I'm back in Canada (Vancouver) for 2 days before heading to California for a week. First impressions on being back in North America after 3 months in the Philippines:
- everyone speaks English and I can understand the conversations going on around me
- Vancouver is so clean
- Vancouver is so grey and cold
- Vancouver is so quiet - no one is honking their horn
- the cars drive so fast and they stay in their lane, and indicate before changing lanes
- there's no bottled water in the hotel because you can drink the water from the tap. Honestly, I spent at least a minute looking for bottled water in my room, before I figured it out. I put that down to an 11 hour flight and 16 hour timezone difference, but did laugh at myself
- as I write this, I'm eating shellfish and salad without worrying about the possible after-effects. Thanks be for my iron gut, I've not yet had the dreaded traveller's diarrhea or food poisoning, but apparently it's just a matter of time in the Philippines
- I can order a glass of white wine and it's not warm before I finish drinking it
- the hotel restaurant is big and mostly empty and it's not because the food isn't wonderful
- there's only 1 server and 1 busboy for the entire restaurant (instead of 5 or 6) and the server checked to see how I was enjoying the food
It's great to be back. I've been quite homesick for the last couple of weeks, knowing that I would soon be back in North America. I plan to enjoy every minute I'm here, especially the time with family. But I also know I won't be sad to be heading back to the Philippines on January 3.
