My family is intense: intensely funny, intensely loving, intensely thoughtful and intensely loud. Despite the majority of my life thus far having been spent in the same household, being in their presence nowadays is the exception rather than the rule, and reuniting typically feels like setting off aerial fireworks in the living room. To give an illustrative example of the trip, I wound up playing Cards Against Humanity at three different times, and I never once won.
My Dutch life is awfully quiet by comparison (although my friends here are known to play politically incorrect cards games fairly regularly), which is mostly a really nice thing, but I love my family for that intensity, and I recognize so many ways in which I am a product of that environment in myself and my siblings. It's weird and it's heavy to be so far away, and it is both in spite of and because of the strong emotions that going home evokes that I will always do just that, but I do remain hopeful as always that the folks I love the most will return the favor and fly over here so that they can see what life is like here in this parallel universe of my own making, too. Having a camera in hand made sure that I was able to stop and focus for at least a few hundredths of a second at a time in the whirlwind of it all.
My Dutch life is awfully quiet by comparison (although my friends here are known to play politically incorrect cards games fairly regularly), which is mostly a really nice thing, but I love my family for that intensity, and I recognize so many ways in which I am a product of that environment in myself and my siblings. It's weird and it's heavy to be so far away, and it is both in spite of and because of the strong emotions that going home evokes that I will always do just that, but I do remain hopeful as always that the folks I love the most will return the favor and fly over here so that they can see what life is like here in this parallel universe of my own making, too. Having a camera in hand made sure that I was able to stop and focus for at least a few hundredths of a second at a time in the whirlwind of it all.
After a bit more than a week in North Carolina, Elger and I headed up to Toronto, Canada to spend the tail end of our North American trip with two of our closest friends, Inge and Helen. We were basically tourists, being drawn to Niagara Falls (and all the Vegas-like trappings that surround it) and chasing views of the CN Tower all over the sprawling city. The Pan Am Games were being held there during our visit, so sails and public transport were all getting in on the action.
