There's always something a little surreal about coming home from traveling abroad. To go from someplace so different to someplace so familiar in such a short time makes it almost hard to believe in the reality of either. Part of the magic lies in the flip that occurs: The foreignness that I lived for the past two weeks is, upon returning, more familiar than home; and the familiarity of home, in that instant, appears strange. But ultimately the power of home -- that fundamental comfort and effortlessness of being at home -- wins out and everything becomes real again. Real and a little mundane. Ordinary.
Our flight home from Lima went smoothly. Fortunately we landed at Reagan National Airport during a gap between summer thunderstorms. For the rest of the afternoon there were violent downpours and warnings on the news that there would be major delays at all three of the DC airports. We were also lucky to be in an area unaffected by earlier storms; apparently great swathes of the DC metro area is currently without power following some earlier storms.
The rest of the afternoon was spent unpacking, doing laundry, calling Comcast to fix a billing error that resulted from my move to the new apartment in early June (it only took 1.5 hours and seven Comcast people to solve the problem). After a while we walked over to Chipotle and brought back some burritos to eat while watching Blade Runner -- which, by the way, is a super weird movie. We picked it because we both knew the name but had never seen it, and we'd hoped it would be in the vein of the Matrix movies. Nope. It was creepy and moody and very 1980s (Vangelis!). There were some nice elements, particularly the film noir parts. But still very weird.
Oh well. Now to bed. I think we're going to get up early tomorrow to go to the beach. I need to see if I can't get some sort of tan before going back to work on Monday. After all, I need to have something to show for all this vacation!
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