Our plane landed at LAX on time at 10am on the morning of Tuesday, June 8th. It was a long and uneventful flight – which I guess is a good thing. Ashlee managed to fitfully sleep most of the way while I chewed through a reel of in-flight movies, you know, just catching up on the happenings in Hollywood. After disembarking, clearing immigration, and retrieving our baggage we were greeted with an hour-long wait to get through a completely unorganized and inefficient customs check – ha, I guess Mongolia doesn’t have a monopoly on mind-numbing bureaucracy, which is something that we have forgotten in the past year. While waiting in line I heard something that made me think my 30+ hours without sleep was driving me crazy: spoken Mongolian! After shaking my head a few times, I looked over and sure enough there was a customs official speaking to a woman who kept shaking her head and saying “I don’t know” in Mongolian. The customs guy was trying to ask the woman if she brought any food with her – he seemed to know that Mongolians like to travel with meat – but the lady just didn’t understand. Fortunately, even with my feeble Mongolian language skills I was able to help translate – much to the surprise of the customs agent who incredulously asked me, “YOU speak Mongolian?” It felt nice to be able to help – and in such a practical way.
Once cleared through customs, we found both sets of our parents eagerly waiting for us just outside the terminal. Although we hadn’t seen any of them in exactly a year, Facebook, active blogging, and weekly Skype video chats really took away a lot of the anxiety and nervous emotion over our reunion – I can only imagine what it must have been like for PCVs thirty years ago to return home after being practically incommunicado at their sites. So yeah, it was really that easy – with a round of hugs, a drive across the Southland, and an amazingly delicious meal (complete with fresh guacamole) at our favorite Mexican restaurant, we just slipped right back into the swing of things here in America. It just felt so natural.
I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t a little worried about the transition back to life in America. We had heard plenty of stories of PCVs dealing with reverse culture shock – some humorous (like forgetting that pretty much everyone around you speaks and understands English so that when you brazenly point out to your friend that the man next to you is wearing a pink fanny-pack, the man knows what you’re saying) and some a little more serious (like coping with the fact that while we are VIPs in Mongolia, in America we are really nothing exceptional). So yeah, we were prepared for the worst – which is why we were so surprised at how easy it was to adjust. Sure, there were a few things that gave us pause like the big cars, the nice smooth roads, and the fact that we understood 90% of the conversations that took place around us. There were several other small things that reminded us that we weren’t in Olgii anymore: (1) grossly overweight people; (2) nice, clean, and well-stocked bathrooms with adequate plumbing that allowed for the flushing of toilet paper; (3) ubiquitous trash cans; (4) cars and drivers that gave pedestrians the right-of-way – completely unheard of Mongolia; and (5) safe and reliable electricity. These were all just small things, though. I don’t think we encountered anything that completely overwhelmed us and there certainly wasn’t anything that made us miss life in Mongolia, which is another thing we have heard said by multiple volunteers who made trips home – we now know that they are all just crazy.
So yeah, we were back in southern California for exactly three weeks, which we pretty much split evenly between our three sets of parents – thankfully everyone lives within about 30 miles of each other. The first week of our stay was spent in my hometown of Walnut. My mother, I think in a not-so-subtle attempt to entice us to stay in America, had pretty much turned the entire back section of the house into a hotel. Everything from the new bed sheets and down comforter, the fresh linen, the huge tv, the large stack of recently released DVDs, and the giant bottle of Jack Daniel’s and case of coke just said, “Welcome home!” My parents took us shopping and outfitted us in California threads (it was amazing stuffing away our fleeces and waterproof shoes in favor of t-shirts and sandals), they threw us a party catered with our favorite foods so we could catch up with friends and family, and they even took us to Lake Havasu, where our pasty bodies finally got to soak up some sun – not that it really gave our permanently white skin any real color.
We split the next two weeks between Ashlee’s folks. At Ashlee’s mom’s house we got to celebrate two academic milestones: Ashlee’s youngest sister, Annie, promoted out of middle school and her other sister, Alyssa, graduated high school. Both ceremonies were a far cry from the graduation my own school back in Olgii put on in May. In an unfortunate twist of fate, Alyssa’s graduation ceremony took place at the exact time that the Lakers were playing the Celtics in Game 7 of the NBA Finals – there were definitely lots of people in the crowd glued to their smart phones.
Over the rest of the those two weeks we took multiple trips to the beach (which was glorious), Ashlee got to pay homage to the mall, I ate sandwiches and drank Jack-and-Cokes to my heart’s delight, we played all sorts of Wii, and we got to visit one of our favorite places, Disneyland, TWICE! Although the park was a little crowded with early summer rushes, both visits were awesome – I mean how much better can life get when you’re eating corn dogs, churros, and ice cream sandwiches? Actually, maybe a little better if we got to the jalapeno cheese pretzels and pineapple whips that we were eyeing, but alas, our stomachs could only hold so much. Ah, who am I kidding – if Ashlee had let me I would have eaten it all.
At Ashlee’s dad’s house we were again treated like royalty. We pretty lounged around all morning watching tv and playing Wii before meeting Ashlee’s dad and stepmom for lunch and then again for dinner. In the evening we were kept entertained with movies, both in the theater and from the video store – did you know that Blockbuster stores are closing left and right? Some of the highlights of our trip occurred on our last weekend in town. Ashlee and I treated ourselves to a date at our favorite Italian restaurant (the same place where I proposed, in fact) and then her grandparents took us to an Angels game. Sadly, the Angels lost, which shattered Ashlee because she was convinced that she was the team’s good luck charm – they have won every game she has watched in the past. Mongolia must have sucked the luck right out of her. Just kidding, Mongolia. We also got to visit with Ashlee’s cousin, who made a trip out from Vegas with her husband and new baby. Only a couple years older than us, they are definitely full-fledged adults now complete with a house and a kid!
I guess the thread that really wove our entire vacation together was food. We ate it frequently and in great quantities. We ate at home, in the car, and in restaurants – fast ones, decent ones, and nice ones. I was like a hobbit – breakfast, second breakfast, brunch, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, and supper. It was no surprise, then, that over the three weeks I put on at least 10 pounds and I went up 2 belt notches. It was amazing.
Looking back, we have absolutely no regrets about making this trip back home. Again, we have heard from other volunteers that have regretted such trips home. Some PCVs discovered that during their time away they romanticized their notion of America and going home just reminded them of all their reasons for leaving in the first place. Others have told us that they found the quick pace of American life too daunting and they were in a rush to get back to the relative slowness of Mongolia. Needless to say, we didn’t have that problem. Of course, thinking about it now, these kinds of comments seem to come from the type of PCVs who are intent on living lives abroad. There are several people we know who, for various reasons, have no plans in the immediate future to return to America. We’re not part of that group. We have realized how much we like living in America. I mean, we certainly have our share of issues with ‘merica, but we have definitely come to appreciate it.
If anything, our three weeks back in California were just what we needed to gain some perspective to help us through our second year. You see, at times our first year in Mongolia felt like ten years. Time just seemed to move so slow and it felt like we were missing so many things that were happening back home. Once we got home, however, we realized that it was indeed only one year and that, no, we did not miss much. I can’t count the number of times we bumped into someone and had them say, “Wow, it’s already been a year?” Already?!? So yeah, it helped us build some perspective that even though our second year in Mongolia may go slow (hopefully not as slow as last year) it will only be a year and we will be able to slip right back into American life just like we did a few weeks ago. Phew.
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