Lou Ann's EuroBlog

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."
- G.K. Chesterton

Yes ... I'm home.

Okay, okay. I know ... I haven't updated for TOO LONG. Sorry! Some of you are hounding me to get this final post up. I wasn't near a computer for the last few days of my trip, and since I've been home I've been working on adjusting my body clock. Besides ... some of you were telling me that I was online TOO much while in Europe. (You know who you are!) So I'm going to type at this piece-meal, inbetween things and hopefully finish it up soon. I'm also visiting a friend who recently had a military move to Leavenworth, KS (weekend of August 5-8), so while she and her husband are busy, I'm going to do some typing.

SOOOoooo ... I'll start with the pictures. Some of you (different people than those who were hounding me about posting for the last time or those of you who were hounding me about being online too much in Europe) are hounding me about seeing some pictures to preview. So ... here's the link. These are just a few of the over 2000 pictures that I'm trying to look through. Be more patient with me!! :-)

I'm not going to do some long, dragged out, day-by-day accounting of the last few days of my trip. Here's the end, in a nut-shell. The last day I wrote about was Sunday, 7/24. On Monday it was rainy, and Bente and Søren were getting ready to take a trip for their holiday, but they asked me to stay until Tuesday because they didn't want me to spend another night in a hotel. So, I had a very relaxed day ... reading, typing, sitting around doing nothing ... it was quite nice. On Tuesday it was a BEAUTIFUL day, weather-wise. I drove around some of the smaller islands south of Zealand (near where Bente had taken me on Sunday ... near Bogø). I saw white chalk cliffs on the far coast of the island of Møn. I enjoyed more coastal countryside.

On Wednesday I had some time in the morning to drive a little bit more (more countryside) and then made it to the airport for my flight to Paris. I won't even get into it, but my experience at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris that day wasn't any better than any of the other times. I made it to the hotel that I had stayed in previously, very close to the airport. It had originally been my plan to take a subway train into downtown Paris on Thursday (an inbetween day) and I decided that I was too tired of being a tourist to do that, so I sat around the hotel for the extra day (and had my final French crepe at a nearby creperie) and read my book, Centennial.

I flew out on Friday. Again, I won't go into the details. But Charles de Gaulle airport was a lousy experience every time I was there, and that final day was no different. Ugh!! I was finally back on U.S. soil on Friday evening, July 29. My friend Amy drove me home from the airport, and I began the process of re-socializing myself with Americans immediately. :-)

So ... of course, I have several random thoughts to share with you in this final post. The first is that I would seriously re-think the decision to travel alone to foreign countries where English is not the main language. With someone else, it would have been much easier to laugh at some of the more frustrating things ... I don't think that I would have taken myself so seriously. And, the extrovert in me was very weary with the conversations in English that took place only for utility purposes ("Your hotel room is 463." Or, "Yes, we have dielsel gasoline here." Etc.) It was sure good to get home!!

Exit. Something that I forgot to mention when I was in London that amused me. When you travel to a foreign country, one of the first words that becomes easy to learn is the word for "Exit". I mean, you have to exit the plane and the airport and so on. And the signs all say "exit" in whatever language. So, in France, you look for "Sortie", and in Denmark you look for "Udgang". But, in England, where I was expecting the signs to say "Exit" (right??), they all said "Way out". Really!! It was almost weird. It made me laugh!!

Humor. Another funny thing that I forgot to mention had to do with the sister of my friend Bente. Remember, her name is Alis, and she took us on that tour of the school where she and her husband work, and then on a tour of the local windmill on Bogø. Well, while we were looking at the grounds near the windmill, we startled a huge rabbit. I mean HUGE. The thing was rather close to us, and went hopping off VERY quickly. I was startled by how big it was, and said something like, "I don't think that we have rabbits so big in the U.S." to which Alis replied by turning around with a very dead pan expression and said, "Interesting ... I thought that EVERYTHING was bigger in the United States!" It really cracked me up because it's difficult to joke around in a language that isn't your first language, and I had heard very little humor over the past month, and she hadn't missed a beat. She really was only half joking, as it seems that, at least in Denmark, most people feel like Americans think that everything about America is bigger and better than anywhere in the rest of the world.

Food. I totally forgot to mention to you when I was talking about the yummy foods in France ... MERENGUE!! Like what you might find on the top of a lemon merengue pie. But you can buy a piece of very stiff merengue ... and it's like eating pure sugar ... but not sticky/yucky like cotton candy ... MUCH better than that!! MMMMmmmmm......

Wind. Have you seen the commercial for an airline that has recently added Chicago as a new destination? The people all come up to the counter to check in or out or whatever ... and every single customer has wildly windblown hair that they seem to be unaware of. That is exactly how I felt the ENTIRE time I was in Denmark. Except that I was wildly AWARE of my hair being blown all over the place. As beautiful as Denmark is, they certainly have a LOT of WIND!!!

Scooters. The employees at the Copenhagen airport often use foot propelled scooters (you know, they are like silver skateboards, but have a handle bar that extends upward) to get around the airport (which is a medium sized airport) ... I even saw scooters attached to vendor's carts. It was kind of weird.

Buildings. Confusing at first ... in the United States, we usually start counting floors in a building from the ground level being the first floor, and the next floor up being the second floor, etc. Well, in Europe, the ground level is the "ground floor", and the next floor up is the "first floor". It took me a short while of standing in a hotel looking dumbfounded to figure this out. The funny part is that the numbering often works the U.S. way, thus you might be in room #304 in a hotel, and find that room #304 requires you to get off at floor 2 on the elevator. Go figure!!

Reading. It's been wonderful reading a book so much about the culture and history of the United States (Centennial by James Michener) while travelling in foreign countries. I really DO love being an American and all that my citizenship stands for. Michener does such a wonderful job of representing the heart of America. And I read from that book (which chronicles, via historical fiction, the history of the western plains on the Eastern slope of the Rockies in Colorado) every day (I'm a slow reader, and a book with over 1000 pages will certainly take me more than a month to read!!) while I was in Europe. In a way, it was like coming home to the U.S. every single day ... it gave me something culturally familiar to rest in while I was experiencing so many things that were so culturally unfamiliar. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone but me ... but that's really what it felt like reading that book while I was in Europe!

Since I've been home, I've done various trivial things. I've spent some time at the pool trying to even out my tan. I've seen three movies (Batman Begins, March of the Penguins, and Dukes of Hazzard). I've had lunch/dinner with several friends. I've had a dentist appointment (yuck!!) And, not so trivial, I flew to Kansas City for the weekend to visit some friends who just moved there (military move) from DC around the same time I left for Europe. We even went to see the Oakland A's play the Kansas City Royals. Such fun!!

You may be wondering about my next trip. Who knows! Somewhere down the line, I'd like to see the Four Corners area, the Navajo Reservation (thanks to my love of Tony Hillerman novels), and the Grand Canyon. That could take a whole summer, don't you think? :-)