So it's over. After another 30-hour travel experience (my fourth: they get easier, but no more fun) I am back among the purple mountain's majesty once more. There are things missed for certain, and adjustment doesn't go quite as one would expect.
After more than ten months eating three meals a day with chopsticks I can affirm to you that 20 years of life is not enough to permanently ingrain the use of flatware into one's skull. I can stab with a fork, but the nuances of cutlery and multiple hand usage are lost on me. Cutting steak was an embarrassment, and I find myself reverting to a spoon for things like peas. I feel like a toddler, and I am sticking to finger foods in public for the time being.
Driving, which I had suspected leaks out of you like foreign language or the names of people you knew in middle school, honestly came straight back no problem. Why can't everything be as hard to forget as riding a bike? I suppose it’s a thing with these modes of transport.
Language of course is depressing. I have a hard time remembering words quickly. Like some sort of mental patient or senior citizen, I spend a great deal of time saying "um" or imaginary filler words like "majigger" but I can't seem to come up with things like "case." On top of that my listening skills have been reduced to the rank of foreigner. Dialect, murmuring, and any amount of speed throw me for a loop. Don't even get me started on the plumber. I have no idea what happened to the hot water heater aside from "top of the line."
Readjustment to food is going well thus far. It's been nice to reconnect with old classics and to rediscover foods I had forgotten all about (pesto, portabellas, peanut butter). I give it another few weeks before I find myself seeking out Korean food.
The ball of life keeps on rolling I suppose, though to some extent I feel as though I have gone back in time, reverted to a stage of my life before all this happened. Suddenly I'm back in the food service industry, living at home, going to classes at UGA, hanging out with old friends. As the days pass the whole past year seems progressively shorter and more dream-like. It’s easy to feel as though nothing ever happened. I feel so familiar with something that I cannot see, I have urges to speak an irrelevant language that is real to practically no one around me, and the people that I know so well have suddenly all vanished before my eyes. I feel intensely different, especially in contrast to a familiar setting, yet all the reasons why are distant from me and incomprehensible to anyone else.
But there are new beginnings and adventures that are not so obvious yet present nonetheless. I am starting a new job, my core courses, and moving into my first apartment. I have a rough few months of adjustment ahead of me and a rough two years of learning before I graduate, but my “junior year” abroad has irrefutably not been in vain. Though the education may have been throwaway credits, I walk away with valuable life experience and connections that will last me until I die. I have crossed an intense and trying bridge and lived to tell about it, and now I am ready for the rest of my life.
