It’s almost one week since our return to the Holy Land. With Independence Day behind us too, I look forward to a few weeks of blissful holiday-free routine.
It might be the post-holiday reaction here, but I am trying to make our days as uneventful as possible now. Sure, friends and family come and go (and we visit them), but that as exciting as it gets for now. Now is also a good time to reflect back on our journey, and process the experience. This was my first time in the USA, so I have quite a few perceptions about this great land to share here.
Having visited California, Arizona and Nevada, I’ll start by saying that in many ways we felt right at home. I blame the climate and the angle of the sun, mostly. You see, when I visit Europe, there is usually this gray sky sense all over. Even when the sky is blue. I think it must be the lattitude and the angle of the sun, making everything seem a bit darker. I actually like that a lot. Above all, it makes me feel I’m “away from home”.
Landing in LA and heading south towards San Diego, the first thing we noted was how sunny everything was, “just like back home”. The local flora in most areas also looked very familiar, down to the “non-local” plants like the giant eucalyptus trees.
In light of that (literally), when we hit on the differences, they felt even more novel and out of place. We found a lot to be different too. In fact, it’s the small differences that I tend to focus on, so I think I’m going to make a small list here. Well, maybe not so small, so maybe I’ll address the topics in a separate post. Let me just throw in some topics, in no particular order: chocolate (totally random, I swear!), vegetables, tv shows, tv commercials, children’s channels on tv, theme parks, cars, driving, roads, free refills, manners, stray animals, outlet stores, walmart… I think it’s enough for now – the kids are back home now, so this room just got extremely noisy, with them playing on the other computer. I’ll get back to my musings later!
