Second Day Back Home

  1. I can't quite remember where things are at the grocery store.
  2. This morning, I ate peanut butter for the first time in 5 weeks.
  3. Jet lag is For Real. My brain is only half-working most of the time.
  4. Everyone around me seems to be speaking English. Whah?
  5. But when I do hear Spanish, my first thought is that it's Italian.
  6. There aren't any big piles of old rocks around here that we call "ancient ruins."
  7. We were walking 8-10 miles a day, abroad. My legs feel brawny. Not quite sure a treadmill or walking 8-10 miles in a Chicago winter will be possible for me, but I will miss all that walking.
  8. Early Christianity came alive for me in a way I never expected in Jerusalem, Jordan, and in Rome.
  9. The three (3) people who recognized the Chicago flag patch on my backpack this trip: (a) an older Palestinian man in Jerusalem, on his way to Friday prayer at al-Aqsa, who told me he'd lived off Fullerton for many years, (b) female employee of the Chicago Police Department who ran into me at St. John Lateran, Rome, looking for Constantine, and (c) a French-speaking teenage boy with a Bulls cap, on our flight from Rome to Paris.
  10. So much happened to us in the past five weeks - just in what we saw, experienced, and thought about. It's hard to process it all.