Yesterday, being home just felt weird.  It’s better now, having been back for a day and gotten caught up on some of my sleep, but getting back to my regular life just seems a little odd at the moment.

Driving home from the airport, and even going out for groceries yesterday, felt “lonely.”  I don’t know how else to describe it, and maybe it’s just my life or how our culture is.  For most of the last two weeks, I’ve been surrounded by people; granted, I couldn’t understand them most of the time, but they were everywhere.  From the earliest touches of dawn until the dark of night made streets impossible to walk (and given the lack of much street lighting, we’re only talking 9 or 10 pm), there were people out walking and working in both Odessa and Mariupol.  Yet, when I think of my drive to the grocery store yesterday at around 10 am, I don’t recall passing more than a couple people walking or biking.

Yes, it was still fairly early on a Sunday morning, but I couldn’t help but contrast the difference between here and there.  Just the week before, in Odessa at nearly the same time of day, there were already dozens of people in City Park and Sobornaya Square.  There were already vendors set up and doing business, and there were already visitors taking their pictures with the “seated man” statue.  Here, a week later, almost nothing.  Yes, my comparison is inexact — my neighborhood in the boonies to the main tourist area of an old European city — but would I see the same type of life in downtown Portland at the same time of day?  I don’t know.

Life in Ukraine does seem simpler.  Culturally, the expectations of the people are different, and so are the means of achieving those expectations.  “Doing something” for a person in Mariupol might just mean taking a walk, nothing more; I don’t know if the same would be true for me.  Many places in Ukraine had small rides and similar amusements for the kids, many year-round.  From an economic standpoint, there is probably no value to these rides — indeed, they probably operate at a loss all the time — but time and again I would see the train ride running with only one child aboard.  A walk to the neighborhood park, a couple hrivnya, and everyone is having a good day.

Travel does broaden the mind, and seeing this [former] second-world country (I know they wish to be a first-world nation, but they aren’t quite there yet) up close — even with the brief time and brief sampling I had — is something my mind will be processing for a while.  I know that in just a very few days, as the normalcy of my life returns, everything from the past two weeks will begin to fade and become just a memory of something I did, once.  I hope I hold on to something purposeful and meaningful from this time.

I said from the outset that this would be an adventure, and it was.  It was months in making, nerve-wracking, confusing, hot, different, tiring, amazing, memorable — everything an adventure should be.  It was a learning experience, not just of a country of which I knew very little, but also of the whole process of preparation and travel.

So only two questions remain:  was it worth it, and would I do it again?  I think, absolutely yes, on both counts.