"It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed is you."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
I recently came back from my first, two-week overseas trip to visit family in the Philippines where pretty much everything is different. From the traffic to the ‘wet bathrooms’, it would take one a while to get used to it and not miss the American way of doing things. It was a cool trip but by the end I was ready to go home where the sunset shines on fields of corn and cicadas chirp in the background.
Before I went on this trip I’ve always been a little bit of a cynic about some parts of American culture. I’ve never really been patriotic or understood why some were so much. But while I was over in the rural part of the Philippines where we ate rice with every meal and drove past handmade shacks and ragged dogs, I started to miss eating eggs and bacon for breakfast and seeing the Great Rocky Mountains. I like to call the bathrooms there, ‘all-in-one bathrooms.’ As part of the Filipino culture, they have ‘wet bathrooms’ where basically the entire room is just one big shower. The toilet and sink are still in there of course – they just get wet whenever you decide to take a shower.
I usually don’t go into politics but I feel like maybe for someone to be a good president, they need to become a regular, middle-class citizen and travel to the real part of a foreign country, not just some tourist resort. They need to spend a couple of weeks there so that they can experience everything, and then come back to the U.S. – then they will know how awesome this country is and how to run it properly to keep it’s values true.
There are many other things I like to talk about from the trip, but to sum it all up, I now understand why besides the war, U.S. soldiers are so eager to come home after deployment. You really can’t beat summer evening cookouts out in the country, or hiking in the Rocky Mountains. When I handed my passport over to a customs officer at the airport on my way back home, he stamped it and said, “welcome home.” That was when I got goosebumps. That really meant a lot to me now that I have taken a huge step back and looked at America from the outside. Sometimes to see how great something is, you just need to leave and look back on it.
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