day 1 - travelin' man

Sitting here in Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport… I can’t help but feel like this is all incredibly surreal… not made any easier by the higher-end-IKEA like surroundings of the airport, coupled with the fact that I arrived here at 7:30am (local time) on a SUNDAY and thus it’s rather desolate… aside from the working patisserie three gates down and the roving band of, apparently omni-present, Asian tour groups heading to Bergen, Germany.  There’s just something slightly off about walking into a bookstall and having NO clue what any of the titles say, but noting that every “culture” magazine appears to have pictures of William and Kate’s wedding, or Taylor Swift, or that the duty-free prominently displays wares by Ralph Lauren or Kentucky Bourbon (Jim Beam… I’d have been REALLY impressed had it been Woodford Reserve).

It was a smooth, easy flight, and the lack of any movies I wanted to see made it great for reading and pouring through the tourbook of Prague that I’d hardly had time to crack. I’m quickly realizing that there’s no way I’m going to get to see everything I want to see and do while I’m here. I’ve got my wishlist and will pack in every moment I can… not often a midwestern bumpkin like myself gets such an opportunity… but there’s something equally inspiring and unapologetically frightening about being “the other”. Even on the plane… surrounded by Caucasians as far as the eye could see (and almost ALL blond… strange), it was still a little bit of a ‘mind-catch’ to realize that I was entirely outnumbered by people who speak Swedish… a language that sounds beautiful when spoken but couldn’t be more foreign to me. … the utter silliness of Utgang (gate) or Hjartstartare (Defibrillator). The relative lack of connection to the Latin language group… root words and basic structures are so completely different, and the same can be said for the Czech language too…

Now if I could just get a little more sleep…. It’s 2am Chicago-time, 9am here in Stockholm (same timezone for Prague), so I’ll be getting into Prague noon, local time, but my body will be saying that it’s 5am… methinks this is going to be a VERY long day for my body…..