No place like home

There is something in the water, there is something in the air. And in the food for that matter. It's all different here.

Being home is busy, but lazy. I try to do all those things like relaxing and being helpful and getting work and reading done and I fail miserably. My Mum even plans work so that the important things  get done before I get here. Otherwise they don't get done as my presence makes everyone (and especially my Mum) lazy. But somehow it's ok and it's a part of it now.

My dreadlocks are apparently still a novelty here. The woman queuing behind me to get on the plane told her grandson to sit as far as possible from me once on the plane so that he doesn't catch something. What was he going to catch, good manners? The lady on the plane on the other hand was super interested in the dreads and was asking lots of questions. In Ukrainian or maybe it was Slovak?  Anyways, I don't really speak either of those, so it was an interesting exchange where we just talked at each other using our respective languages. Once I got home I had a slightly less pleasant experience - I made a boy crash his bike. He cycled past me and kept looking at my hair while cycling ahead, then run over a cat, crashed his bike and scraped the hell out of himself. I felt bad. Generally people still stare and whisper, I thought that they would be used to it by now. Oh well. I'll take the whispers as compliments, bad press better than no press, right? Put some controversy into their lives!

I also watch lots of older and cheesy movies, usually the ones I've seen before - which I try to avoid otherwise, as there are still so many movies I want to see. We have a whole list of movies we watch when I get back. This is caused partially by the fact that the same movies are on tv over and over again and it's just easy this way. And partially by the fact that my Mum has her favourites and Dad "has never seen that movie before". It doesn't matter what movie we are talking about and how many times we watched it together, he just hasn't seen it.

Food is different too. Great home cooking. Not to mention that we have a garden and so a bit of our own, fresh and really good produce. It's great to be able to get outside and water some plants, to pick strawberries, raspberries or tomatoes, to sit down under a tree and pick on sunflower seeds from a whole sunflower head.

I also get to plan and dream and talk through all those weird and silly ideas I have. I can do it knowing that it doesn't matter whether I go through with it or not, whether it works out or not, whether I change my mind, give up, or come up with something different. I rarely get specific advice, more of the "it's your life, do what you want" sort of thing, but even then it's good to know that the family is supportive no matter what I do and no matter how weird and silly it is. And I've been testing them over the past 10 years with more and more ridiculous ideas. They either became immune to the craziness or figured that there is no point in trying to change my mind and it's easier to wait it out. Whatever the reason, I'm glad. It's both refreshing and reassuring.

Being home is great, even if I don't get much done. Even if it's not super exciting. It's great, because it's so different, but so familiar. There is just no place like home.