Born in the USA!

Yes, folks, I'm back for about 2 weeks in order to go to my bestest friend's, Bree, wedding in Dallas on the 9th.

After taking 3 long flights from Asuncion, Paraguay, to Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Mexico City, Mexico to Dallas, Texas...I have finally arrived. I left Paraguay at 5pm Dallas time on Wednesday and arrived in Dallas at about 12:30 in the afternoon on Thursday. I got to my parents' house, ate the still-warm apply pie that Grammy left me on the table, chatted for a bit, feel asleep, work again for a few hours, feel asleep for the rest of the night. Yes I was a little tired; I don't sleep on planes.

Adjusting to being in the US actually isn't bad. The first time I was out of the US for an extended period of time was when I studied abroad in Santiago, Chile. Santiago is a large city, but for some reason, dealing with the English was much more difficult, and I had a short incident whereupon I froze up after entering a Target.

This time around it wasn't too big of a deal. I went to Target, didn't freeze, though admittedly I did have to leave a little early because my heart was pounding. Have you ever seen those scenes in a movie with a person who can read minds, and they get overwhelmed because they understand everything and can't stop it?....It was kind of like that. In Paraguay I can easily block out people's conversations in Spanish or Guarani. I can easily ignore advertisements, random stuff written on walls, packages of stuff I'm not looking to buy. When when I got into Target I could read everything, understand every snipit of every conversation, without trying. After that Friday I got my zoning out threshold up to its proper English settings, and I was fine.

Another thing I noticed, umm, you all have really heavy accents. No, really. All of you. People in the PC have pretty neutral accents because we've mostly traveled all over. I only know of one guy, from South Carolina, who has an in-you-face accent. I was bowled over by how heavy most peoples' accents were. People who I thought had pretty neutral accents, well either I was wrong, or you have been watching too many repeats of Cops:Dallas ;) JK.

It wasn't a bad thing, it was actually kind of fun to hear it again. But I never noticed it before.