What unfamiliar places do to us
Soup for breakfast in Vietnam, and back home the German weather pulls you right back. On the holiday that fades.
In Vietnam I had soup for breakfast. With a coffee, strong and sweet, like nothing I had drunk before. Such a small moment, and yet it stayed with me.
We usually visit foreign places to go on holiday. To switch off, to forget the worries at home for a few days. And it works. The first days feel like a different life, and in Vietnam that was exactly the case.
Then came the return. What caught up with me was not some big drama, but something completely ordinary. The weather in Germany. Grey, cold, familiar. With the first grey morning the soup was far away and my head was back in the old groove.
What stays is the longing for the next time. At some point I noticed what the ratio actually looks like.
We live for 30 days of holiday and almost forget the other 335.
What Vietnam actually showed me
Travelling itself is not the problem, quite the opposite. What is interesting is what it reveals about the rest. If a bowl of soup in a foreign place feels freer than an ordinary Tuesday at home, then it is not about the soup.
Maybe it is not about more holiday, but about an ordinary grey morning in Germany feeling like my life too. I only know that I no longer want to see the 335 days as nothing more than a pause between two journeys.
Did this land?
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