Barb and Baden’s Excellent Return to Germany – Final #2

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Awake

It's just after 2AM and we have been home in Vancouver for about 12 hours. As of about 20 minutes ago, I'm officially awake. Of course while the clock says 2:21 my body is convinced that it's 9 hours further ahead on German time at 11:21 in the morning.

This is all quite normal and as it has been for the past few years us waking up in the middle of the night will continue on for about a week. As you might imagine it makes going back to work a bit inconvenient because not only are we waking up about 3 hours earlier than we normally should but around the late afternoon we will start falling asleep as it will be around midnight according to our bodies.

What we've noticed is that the amount of recovery time that we need to get over the jet lag has gotten much worse over the past 10 years. I seem to recall that we could come home and within 2 days be back to normal. I really hope that this trend doesn't get worse and worse over the years to come.

Today is Tuesday and I normally take the day after we come home off work to recover but in Barb's case she did not do this so for her it will be a working day. The last time I attempted going back to work the very next day after coming home was when we went to Italy in 2006 and I swore never to make that mistake again.

Our return flight back home from Berlin was uneventful. The only point of interest is that when we got back to the Vancouver airport and went through immigration we were directed into this special lineup where we used a self-serve kiosk to scan our passports and declaration form. The woman said that they had just installed these about a month ago and were trying them out. About half of the people who were in front of us put their declaration form in the slot and it got completely mangled so there was a guy running around fixing the machines so it was much slower than they probably wanted it to be.

Normal Food

One of the biggest things that we both look forward to after eating in restaurants for almost three weeks is eating normal food again. By that I mean eating home cooked food but also not constantly having to wait at the end of the meal to get the bill and pay. All of that was quite interesting and fun for the first few weeks but this one issue is where I really get the most tired of when we are on vacation. Barb and I have always talked about one day going to a place for a longer time – say a month or more and stay in an apartment instead of a hotel. I think that doing this where you could really live as a local and shop for groceries in the markets and cook at home could be really a great way to experience the local culture in ways that we never could by just staying in hotels.

Thanks to everyone who sent emails to us while we were in Germany. I'll sign off until our next trip. It's 3:00 and I'm sure that there's something on TV.

 

Baden