself to see if I had changed. I never noticed any difference which confused me because everyone said I would change but I didn't feel different… that is until I came home. I basically lived in a false world while I was on the ship, everyone had observed the same things I had and we all kind of thought the same way. I think this is why I did not notice any change within myself.
I did not know what to expect when I got home, I did not know how people would respond to me and to what I had to say. The first thing I noticed was how big everything is. I went to the bathroom in the airport and the stall was so wide I had enough space to turn around with my book bag on my back and I did not hit any side of the stall. In all the Asian countries the toilet stalls were three times as small. As I walked around the airport random people would stop me and ask why I had a lamp shade on my back and then I had to explain that it was a rice hat from Vietnam. This led to a conversation about why I was in Vietnam which led to explaining the whole Semester at Sea program. This happened about three times and at that point I got sick of talking about SAS so from then on my response was that I got is at a souvenir shop in Florida. I even had one of the flight attendants stop and talk to me for ten minutes about my travels. When I got home everything looked the same, nothing had changed. The first few days home I visited my family and friends. My grandmother took me Christmas shopping one day and this is when I noticed another change. The way I view people now is different. I am used to being in a different culture and observing unfamiliar ways of living. I liked looking at what the people were wearing and how they acted. Well now I am continuing to do this in my own country. Before this trip I never noticed how many different kinds of people we have in the US. This is one of the only countries that has such a diverse group of citizens. In Japan you would never see a black woman sitting next to a Hispanic man sitting next to a white family sitting next to an Asian. The US is very special in this way. For the most part everyone is accepted here and it is in no way strange to interact with people of a different nationality. Now I am on a road trip because I could not stand staying at home and being in one place. I went to Long Island to visit my friend Eilis from SAS for her 21st birthday and then I went to New Jersey to visit my SAS roommate, Amanda, and we went to Time Square for New Years. Next I went to Philadelphia to visit my boyfriend and his family took me skiing with them in Killington, Vermont. Tomorrow I am headed home and then on Friday I am moving into my apartment at University Park.
I like being on the go all of the time. The only downfall is that I do not get to spend as much time with my family and home friends as I would like. It's all about sacrifice.
It seems as though no one at home changed very much. When I talk to people about what they have been doing in the past four months it is usually the same things they were doing before I left. I hope I do not fall into a rut like that. I want to constantly be doing new things. Every time someone asks me about my trip I try really hard not to sound conceited because I did a lot of the things over seas that most people would never dream about and I feel like when I talk about them I make people feel bad about themselves. I try not to bring up SAS in most conversations but it is hard when I have so much to share. More changed will arise when I return to Penn State and I am excited to continue evolving my view on the world.