Preparing to Head Home

Dang. We actually only have thirteen days left in this country. This isn´t the first time I´ve been out of the country and experienced the strangeness of cultural adaptation and re-adaptation, but this time´s going to be pretty different. Each time I go to El Salvador with my volunteer group for our yearly ten-day trip, we spend only ten days in the country, working pretty hard on a construction project for most of each day, living in fairly rustic conditions is an impoverished part of the country. When I return, I usually spend a few days being pissed off at how capitalistic and commercialized everything in the United States is. It´s like that scene from the movie The Hurt Locker where the main character comes back from Iraq, and he´s standing in the cereal aisle at a grocery store, shocked at how easy and cushy life is the US. Not that I´m directly comparing El Salvador to Iraq, but you get the point.

This time I´ve spent two and a half months living in a comfortable, middle-class setting in Ecuador, living as a student and a tourist, seeing some of the most beautiful places on Earth, and studying a different language and culture. I don´t think the process of cultural re-adaptation to the US will be a process of readapting to comforts that I´ve missed or anything like that, it´ll be simply based on differences in lifestyle. I won´t be walking around an historic city all day, buying delicious two-dollar lunches or talking to my group members about their host families or experiences in Cuenca. I won´t be eating tasty dinners of rice and fried eggs and chicken and plantain. I´ll be at home eating cereal and peanut-butter and jelly. I´ll be playing xbox and working out at the rec. I´ll be talking to my mom about buying stuff to make burritos at the grocery store. I´ll be hanging out with my friends in my buddy´s living room (see photo) talking about videogames and pointless gossip. In short, it´ll be a return to boring, lulling, comforting normalcy, while planning out and waiting for the next adventure.