filling up the passport...

Left London today to fly into Germany, where we'll be for the next week and a half.
It's my second time in Germany, although the first time around two years ago was mostly just a brief stop in the middle of a long train ride from Amsterdam to Prague. On that trip Germany seemed like a very foreign destination. Now, after six weeks in Asia and 14 months away from the States, Germany seems like a very easy place to travel. Sure, a lot of things aren't written in English (although quite a bit is). But at least you can figure out a bit of what is going on with German, or at least pretend you can, which is something you can't do with Chinese.

It's one aspect of a larger difference I'm noticing after a few months of solid traveling. On my first trips to Europe, and even when arriving in New Zealand, there was a serious feeling of displacement. Even London, on arrival after a long flight when you have`t been abroad, seems like a very foreign place. When I first got into London the jetlag and culture shock froze my brain; it took at least a day to even recognize the language people were speaking to me was English and I should be able to parse their meaning and perhaps even respond.
I haven't had quite as much of the displacement buzz when we've arrived at our last few destinations - probably not since Bangkok. Switching languages, surroundings and cultures is starting to seem like the ordinary manner of things, rather than a huge abrupt change requiring a serious mental effort to accommodate.
This is a good thing, I suppose, in that it means I've traveled around enough to deal with different environments much faster. But I do miss the feeling of arriving into a complete unknown. Not just the unknown of a place you haven't been, but the unknown of a mental shift and adjustment you haven't made anywhere before. Just landing in London that first time set off a buzz in my brain for a few days, and that's always fun.

One other downside to becoming used to traveling is being totally unprepared for jetlag. Before, jetlag was an excuse to explain the brain's inability to keep up with all the new input. When I arrived in London, since it didn't seem particularly daunting, I also expected my body to adjust as easily as my mind. My body had other ideas.
We left Beijing around 11 a.m. (which meant a 6:30 a.m. wakeup call). It was a 10-hour flight across seven time zones, so we landed around 2 p.m. It was a long period of daylight, and by the time we got to bed, our bodies were at about 4 a.m. although the clocks were at 9 p.m. I figured a sleep would put me right, but all week I felt a wave of fatigue hit in the late afternoon.