"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land." – G. K. Chesterton

Twelve days ago, give or take a few hours, I arrived home. Or rather, what is supposed to be my home. It's the same place I left four months earlier with the same buildings, same people, and same situations. Yet somehow, despite being almost exactly the same from how I left it, I'm not sure it still feels like home. Reverse culture shock definitely plays a part in what all of us are going through. There's confusion over driving, measuring systems, language, even handling American money. It's not home that changed, it's me.

One speech at the closing ceremony summed up what we all felt really well. He told us all that saying a study abroad experience "changed your life" is both clichéd and not enough to describe the semester. His example was that he could say Avatar changed his life, so it's wrong to say study abroad did the same because they are in no way equivalent experiences. Yet I know I have changed and my outlook on life has done the same.

Being home just doesn't seem right or normal. Two weeks ago I was on another continent, in another country, and worrying about a volcano which would potentially not let me fly home. And while I'm glad I wasn't stranded due to the volcano, I wish I had been able to stay there longer. Maybe not Denmark specifically, but Europe. There's a sense of excitement when you're in a country where you don't understand exactly what's going on all the time. Frustration definitely is there too, but it's a completely different set of challenges. My biggest decisions at home are whether to work out, what to eat, and what to do next with Pokemon (don't mock, it's important).

In trying to figure out how to approach this entry, I Googled travel quotes and came up with a few which I think describe what I went through and what I'm going through now pretty accurately. The best is the one I chose for the title, but these others are also good:

"No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow." – Lin Yutang

"Travel is glamorous only in retrospect." – Paul Theroux

"Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white." – Mark Jenkins

"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page." – St. Augustine

My only real consolation to being in the US is that in four days, my application to the Peace Corps is reactivated. Despite submitting in March, I have to wait until one year to my earliest departure date (June 2011) before they will start processing my application. So if all goes well, in one week this blog will fully make the transition from a study abroad blog to a Peace Corps applicant blog. And in one year, I will be preparing to spend 27 months in a foreign country and influencing the lives of those people as well as my own. Here's hoping anyway.