Travel makes you appreciate the rest of the world more
What am I saying?
The title should really say travel makes you appreciate home more!
I left for my month-long vacation with a side-thought not far from my mind: would I like to request a transfer to work in any of the places I visited. It was an interesting way to travel - not only was I checking out the regular tourist sites, I thought about the pros and cons of various places.
While my internal jury is still out on where I'd like to end up, I found that I was looking at all the places I visited with a different sort of critical eye. Did a zany transport system and eclectic street life appeal to me?
How much insanity could I tolerate?
And perhaps most importantly, was I really getting a fair and accurate picture of cities with a visit that only lasted a couple of days?
No doubt I only got part of the picture - a fact which was reinforced by meeting a friend who had just transferred over to a European office. There were yet more issues that I had never even thought of that came up - the bureacracy you deal with when showing up for work in a foreign country can be ridiculously complicated, so you have to plan for various contingencies.
All those details aside, two overarching ideas stayed in my mind.
First, I need to figure out whether I simply like travelling once in a while or whether I really want to be posted abroad for an extended commitment? I'm still leaning towards a posting, but the decision is, if anything, even trickier now.
Second, looking at the other towns - their smells and aromas, their pretty parks or abject lack of green space - made me appreciate home so much more. You may think the grass is greener on the other side, but our lawn is literally the greenest I saw anywhere.
The warm welcome I got back in the office from simply everyone I ran into made me glad to be back. As strange as it sounds, I was happy to be back in the office, even if it meant digging through 300 e-mails that had piled up while I was away.
Free toilets in public areas, trees and grass everywhere, a public transit system that, although simple is nevertheless rather super easy-to-understand - and full of escalators, thank goodness!
It's good to be home.