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Coming home has been just as much an experience as leaving for the first time. I’m not jet lagged by being off schedule with everyone else. Rather, I am simply unable to sleep that much. Every night I am exhausted, but then I can’t sleep more than 6 hours. This was typically the case during my travels, but I had attributed it to walking around so much and having to wake up to catch the free breakfast. I guess the habit followed me back.

The biggest culture shock was actually when I bought something for the first time after being back. It happened to be a Chipotle burrito (Mexican food is abysmally absent from much of Europe). The menu said $5.95, so I got out $6. I had to scramble for another one dollar bill when the register displayed that the total was in fact $6.37. Where did that extra money come from? Oh, sales tax! Silly Americans adding it right at the cashier! In Europe, any tax is included in the menu price. This has a couple really nice consequences. First, you know exactly how much you are supposed to pay ahead of time. This makes lines move a little faster, as there’s a lot less fumbling by the time people actually get to the part where they have to pay. Second, there are basically no pennies. All the businesses round the numbers out to the nearest 5 or 10 cents (or pence), so those little waste-of-copper travesties don’t take up space in your pocket.

There was some moment around a month in to the trip when I figured that any home sickness had passed and I could keep going indefinitely. But that’s not really true; I try to imagine more than 6 or 7 months of living in hostels, and it feels like something would have to break. Having a room to myself, a bathroom, are such grand luxuries that I couldn’t comprehend them a week ago.

Minnesota always seems more…saturated than the places I visit. The horizon is a place where fairy tale blue confronts forests and rolling hills of wreath green. And the storms! Rain in Europe feels like a pathetic, weak thing without the tell-tale accompaniment of that brief flash of light and the boom that follows.

In the time that follows, I’m going to try to include some more meta information about the trip, like distributions of money in each country, and the actual route I traveled. Hopefully I can help somebody else with planning a similar trip.

Well, that was an adventure of epic proportions. But at the end of the day, it’s good to be home.