the real kaz: Home Swede Home

written August 30, 2009

Scandinavian trip in a nutshell: Incredible. There is far too much to say about the last three weeks of my life to fit it all into a manageable and still entertaining blog post. Over the past three weeks I experienced nearly every emotion known to man. Happy. Sad. Overwhelmed. Angry. Peaceful. Excited. The list goes on. It took me a while to recognize, but Kazakhstan had hardened me. I stepped off that plane in Stockholm with a different outlook on life than I had a year ago and with really no clue how to manage it.

The Cliff Notes version of my trip to Scandinavia:

Toured an old Swedish castle, took an evening jazz cruise in Stockholm, stood in a 14th century Swedish church in the countryside watching my best friend from college marry the man of her dreams, got stuck in a rain storm on a canal cruise in Copenhagen, sat in the backseat of a car with two great friends from America watching the Swedish countryside flying by, stood in an Ice Bar with flip-flops, a parka and winter gloves drinking a cocktail served out of a block of ice on a bar also made entirely of ice, saw the Copenhagen skyline flying by beneath my feet from an amusement park ride at Tivoli, had a traditional Danish meal with two remarkably hospitable Danish friends, buried my face in laundry fresh out of the dryer, made new friends in Stockholm who did a great job of convincing me that Sweden should be the next destination for my life, sat in a one-room cottage with 20 other wedding guests singing 'Oh When The Saints' to the tunes of an amazing trumpet and guitar player, got upgraded to Business Class and ate chocolate chip ice cream and fried gambas (prawns, bet you didn't know that) on a bed of mango, bell pepper and coconut salad, watched the latest Harry Potter (in English!) in a real movie theater, ate Thai, Indian, Italian, Japanese and Mexican cuisines not to mention approximately 7 or 8 hamburgers/chicken burgers, spent several mornings running around a lake on winding forest paths listening to amazing music and breathing fresh air, took several hot baths with absolutely no shame when my hands and feet were long beyond pruny.

Some of my expectations for this trip were absolutely shattered and others were far beyond what I could have expected. Unfortunately, for me, this wasn't just a vacation to Scandinavia like it would have been two years ago. The whole experience turned out to be as much about me being a Peace Corps Volunteer as it was being a tourist. Separating my life in Central Asia from this experience proved nearly impossible. Nothing in my life is certain right now, nothing except these 27 months spent serving in the country of Kazakhstan. When you spend 12 months of your life experiencing and adapting to very little that resembles ‘normal’ it’s hard, I found, to instantaneously bring yourself back to the ‘real world’ and not bring a lot of that baggage with you.

A friend of mine commented that it seemed as though I was incapable of being in a conversation that didn't revolve around my life in Kazakhstan. At first, of course, I was shocked and appalled. And of course, I hope there was bit of exaggeration in the claim, but, the more I thought about it, I realized that he probably has a point. I spent a lot of time in my head these past three weeks and it was impossible to deny the fact that Kazakhstan, if absolutely nothing else, has changed my daily realities. When almost every aspect of a once-familiar life begins to feel foreign, I suppose one option is to resort to talking about things that you are familiar with – for me, Kazakhstan. I've changed in a lot of little (and some not-so-little) ways since I left California last August. Some of them, like this, seem to be the temporary, consequences-of-the-job type that I hope to correct or overcome during this experience, or in its aftermath. Others, I hope will stick with me for a long time to come.

Of course I didn’t spend the entire time imprisoned by my own overactive thoughts. It’s a bold claim, but under the circumstances, I think it’s reasonably safe to say that this trip to Scandinavia was by far the most amazing vacation I’ve been on. Leaving Stockholm was one of the hardest things I’ve had to force myself to do in quite some time, and returning to Kazakhstan has definitely presented it’s share of challenges (but, more on those later). Now it’s just letting my family and friends in California try to convince me that when this is all said and done that I should be heading home and not to Sweden…