Fairwell Hawaii, Hello Texas

So, we're back. It's freaking flat here.

When I first landed in Dallas, the first thing that stuck me was the sky. It was just...wrong. It seemed faded, washed out, and tired. A pale imitation of the real thing.

Since then, my perception somehow altered. The sky looks perfectly fine now, and I have no idea how it could possibly look any different. It's amazing how quickly you can adjust.

When I picked up David from the airport, on the drive home he turned to me with a bleak expression and said, ''there are only.... 3 shades of green here.''

We are still adjusting. I usually only have some desperately aggressive thoughts towards Texas in general when I am walking the 2 miles from the car to class, and it feels like I'm standing in an oven. Literally. The wind, as it blows in my face, is a perfect imitation of how it feels when I open an oven to check on my cakes. Except instead of a quick blast, outside I'm getting non-stop oven action. It's killing me.

Texas is beautiful, it's jut a different kind of beauty, and we have to go a little bit further outside the confines of Dallas to find it. I see lots of road trips in our future.

I do revel in the little joys of being back. Proximity to family and friends is of course, a given. But it's the little things that help the transition. Thus:

TOP 10 THINGS I DON'T MISS ABOUT HAWAII

1. Outlandish grocery store prices. I love shopping now. I may or may not have done a dance in the produce section the first time I shopped, which was repeated with more vigour shortly thereafter, in the checkout line.
2. The lack of those little levers on the gas pumps that let you walk off while your gas is pumping at the station. I don't know what the deal is, but no gas station in Hawaii has those little levers. Apparently, they have decided that Hawaiians can't handle that kind of responsibility. It's annoying.
   
3. The highway system in general. I freaking hate it. Texas Turnarounds are the best thing ever. I want to give them a big ol' hug.
4. Constantly having to eat at 'local' places with friends, which always involved mystery meat from some part of the animal I don't normally eat from.
   
5. Dry Cleaners. It was so expensive there, we couldn't afford to dry clean David's shirts. Whenever he got sent to California for work, he would take an extra suitcase over, stuffed with things we needed dry cleaned. This was a great system, until the one time I sent some pants and things over, and David forgot to pick them up. He wasn't going back to California for a least another month. Lovely.
6. Fake BBQ places. When we first got there, I was often fooled by places advertising 'BBQ'. What they really meant was 'Korean BBQ' which is possibly the last thing normal people would want to eat.
7. Spam. People were always trying to get me to eat Spam. Mainly Spam musubi, which is is fist-sized wad of rice with a slice of Spam on top, held together by a belt of seaweed. They could be found in any gas station in the state, right next to the necrotic hot dogs.
   
8. Homeless people constantly trying to make off with my shoes. There was a park right across the street from where I worked, and I like to go lay down in the shade and listen to the ocean some days while eating my lunch. Hawaiian grass is too nice for shoes, so I would take them off to fully enjoy myself. I quickly learned this was just asking for it.
9. Lack of A/C. Sure, it's really nice here. But occasionally we would have to lie around in the house, not moving, so we wouldn't immediately break out in a sweat. Just getting up for a glass of water would do it. All hail modern technology.
10. Being an outsider. It was really interesting to live there and be a minority, since it was such a different culture, but after a while, sometimes it was lonely not quite fitting in with most of the people around me.
    

Anyway, no place is perfect. I do miss the beach and the outdoors a lot more than I was expecting, which is kind of surprising, since some weekends I didn't want to go out of the house, but felt that I had to since we lived in Hawaii. Perhaps that is just because I do nothing but school here, and that would depress anyone.

We'll see.