Travel Day 801 – Detmold, GERMANY
After more than two years of travelling it was a bit strange to be at home with parents, but on the other hand my mind didn’t really register what was going on anyway and so I felt like I was still travelling for many days to come…
Grey Sky and lack of Colors in Greymany
While I would normally use the term Arrival Day to settle-in after arriving at a new place, here I didn’t really have to settle in because everything was familiar, but it actually took me many Arrival Days to be fully there. This was especially true because I was just visiting my home and still lived my role as spectator rather than as participator. Since I tried to take only photos and leave nothing but footprints behind, my involvement had always been rather limited in many countries…
So naturally during my Arrival Days I decided to continue observing my immediate environment. What struck me first when I arrived in Germany was obviously the big change in climate, but what came next, pretty unexpectedly was the complete lack of colors. For some reason everything seemed to be extremely grey. Besides the grey sky, all the cars were either black or grey and all the people were dressed in dark colors only. As a friend stated who arrived on the same plane with me from India, it was the arrival in Greymany…
Even if I was wearing dark colors myself since it turned out to be the most practical for travelling, I still felt I was not quite fitting in with everyone else. On the one hand I was still having a bit of a tan and not being equally as pasty pale as everyone else, but more importantly, I felt I was walking around with a smile. Everyone else around me did not really seem to see a good reason to display some form of happiness or was just not in the mood for smiling…
That was especially true for people like the guy in front of me at the cashier in the local supermarket, who turned around and gave me a grumpy speech about his personal space. I had pushed his items on the conveyor belt together so I could fit my things on there as well, but he absolutely did not like that. So he made very sure to tell me that the space between the two sticks on the belt was his and he did not wish me to encroach on it…
At first I was in shock that someone could actually think like that and even tell other people about it, but then I thought that this whole incident was rather amusing. At least one thing was for sure: I was definitely back home in Good Old Grumpy Greymany and it would probably take me quite a few more Arrival Days to fully settle-in and overcome the local Culture Shock… : )
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