Ordinary weird

Slowly, we’re getting into the swing of things. The great thing about living abroad is the way that it makes the weird ordinary and the ordinary weird. For more than I year, the backdrop of my life featured onion-domed churches, billboards and posters in another alphabet, people chattering in another language all around me. Several times a day it would strike me that this was the strangest situation I’d ever been in, stranger than I would have dared to imagine when I was young. That all of Europe and the Atlantic Ocean were between me and where I was born, that there was a vast country all around that I was slowly beginning to actually understand.

Then I come back, and the scenes around me are familiar but all the details are sticking out. The first thing that came as a shock was how quiet it is up here – real quiet, as in, you don’t hear anything and when you try to actively listen you realize there is just stone cold nothing out there. It is almost unsettling. Also, I’m still at the stage at which nearly anything I do is the first time I’ve done it in ages. I had a burrito for lunch today – first burrito I’ve had in more than 15 months!

But it is all starting to sink in. Reading the Russian papers online, I feel like I’m reading about a very far away place. I don’t seem to cherish the ability to communicate freely and effortlessly with people in my native language the way I did in the first few days. And today, the Eagle ran my last “Letter from Moscow” column. It was the hardest one to write, as I tried to wrap it all up and get on paper all these stray thoughts I’d accumulated over the past year. The result is as incoherent as you’d expect from someone still going through jet lag, culture shock, life with a very busy toddler, and near constant worrying about what he’s going to do next.