live. move. be.

After three amazing months overseas, I am back. It has been quite an insane journey to get here!

Let me start Monday, 7 AM. That's when I woke up in Inverness, and I didn't really fully sleep again until 4 AM Wednesday morning in North Carolina. I took a bus back to Glasgow (which was beautiful and rather cold, in the thick snow) then packed like crazy all afternoon. It was a pretty amazing feat to cram everything from three months back into a few bags in a matter of about 4 hours. I locked up my room and headed over with all my bags to my friend's apartment to hang out for my last night.

Then at 9 PM, I received an email from British Airways, informing me that my flight to London at 7 AM the next morning had been canceled. Since my flight to America was flying out of London Heathrow at 12:00, I was essentially stranded in Glasgow. I was very thankful to be surrounded by a few good friends, because if I was alone I probably would have been twenty times more panicked and freaked out. My amazing friends consoled me with many cups of tea, Indian takeout food, and helping me call multiple airlines and travel agencies. After hours of being on the phone with ridiculously unhelpful people, we finally booked me a new, very expensive flight to London out of Edinburgh that flew out at 6:00 AM...meaning we had to drive about an hour and a half to Edinburgh at 3:30 AM, so we were essentially awake all night. At the airport, I was told that this flight (which was the only thing I could get at the last minute after BA canceled) would charge me eight pounds for every extra kilo of weight over 20 kilos, so I ended up paying over $300 dollars just to check my bags.

I landed at Heathrow at 8:00, and it took me three hours just to clear security. I finally flew out at 12, had a pretty sleepless flight, and landed in Chicago at 3:00 (American time), where it was POURING snow. My flight out of Chicago got delayed at least 4 times, meaning that I was stuck in O'Hare airport for six long, miserable hours until I could finally fly out about 10:00 PM. The airport was crowded, hot, and full of angry people whose flights had been cancelled and delayed...not really the kind of place you want to camp out for 6 hours. I finally arrived in Greensboro about 12:30 AM, and at home close to 4:00....

.....meaning I had been travelling almost 30 hours by the time I got home, and had been awake (besides a minor nap on the plane) for over 48 hours straight. I was nearly delirious. I slept for 14 hours today, and woke up around 5:30 PM. Needless to say, I'm feeling just a bit crazy right now. It's 11:00 PM as I'm typing this, but in Glasgow it's 4:00 AM, and that's still how I feel....like I should be asleep in Scotland.

I am very happy to see my family and to be safely home, but at the moment I just feel incredibly overwhelmed and sad and strange. You never cry that much when you actually say goodbye to people, because it feels like you're just going to see them again the next day.....it's when you actually get home that you realize they're really half the world away and just like that, they're gone, and in an instant, you're living a different life. It all becomes real, and that's when the tears finally come.