Home Sweet Home

I just arrived in Burlington a few hours ago and can happily report I survived my trip. My computer is mysteriously working again. I'm not terribly optimistic this trend will continue, although I can envision a scenario that looks something like this: My computer gets terribly homesick and, like a small child, doesn't have a way to tell me this. Instead of engaging in productive dialogue about how it misses English-speaking computers, it instead throws a fit and ignores all commands from me. Now we are home, it is behaving better.

During the trip home, I slept pretty much whenever the plane was in motion. I even slept through meals, which is a first. Plane food is rarely good, but once I got this delicious masala-and-mini-chapati dish on an Emirates flight that was actually spicy. As a result of this experience, I'm eternally hopeful. I also like looking at how it's all packaged, although that seems less ingenious post-Japan then it did before.

The hardest part of the trip was the UAE layover, which was around 17 hours. It was much too long to wait in the airport, but I had huge bags and there were no lockers in sight. This September, I'd rarely thought of the UAE as a beautiful place, but the cab ride from Dubai to Abu Dhabi proved to me just how beautiful it was at the time of year. It even looked as though it had rained recently and there were tons of flowers along the edge of the highway. I read three books while waiting in the Abu Dhabi airport and got rounds of Turkish coffee with a succession of Lebanese guys going home for Christmas.

When I finally landed in Vermont, there was snow all over the runway, which was lit up by low-lying indigo lights, Tokyo club style. There must be almost a foot of snow all over the ground. It feels really good to be home and see my parents. It's time for some horizontal sleeping now (the best kind), but I plan to write about Kyoto and Osaka tomorrowish.