Setting foot on European ground

Many days have passed since leaving Tenerife, and for the last four months, we have been travelling through Middle-America and the Caribbean. During our long visits there, we learned to adapt to different cultures, languages, the humid climate, and things that we never really knew we adapted to. Until we made it back to Europe, to the Azores!

While being on a green rocky Island in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by breathtaking marine biodiversity, strange things started to happen, for example when I went to the supermarket. Standing at the cash desk, I remembered going to the supermarket in Panama and wanting to buy a pineapple, which was something I had done loads of times over the past few months. I even thought of taking out a one-euro coin instead of a one-dollar bill, now we were back in Europe. The cashier scanned my pineapple, and I handed here my one-euro coin. Then, she gave me a very confusing look and pointed at the screen in front of me. I could not believe my own eyes. Six Euros for the smallest pineapple I had seen in ages! I lost my appetite for pineapple immediately and rather stuck with a huge pack of chocolate cereal. I realized that the one-dollar Panama pineapple times have probably come to an end. Even my search for a Cuban peso-pizza stand whilst wandering through the streets of Horta failed. That very same day, I switched my diet from juicy exotic fruit and peso pizzas back to chocolate cereal, the same kind I am used to at home in Kiel. Slightly frustrated and armed with 2,5 kg of cereal and 6 Liters of Azorean milk, I made my way back to the Thor.

Yet not everything about being in Europe again was negative. Finally, traffic lights were not just a decoration anymore and everybody took them seriously again. Moreover, the sighting and smell of freshly cut fields was something I was very delighted over and a view I had not seen in a while. And then there was the moment I saw an entire shelf of PURPLE COW chocolate in all its different flavours again! I will not forget the feeling I had in that moment for a while. And at last, I saw a bakery with proper bread.

As always, we adapted to what was given to us, and being on European ground after such a long time was a big relief. It felt like something we all were familiar to: home.
But at night in my dreams, I still travel to white sand palm beaches, Caribbean fruit markets, green tobacco fields, tropical rain forests, …