I've been back about a week now. Slowly I'm getting over my re-entry shock. In some ways going to Vienna was part of the re-entry process. It was a city I'd been to 3 years ago, so some places were familiar to me, including the hostel I was staying at and the Turkish restaurant around the corner. Vienna was far bigger than any of the locales I'd visited, much more crowded, and more diverse (though it was still nothing compared with home or other Western European cities). And in some ways the whole trip came together there - Austria once controlled the Balkans, and the Turkish food I ate was a reminder that Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire) was once a colonial ruler as well. I was a bit overwhelmed by Vienna, though, after having traveled primarily through small, less developed and less crowded places for the past couple of months.

Coming home for me is, like for most travelers, a weird feeling. You're no longer moving from city to city, thinking about your departure almost as soon as you arrive, sleeping in a different room with complete strangers every few nights, meeting new people from different countries, getting used to new languages. As soon as I come home, I'm already suffering travel withdrawls, even though I was probably exhausted by the end of the trip and didn't want to carry my rucksack any longer. 

The past week has been spent re-adjusting to my old routine. Almost immediately, I threw myself back into the life I'd left behind for two months - sleeping in my own bed, catching up with friends, books and DVDs, getting my fix of chow fun, Szechuan fish, Zachary's Chicago deep dish pizza, cheese rolls and granola from the Cheeseboard, red mole tacos, guacamole, and horchata, cooking some Pad Thai, picking up some Ben & Jerry's cookie dough ice cream, shopping at Trader Joe's, and going back to my favorite haunts. Summer hasn't quite arrived - it's still warmer in Vienna than Berkeley and I feel ready for it already. And as always, I've already started thinking about my next trip. I'm planning on taking a short trip to Seattle and Vancouver and possibly Colorado at the end of the summer, but next year I will most likely be going to South America - Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. And of course, as always, I'm excited about it already - the more I read about it, the more I want to go right now. But for the moment, I'll have to focus on writing about my most recent trip and getting a job for the summer.