So I’ve been back on the land of the hamburger for two weeks now, touring the great state of New York, visiting family and friends and spending time with my long lost Andy P who flew to the east coast for a few days.

My reentry was painless to the US, no problems with the flights except for the girl in the seat in front of me who had digestive problems or ate too much pasta fagioli if you know what I mean. She also gave me her cold which I am still recovering from.

As we coasted in, my first view of the motherland was of the familiar arm of Cape Cod, and it wasn’t until that moment that it finally sank in that I was going home! The moment I had dreamed of for months was finally here! And it was so green, leafy and beautiful, even the highways and rows of McMansions looked beautiful just then. Every time I stood in those hours-long lines at the banks in France, or got on a bicycle or walked down the perilous streets of Italy, or when they didn’t pay us for months or when the bank stole my money and I couldn’t go to the doctor I thought to myself “I will survive this and make it home one day” and the plane didn’t even crash to be ironic! I made it and Andrea met me at the airport in New York, she even made a sign with my name on it in case I forgot what she looked like since she visited at Easter. And somehow we made it back on the subway to her apartment with my bags marked "heavy" in red, but we couldn't have done it without the kindness of strangers, which is something I really missed about America.

So Andrea and I spent the next few days vacationing in New York, me marveling at the free icewater, public toilets that don’t give you diseases, and the calm drivers and Andrea smiling and nodded patiently. She even bought me bagels, pickles, and juicy juice for my first breakfast back as I requested. There is nothing like a New York bagel, though they didn’t exactly live up to my recurring dream of sawing a ginormous bagel in half with a two-person lumberjack saw – but it was close. We drank wonderful wonderful beer on her roof while taking in the the Manhattan skyline…Harpoon, Blue Moon, Sam Adams…(hint: never go to southern Europe if you want to drink beer) wandered around the new Highline park planted on an old elevated railroad over Manhattan, explored new parts of Central Park (the Ramble!), which I think is the nicest park out of any park in the whole world I have seen, and visited Times Square because it’s closed off to traffic now!!! It was a bit of a letdown because I thought it was all of Broadway, but still better than before. We also went to Long Island to visit grandma, where I beat her for the first time in Scrabble (though there is still a dispute over the legitimacy of the word qi) so now I don’t have to play Scrabble anymore, and we all went to the beach to watch the huge waves still rolling in from recent storms and we got in some kickass boogie boarding.

Long Island is a land of contrasts. It is half strip-malls, fast food, and highways and parking lots filled with jerks driving vehicles ten times larger than anyone on Long Island would ever need – not the best place to be reintroduced to America, but the other half is green leafy bike paths, beautiful marshlands and beaches and nice local restaurants, and of course some of my relatives live there.

Anyway, to continue my all-inclusive tour of New York State, I went home to Endicott and saw mom for the first time all year and the rest of my family except brother Andy. Then FINALLY I met Andy P who I hadn’t seen in seven months, he flew in from Seattle for a few days. I was afraid I wouldn’t even recognize him, but luckily I did and it almost immediately felt like we’d never been apart even though, as it turns out, a year is a pretty long time.

Next stop on the New York tour – Adirondacks to visit Grandma and Grandpa, where we not only got in some good hiking and canoeing and bocce ball, but we also went with Anne and her friend to Enchanted Forest Water Safari where it was the 'Obese Americans in Bathing Suits' theme weekend. Maybe I’m just used to those mysteriously skinny French people, but if any cliché about Americans is true, it is definitely that one. And it’s got to be the processed food, corn syrup and driving everywhere, and I think the French would also add – the lack of stinky cheese crawling in microbes and the Italians would add the lack of rules about the timing and order of eating. I mean, I guess they have all the same processed foods and strip malls and car dependent areas as we have, but they’re by no means ubiquitous as they are here. Most of our towns don’t even have centers anymore where you can just go and walk around and just enjoy oneself, here we hop alone in little air conditioned metal pods on wheels from one stripmall island to the next with very brief interludes of sort-of outdoors between the car and the next freezer they call normal indoor summer temperatures around here. But I digress.

So we had a really nice time in the Adirondacks, and in Endicott, then Andy went home and I went with mom and Anne to visit family friends in Rochester to complete my tour of New York State.

One thing I really missed when I was in Europe was having greenery everywhere and open space. In New York almost every hill is covered solidly in forest or fields, with a few scattered farms. In Europe almost every inch of land is covered either in farms or houses, even the steep cliffs of the rugged lakes in the North of Italy (which I went to in my last few days of Europe when I wasn’t updating this blog, some pictures below). I’m not sure there’s any prettier place than upstate New York in summer, particularly at sunset. It’s not a dramatic landscape, just a nice gentle pretty one and I’ll miss it when I move out west next week.

So I’m back. It feels almost as if I was never in Europe now, only a few of my friends still remain there. As for reverse culture shock, which I got badly when I came back from New Zealand, but this time I thought I was just so glad to be back that I didn't experience any, but now that it’s sinking in that I’m home and all the people I spent every day with for the last year are far far away and I won’t see them for a long time, and now I’m starting to realize that I really did adapt to the European lifestyle, I have a hard time walking fast, in fact I don't even like it, I can stand in line patiently, I can just sit and talk forever, and I miss having a nice historic center of town to stroll around in the evenings, people watching. I miss walking everywhere on cobblestone streets among ancient buildings and and having a huge network of friends from all around the world to run into. Strangely I even kind of miss the stylishness of Europe, even if I will never blend into it. And I’m even starting to have warm memories about France now that the bank has mostly returned my money and the red tape entanglement is almost finished. Maybe I could even live there again sometime.

But it’s over, all good and bad things must come to an end, now if I could just finish writing that thesis I could start the next chapter of my life on the west coast!

At Michele's town, Iseo, on one of the lakes

Me and some south american buddies at our goodbye toga party