The “Red-White-And” Blues

I won’t lie to you: The US is getting to me.

I feel more or less as I did after about a month in Canterbury. When all the new impressions and things to see start to become routine, all the little things that don’t work the way they should start nagging at you, and you start to wonder if it was worth coming here in the first place. It took me 5-6 months to get over that feeling in Canterbury.

I won’t be here in the US that long, and so I will leave with a bad impression of the US. And that’s not totally fair. There are loads of good things about the US, and I have experienced quite a number of them. It’s just that when I leave, I will tend to look at the negative things, simply because I will be at that particular stage of experiencing a foreign culture. I apologise for that, but it’s my psyche (and others’, I believe).

One very relevant thing that bothers me about the US is exactly that nobody seems to understand exactly that – that thing get to you after a while. Most Americans never leave the country – in fact, only 23% of the US population owns a passport, and less than 10% of those (that’s less than 2,3% of the entire population, or less than 1 in 40, for those of you who are not so mathematically inclined) ever leave the country, according to a Google search I just made. Take away the people who just take a quick trip across the border to Canada (which is basically just a more relaxed, laid back, and hence more sensible, version of the US) to have a lapdance in a country where strippers are allowed to be nude, you’re looking at a population that is basically ignorant of what it is like to live “somewhere else”. Sure, there are differences between east and west, and especially between north and south in the US, but life is basically the same – the same chains of shops and restaurants, the same language, the same ideology, the same common knowledge, the same frame of reference – only the climate changes, and, to a lesser extent, the dialect.

It was worth coming here. I have seen things, experienced stuff, met people, smelled air, walked streets, travelled roads, lived a life that I would not have had the opportunity to do back home. But I am full. There is only very little room left for more impressions, and I need time to digest. I need time to relax, to contemplate, and to get rid of the incessive belief that just around the corner is something I haven’t yet seen, and that I might not get to see ever if I don’t go there right now.

It will be 3-4 weeks until I can go home. And I wonder what I mean by “home”. Is it Canterbury? I hope so. It was when I left – or at least more so than Denmark was. But I’m going to Denmark before the new academic year starts, so I will see home one way or the other in September. But 3-4 weeks is a long way still to go when you don’t want to stay.

I don’t know how to cope, but I will have to. There is still work to do, before I can feasibly say that I have finished the piece of work I came here to do. But in many ways, I wish I could just go home and finish the work there. Except, at home I have a mini-thesis looming…

I wanted to go to Atlantic City this weekend, to drown my sorrows in poker, but I was too tired and ill. Hopefully, I will be able to put in a solid week of work, so that I can justify the trip next weekend. Unfortunately, I doubt it will happen – feeling like this wrecks havoc on your ability to concentrate.

(No pictures this time – the internet connection at the hotel is really slow, especially when uploading, and I want to go to sleep. I will catch up with all the photos when I come home. I know that’s a bit late, but think of it as a postcard that arrives after the person sending it has returned and told you about the trip. )