WARREN, Ohio – Life is different in the United States. For the past nine months, my columns have been coming from Salzburg, Austria or some other location in Europe. As of Thursday evening, I’ve been back to Eastern Standard Time, returning to the life I used to call normal.
But a new normal was ingrained in my life for the past nine months.
I am used to walking and riding my bike or the bus everywhere. Most trips would involve seeing the Untersberg or the Festung. I am used to ordering in German and not receiving complimentary water chilled with ice.
I also realized that I don’t know how to dress any more. I felt strange going out to eat in my Austrian jeans and my Austrian boots when the Ohioans I saw were dressed for summer in shorts and sandals.
Going out to eat or shop also means that I will now be faced with air conditioning, something I got used to not having and never had to consider that I might be cold at a restaurant.
But before I had run-ins with any of these things, I had to get over the time change and jet lag. I really hadn’t given myself the greatest base for having a 30-hour day, considering I had slept seven hours each night for the past two weeks if I was lucky, and then slept a mere three hours the night before my flight, which was at 8:30 a.m., but fortunately at an airport the size of Toledo’s or Akron’s and located only 10 minutes away.
I managed to get home without too many troubles, crying only on my short flight from Salzburg to Vienna, suffering only minorly on a too long and too crowded nine-hour flight from Vienna to Toronto, going through American customs in the Canadian airport (I never officially went to Canada), and having a delay of a half-hour because of problems in the plane’s cockpit before boarding for my final leg to Cleveland.
We stopped for dinner at an Arby’s in Cleveland, where I was afraid to eat anything more than a regular roast beef sandwich that I washed down with a small Pepsi, the size of an Austrian large. I was quite happy to have Pepsi with free refills (not that I needed one) and an unlimited amount of ketchup. And it was nice to be somewhere where no one would complain about the meat to which I applied ketchup, considering there are some rules I was fond of breaking in Austria when it came to ketchup.
After finally arriving home I went to sleep for a good 16 and a half hours. This was a new record sleep for the longest and latest, sleeping until 4:30 p.m., and I went to bed again before midnight.
Now, a week after my return, I have more or less re-acclimated. I have been sleeping a lot and doing all sorts of work, like unpacking and cleaning up all of the things I brought home and what my parents brought home for me almost three months ago.
I have also begun the search for a job. It would be wonderful if I could go back to Austria this fall, but I know that I would need some sort of employment there.
This transition time is weird. Not only am I finished with the University, but I have also just returned from nine months in Austria, a land at most times dramatically different from here.
I don’t know where I am going or what I am doing. What I do know is that I love speaking German in Austria and living in Salzburg. I also love writing and traveling. I need to find some way to incorporate all of these things to some extent in to the rest of my life, and then everything will be golden.