back where i started from

And it's over. My whole long country-hopping trip is finished. Well, not quite. We're in Surrey now, which is on the outskirts of London and very much in the countryside of England which is gorgeous. Next is Oxford because my dad's speaking at Oxford University. Then we're in Cambridge, which is where we'll be living for the next two months. I'll only be there for two or three days though, because then I'm taking a bus to Heathrow and flying out to Greece! Okay, so I still have a whole lot of traveling left. But no more driving for hours and hours in the backseat of a stick-shift car (only now do I realize my deep, abiding love for automatic...) no more new countries and languages and foods and ways of flushing the toilet every day, no more not knowing what to wear each day because of the weather changing from jeans and sweatshirts to shorts and tank tops in ways my brain doesn't comprehend. No more dashing to make trains and metros and pick up rental cars and pack five huge suitcases in the back of a tiny European van. No more snapping pictures as if your life depended on it. It was an amazing trip. Somehow I don't feel as if I'm the same person I was two and a half weeks ago...was it only two and a half weeks ago? I look back at me before we left my great aunt and uncle's house and feel like I'm looking back a great distance to someone I was long ago. Maybe this trip has changed me. I felt like it would. I almost wanted it to. Maybe when I go to Greece and see my friends I'll realize that I really am different after all that has happened. Not that I'm better because I've been around Europe, but that somehow God has used this trip to open my eyes to things beyond the places and the faces that I've seen, and now I'll look at normal life and at these friends I see and know regularly with true sight. Aghhh...why is it that sometimes I'll write things and they'll come out sounding so proud and so arrogant and so "I'm better than you.."? That is not what's in my heart. I just feel that God has taken me way out of my comfort zone with this trip - where I know no one outside my family, don't even know the language most of the time, walk miles and miles, don't have space or time or anything to myself - and has slapped me in the face with things bigger than all of that. If God can do that with a trip around Europe only for visiting family and sightseeing, what will he do in Greece?! Oh my goodness, I'm so excited. I can't wait to go there and see what God will do. Honestly, I don't know much at all about Greece as a country or what we're doing there (although I've been on two different World Changers trips before, just not out of North America...to Florida and Canada.) This is a good thing, I think, because I'm not expecting anything. God can just do whatever without me pushing something and insisting to myself that God wants me to learn this or do that.

And something else I've learned from traveling is to never underestimate stereotypes. I always thought stereotypes of Europeans were highly overexaggerated. I was wrong. Most of what you see in movies portraying Europeans...it's true. The French say "voila!" a LOT. You buy a tomato, they hand it to you with a "voila!" The English say "loads" and "quite" and "jolly good." The Germans stare. And they're all so quiet, so unlike Americans who talk and talk and are really rather loud compared to those in Europe. The attitudes, accents, phrases. The people here really do live up to a lot of the stereotypes! And sometimes it makes me laugh. Really hard. I have so many stories.

I also have a million thoughts that have been running through my head. Why is it that I cannot manage to put them down on paper or the computer and thereby put them to rest anymore?

But life is lovely and I'm counting down the days until I leave for Greece! It's a week from today! I have lost all sense of what time it is back in North Carolina, but here it's almost midnight. Which means bedtime for me because we're going to an old, old church here in Dorking tomorrow morning. I can't wait.