Copied this one right out of my journal. I wrote it the morning after we arrived in New York City. My thoughts have changed several times over since I wrote this, but I thought you might like to know my very first reaction to America after 330 days away.
We made it. After an extremely long travel day, tears, hugs and yelps of excitement, we are in the United States of America. And boy is it an odd feeling. I'm sitting in Central Park right now. There are hundreds of people on their morning run – and when I say hundreds, I mean hundreds. I feel as though I am a spectator at a marathon rather than a person perched on the root of a tree in a park. It feels so strange to be in America again. I don't think that what I'm experiencing is actually culture shock, although I know that's what people will assume. I am not shocked by American culture. I am used to culture changes, new currencies and conversion rates, languages that sound foreign to my ears (And let's be real, New York accents are so strong, my brain doesn't even register them as English yet). Truth be told, change is the norm. The part that makes me feel funny is trying to grasp that this place is supposed to be home.
That is the weird part.
For once we didn't just stumble across a Starbucks in the Malaysian airport or discover a Forever21 in Thailand. This is the place those things originated. This is the real deal. We spent all year looking for bits of home overseas and now that we're here, things feel wrong somehow – like a coat that's one size too small. It no longer feels like home. Maybe that's because I'm in New York City and not Melbourne, Florida, or maybe it's because I was never American to begin with.
You know how you can leave a place for a long time and then come back and being away feels completely like a dream?
It's the exact opposite of that.
America feels like the dream. Away feels like the reality. I spent 17 years of my life outside of the US before my family moved to Florida. Back then America felt foreign and strange. A year away made it feel like that all over again.
