home again (where do we go now?)

After something like 36 hours in transit (why is there a "london" in "london stansted"?) from southern sweden, I'm at long last on American turf again. It was a long trip. The Summer Student part of the summer is all a blur now, a long-lost bit of nostalgia. I left on June 10 and returned October 5 -- long enough in Europe that I now actually prefer the bubbly mineral water. didn't see that coming.

Dalls/Ft.Worth was a bit of an assault on the senses, with more than dozen American flags greeting the arivee at Customs, with every single product or restaurant or boutique sporting the adjectives "American," "Texas," and/or "Lone Star." Weird to have everyone speaking English again.

It's always a bit of an anti-climatic experience, coming home: it gets all built up, i'm all excited about California and my family and all that, and then I get here and I remember that there's absolutely nothing to do in Orange County. Especially if you don't have a car. The other big downer is that I'm definitely allergic to something in this house. My eyes hurt and it's difficult to breathe, and I contemplate sleeping outside. But, still, it's nice to be back.

there is a thrill, though, in looking out the window of the airplane and finally seeing the desert again, the desolate lands. It is a landscape that I think only a Californian could love -- and I do.

It was wonderful being in Sweden again. I got all the way up to the arctic, but just barely. I visited Nils (from CERN) at his home in Luleå (which is way up at the top of the Gulf of Bothnia, where Sweden and Finland come together. We drove up on a daytrip that took us through Jokkmokk, which lies just north of the Arctic circle. On the way there, fresh snow was falling, the first snow of the season. I know some people from snowy climates for whom snow is largely an annoyance, but for me it's still magical.

We had planned to go up to Kiruna to hike Kebnekaise, but by this time it was much too late in the season. So now we say we'll do it next summer, maybe even midsommar infact. Hike kebnekaise, stay in the fjällstationen, go to Abisko, to Tromsø in Norway and the arctic norwegian archipelago. The first plan was to hitchhike to Kiruna, but Nils was afraid that we'd get stabbed. There's a lot of cynicism, you see, in Sweden today, after the foreign minister was murdered -- stabbed -- three weeks ago. The next plan was the hop the freight train on its return to Kiruna to collect iron ore from the northern mines. But freight hopping is not a wintertime sport, so instead we toured the steel foundry and took a roadtrip by car, both of which proved to be worthy things to do. A blast furnace filled with seventy thousand tons of liquid metal is a moderately impressive contraption.

I've been home for all of one day, announced this explicitly to no-one, and already I've gotten calls from potential employers and ex-girlfriends. Well, only one of each, but that's enough to remind me of why I deliberately avoided getting a telephone for the last year. The potential employer is the scarier --- I feel like I'm caught in the tractor-beam of corporate america. If this company makes me an offer, I won't be able to refuse, yet the idea of being bound to work in a particular place -- Mountain View, CA -- working forty hours a week is horrifying to me, given the present freedom I feel. I'd much rather continue living on couches in Berkeley, working at LBL a few hours each day to have money with which to get by. But please forgive me if I give in and work for this "real" company, because I know I will if they invite me. My parents regard my complaining with some bemusement, as they're both searching for jobs.

One of the best things about traveling, in my opinion, is the people you meet. I sat next to a funny woman on the flight from Gatwick to Dallas -- a brit who moved to Texas, living in Norway and Saudi Arabia on the way with her American armed-forces husband, so you can imagine her rather odd mixture of speech patterns. I think she thought I was about twelve. I was flipping through the in-flight magazine when she came in and sat down. I happened to be turned to the page showing the various aircraft in the AA fleet (comparing their fuel efficiencies, I must admit), and she greeted me with, "First flight?" Later the flight attendant asked me if this woman was my mom.

Well anyway, we talked for quite a bit on the flight (although I never got her name). We talked a bit about the Red Sea (of which we are both fond) and she had a very nice story. The red sea is a very warm and comfortable sea, clear at least in the late summer, and you can float for hours gazing into the coastal coral reefs, at all the pretty fishes and corals. But at a particular time of year, there is a migration of whale sharks, and, as you know, whale sharks are incredibly huge and gentle whale-like sharks. And from the coast of Saudi you can take a rubber raft out into the sea and you can find the whalesharks, and they come up to greet you, like dolphins might. And with your snorkel and your mask and in your shorts in the hot Arabian sun in the cool but salty waters of the red sea, you can dive in, swim up to the sharks, take a gentle hold of the dorsal fin, and there you go -- off swimming with the sharks, rocketing through the water. And when the shark is tired playing, he dives down into the deeps, you lose your grip and bob to the shining surface, where you catch your breath and look again for your little boat, and then, another shark.

And that, I think, is where we should all go. But maybe we'll do it on a roadtrip to Baja, where we can swim with the hammerheads. who's with me?

Tobin