New Book

SLS, a great friend/old roommate got me Bill Bryson's "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" for my birthday and it is literally laugh out loud funny. The book is about Bryson's return to the US after living in the UK for 20 years and while my abroad experience will never be that long I can definitely relate to many of his feelings. Here is my favorite quote so far:

The many good things about America also took on a bewitching air of novelty. I was as dazzled as any newcomer by the famous ease and convenience of daily life, the giddying abundance of absolutely everything, the boundless friendliness of strangers, the wondrous unfillable vastness of an American basement, the delight of encountering waitresses and other service providers who actually seemed to enjoy their work, the curiously giddying notion that ice is not a luxury item and that rooms can have more than one electrical socket.

As well, there has been the constant, unexpected joy of reencountering all those things I grew up with but had largely forgotten: baseball on the radio, the deeply satisfying 'whoing-bang' slam of a screen door in the summer, insects that glow, sudden run-for-your-life thunderstorms, really big snowfalls, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, the smell of a skunk from just the distance that you have to sniff the air quizzically and say: "Is that a skunk?", Jell-O with stuff in it, the pleasingly comical sight of oneself in shorts. All that counts for a lot, in a strange way.
::bill bryson

Can't wait to go home again...