Home At Last

I woke up at 4am this morning, an early start to my fourth day back in my favourite GMT -5.  I hate to blame my fatigue on some ailment as imaginary as "jet lag", but I seem to have a more difficult time than most adapting to the 12-hour change, and some of the last few days has been a bit of a daze.  Maybe it's an indication that I should never travel again.  Ha!  Good one!

The jet lag weariness is the final concrete remains of the trip, the only tangible proof that I was ever in Asia.  The millions of pictures and the collection of currencies and the random ticket stubs document a fanstastic larger-than-life year, but are stuck collecting dust somewhere in memory; a trip is something we can remember but can never get back.  Yet it's amazing how quickly I've switch back since stepping off the plane, how I've never forgetten how to live like a Canadian.  It's amazing to think, while enjoying holiday festivities with friends and families, while talking about the dismal ski season and new apartments and bus strikes and Jimmy Kimmel, that less than a week ago I was sleeping the deck of a river ferry somewhere around the Tropic of Cancer with everything I needed acting as my pillow.

The only hiccup in my reintegration has been related to clothing.  In the Seoul airport, I looked around at the waiting area filled with well-kept Koreans (they all look the same!) in tidy black pea coats and leather shoulder bags, playing on advanced new electronics.  In my shorts and Bikenstocks, green sweater of many years, and sporting a goofy Ronaldo bum bag, I was overcome with a sense of my own destitution.  This was only exacerbated while waiting at the Toronto City Airport terminal after arriving on Porter Airlines, where I bumbled my way to the ferry with a cart balanced with a huge dry bag and a dirty bike wrapped in plastic bags.  After a year of dressing like a slob and being hailed as a rock star, I worry that I won't be able to blend in back home.  I've been digging deep to recall how to coorindate shoes and socks and warm jacket and scarf and all the other little things.

For all the societal differences that confront the long-term Asian traveller returning home, it's surprising how similar our two worlds are.  While walking downtown the other day I had a flashback to Kathmandu, to the cramped shops and simple merchandise of Asan Thole.  Our shops are bigger and cleaner, but it's all the same game of buying.  It doesn't matter where you are in the world, people come together to shop and to eat: humanity is united in its search for community.

What's surprising is how travelling around the world to Asia has given me so much more context for a place like Toronto.  I called to make a dental appointment and got to talking about the receptionist about where she was from in India.  An Afghan baggage handler at the airport reflected on my time in Pakistan.  I hear Mandarin everywhere.  I see Hindu temples now in places I've walked by hundreds of times.  One upon a time, well-heeled British graduates went on the European Grand Tour, a loop through the many cultures of the continent that served the worldly education one couldn't get in school.  How much better prepared for the future would Canada be, if all its future leaders had completed a required-reading Grand Tour of Asia?

And what have I learned on my circle tour?  Lots.  Lots about money, success, family, and work.  Lots about what makes a place great.  Lots about values.  How lucky we are to live in Canada!  Not because we are rich.  Because all people are considered equal.  Because we have free schools and hospitals.  Because we pay people in the most menial jobs enough to lead a happy life.  Because we have the luxury of being able to retire. 

In the reflection of the trip I also see myself.  I see myself as the person I've always wanted to be, someone who reads, writes, learns languages, and finds himself having a great time in strange places.  I hate the "He's finding himself" explanation to my chasing of distant adventures, but on the other hand I do return home more aware of my place in the world.  I've always thought that a love of travel was something I would eventually have to fit into the confines of a successful life.  Now I'm leaning toward the idea that my future is the thing that has to fit around the pillar of travel.  One thing is certain: the more I travel, the larger the world becomes.

Thus I bid farewell to a grand year in Asia.  I will think of you every time I see the sun rise.  And everytime I eat rice.  And, come to think about it, every time I get food poisoning.  I wonder what I'm going to do now?