Home at last.

I'm sitting in my brother's kitchen listening to my one-year-old nephew grunt as he waddles around the living room, passy in mouth. My feet are cold. I still haven't adjusted to air conditioning. We drove down to Florida yesterday and everyone gasped when we rolled down the windows and felt the humid air. "Does this remind you of Africa?" they asked. Not quite.

My trip home took a little longer than I was anticipating. I wrote down a basic timeline in my notebook when I was on the flight home from Chicago. This is taken straight from my journal:

June 23, 2008 Chicago, Illinois.

Some people try to make it around the world in 80 days. I did it in 3.

Timeline:

June 21st
7 a.m.
~Woke up in Riviera del Sol and took a bus to Fuengirola. From there got a train to Malaga.
1:45 p.m.
~Flew from Malaga to Madrid to London.
5:50 p.m.
~Arrive in London
8 p.m.
~Was told that I was mysteriously erased from my flight to Knoxville.
June 22nd
2 a.m.
~Find out that they were full of it.
11:40 a.m.
~Flight to Chicago boards, but we still sit on the runway for an hour.
3 p.m.
~Arrive in Chicago and wait 20 minutes for my luggage.
4:20 p.m.
~My flight for Knoxville takes off.
4:21 p.m.
~I arrive at the gate.
7:40 p.m.
~When the next flight to Knoxville leaves.
6 p.m.
~Find out that the 7:40 flight is cancelled due to inclement weather.
6:10 p.m.
~I was told I couldn't leave until 4:35 on June 23rd.
7 p.m.
~I arrived at the hotel Mom booked me in. They said I wasn't booked there.
8 p.m.
~I arrived at a different Doubletree hotel 25 minutes away. Not booked there either. Call the 1st place and find out I was right the 1st time.
8:10 p.m.
~Pay a taxi driver $23 to take me there because the hotel shuttle wasn't driving anymore.
9:00 p.m.
~Finally get to my room. First bed since the night of June 20th. Also my first shower...
June 23rd
8 a.m.
~Woke up and took the shuttle to the airport.
11:50
~My flight to Knoxville finally takes off after 5 gate changes.

It's been an eventful weekend full of more illness and tears and waiting than I would have liked. I should probably add that I came down with some strange illness in London and spent a good portion of the night getting sick in the "loo". Ended up meeting some pretty interesting characters during my 18 hour layover though. Got about an hour of sleep on the floor of the terminal. Had a cup of coffee at 3 a.m. (1st Starbucks in 4 months!) with a man from Peru and a guy from Uganda. Had a guy in Chicago ask me if I knew about Murphy's Law. Told him I know more about Murphy's Law than Murphy himself. Not much else to say.

P.S. Feels good to be in America.

Later:

I stopped counting gate changes. It's somewhere between 4-5. I'm laughing at this point and feel like I should appologize to my fellow Knoxville passengers. My presence on this flight is certainly the source of these gate changes. My fellow passengers are a comforting sight I should add. Orange and white and fat with Southern accents and smiles. 17 A. That's my seat number on this puddle jumper. I'm laughing again at my luck, or lack thereof. There are 18 rows on this plane, you see. I'm always sitting in the back.I'm thinking about changing my name to Murphy.

I'm en route at last. Below me to the left, the Chicago skyline rises imposingly beneath the scattered clouds that resemble floating cotton. Not like cotton balls--they're more like the cotton still found attached to its stem, only whiter. Suburban blocks in neat little rows cover the smaller-growing landscape.

February 11th-June23rd. That's a short period of time to experience so much and change so much. Have I changed through this experience or merely gained a handful of stories beginning with "When I was in Africa..."? I say Africa instead of Ghana because no one knows where Ghana is. I believe that I have indeed changed. I also believe that I won't realize the extent of my transformation until I've safely made my journey back into American society and culture. I've gained patience through this experience, and self-reliance. I feel like there are very few situations in which I could not safely extricate myself. I've learned to be quick on my feet, as well as quick on my tongue. Kindness, I've also learned, is a more effective weapon than anger. This lesson was learned by doing the exact opposite and comparing results. Angry words take more breaths, and opposed to popular belief, are not as relieving to release. Smiling in the face of adversity goes much further, especially if you can learn to smile on the inside too. I've learned that the best things in life are not only worth waiting for, but are much more appreciated once they are received. i've learned that walking slower is not only less exhausting, but it allows you to witness the things everyone else is missing in their hurry. So here I am now--20 years old and walking slower with my head swiveling around in an effort to see it all...and increasingly irritated that I know I never can. There are too many places for one person to see in a lifetime. I will see all I can though and probably die young of some absurd food-born illness in a place more rustic than romantic.That's a fine way to go though...

So here I am. I went to Africa to find myself and realized that I already knew who that was before I left. I am an ever-changing nomad with a terrible sense of direction and a habit of being ill-prepared for all my inevitable adventures.

And right now I'm happily descending on Knoxville, TN.

I'll post another blog later with more details about my Spain trip.