At first of course, it just felt like I was on a trip, a vacation of some kind- it was the end of the summer, we all met up in Amsterdam (which was amazing that it actually worked, but you have to remind yourself that people still did things like that before email/internet/cell phones :). We traveled around for awhile and it just felt like a vacation. By the time it dawned on me that I'd been gone awhile and seen a ton, it was time to go to Barcelona, a new adventure, and start school. That occupied a couple weeks of marveling at new experiences, and then it was time to begin the real travels. So really for most of the time I was gone, it just seemed like a series of 1-2 week vacations strung together, with bits of class and homework here and there :)
And also, coming *home* to Barcelona from all the other trips started to make it feel less foreign, and also make it feel less like I was gone or NOT home-home in the US- and though I of course intellectually knew, my body and subconscious slowly adapted to my new environment till it just started feeling *normal*. I wouldn't doubt that most every classmate of mine by the end of the semester was missing/craving something from home/the US, either a person, a food, their own bed, whatever. I don't recall really having a longing craving for anything- I in fact was quite content every week, for the most part.
My biggest problems were school and relationship. School got intentionally compressed into 3-4 days a week because I was constantly traveling (and choosing to not do any work during the weekends) and so the 3 days a week that I was in Barcelona were usually quite stressful. Tiffany was only able to talk during the weekends because of class and work, and I was only able to talk during the week because of traveling. I won't go into the details of those problems :)
I think it was because I was traveling so constantly, and going somewhere different each week, that sorta hindered my mind from realizing that I had been gone so long, but also aided me in experiencing each city/country to the fullest- I thankfully never got to the point where the concept of "experiencing something new" became routine- some people got sick of traveling. I never did :) Seriously. I got into a great routine of weekly packing and unpacking, and it was really nice to have the bare essentials needed for living, and to not hafta worry about all the everything else in life, just how much time we had that day and what we wanted to see and where we were gonna get our food :)
Like I've mentioned, going home at the end, from Dublin to Chicago to South Bend, was thankfully very easy because I was meeting my friend Matt's Japanese girlfriend Shuko, and going home to immediately celebrate the holidays and see family. So I had more events to look forward to. But if I had gone back like the second week of January, to nothing but school starting or something...I mighta been kinda depressed :)
The real question though is, how long could I have done this. Because of future ideas Tiffany and I had talked about, and because I knew the state of the economy in the US, and because there's some pretty sweet architecture firms in Europe, every city I traveled to I was thinking "what would it be like to live here?". I think be abroad and traveling was easy because I had a limited time frame with a definite ending. I knew that I'd be going home after 4 months and life would go back to normal- so it was easy to stay short-sighted and know that I had 4 months to get the most I could out of my time, money, and travels. So I think it was easy to be positive, task-oriented, focused. The real question is, why couldn't I wield this frame of mind in real life, and be much more focused and happy on what was currently going on in life day-to-day and week-to-week, rather than thinking about the future and all that garbage. Life was even like that to some degree for all the years I was in school- you only looked ahead one year, or to next summer or next break, or maybe if you were in junior high you looked forward to high school, or if in high school you looked forward to being a senior.
I remember when I was a senior in high school, realizing how much I had blinders on. I really hadn't thought past senior year of high school- it seemed like the culmination of schooling, the end-all be-all, since I was in middle school. I really didn't know where I wanted to go to school or what I wanted to study. I really was just living life one year at a time. And suddenly I had to think about the next four. Which was no match for graduating from college and suddenly feeling like I had to think about the next REST OF MY LIFE all at once. I still sometimes feel like that to a degree, which is easy to do when there's always talk of savings and IRAs and paying for your kids' college and all that crap.
Before I get to be rambling too much, let me talk more about my experience directly. I had gotten very used to life there, even if life was different from week to week. There were always common experiences (unless we were in Morocco). Same currency, some same foods (like Nutella), generally the same cars. Though I did like seeing the cars change from country to country- lots more SEATs in Spain (made there), lots more Fiats in Italy, and more Audi/BMW/Mercedes' in Switzerland. No big surprise I guess.
These similarities helped me more focus in on the differences from country to country- cuisine, cost of living, architecture, climate, etc. My favorite was always exploring the old city centers, and seeing the pedestrian shopping streets, old architecture, and sometimes things like old city walls. How the cities related to the nearest water (usually a river) was always interesting. What the public plazas were like, the public parks- where in the city, how big, how much there was to do in them, how many people were using them. One thing common across Europe- people like being outside much more than Americans. Or at least they actually go DO it. They eat outside, play outside, walk outside, sit outside. People all over the place all the time, USING the public spaces (something that frustrates American architects trying to design similar spaces in the US). Restaurants will have people sitting outside well into the cold months, kept warm by those tall lamp-looking things that have propane heaters in the top.
It was amazing how foreign/new the US finally seemed when I returned. Of course the big cars, but the highways, the fast food, the newness of everything. It just felt like everything lacked history and tradition and culture and interest- very homogenous. The first thing that struck me when I came out of the train stop in Chicago was the buildings. I had been in a lot of big cities in Europe but most buildings top out at 5 stories, or 10 or 12. And here in Chicago there were just CANYONS of buildings, it felt like a sci-fi movie, the city of the future, buildings touching the sky with the tiny people and cars down below. Shocking.
Another thing I really enjoyed was the constant interaction with my classmates. Going into it I was very excited to be living and studying and traveling with the same people for 4 months. I knew it would be great getting to know some of them so much better, spending practically every waking moment of weeks on end with some of them who I lived with or near, studied with, traveled with. So I was looking forward to making new/better friends, especially since the past two years in school had been spent largely with my Chicago friends, when I wasn't studying or spending time with Tiffany. So this was finally classmate time. Which is why I was disappointed by a few people who didn't come abroad :/
Finally coming back was weird because everything felt normal but foreign- like an old life. And it was hard to believe that 4 months had gone by in a flash. That something I dreamed about for a couple years was now just another memory, a set of photos and ticket stubs and stories. That I think was the most sad to me, knowing that one the biggest opportunities/events of my life was over with. THAT is why I always save the biggest present for last on Christmas :)
Its probably time to move on and post pictures of 2010.
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