The hard truth about going back ‘home’ after 10 month in Central America

Anyhow, eating
Central American food must somehow increase the sense of the taste buds. It is
not a big secret that Germans prefer rather salty food, but maybe they exaggerate
the saltiness of their meals. I seriously wonder how they manage to eat it. I
can’t! No wonder that taste more or less disappears and that we demand more and
more flavour extenders in our (pre-processed) food.  With all that taste bud trouble and flavour
mashing, bashing and mix ups, it is not surprising that a former salty biscuit from
Nicaragua somehow changes its taste to sweetish once eaten in Germany.

The „Ach wie schön ist Panama“ airplane doesn’t take me to Germany from Panama but from Costa Rica.

Of course,
the first days are somewhat strange. Not only food is different, but every
aspect of daily routine does not seem as daily and routine anymore. You unpack
your suitcase, but actually there is nothing to wash. Obviously you washed
everything back home in Nicaragua before going on your trip to Europe. But now
you do not really know what to wear. It would be kind of stupid to just stick
to the same old clothes you wore in Central America. However, opening your
wardrobe made you feel like: What the fuck?!? A typical reaction to an overload
of clothes. An easy solution from my side: the first three days I just stayed
in my tracksuit. Day and night.

There seems
no obvious use with all these clothes, which hid away for almost one year
inside the wardrobe. Some days later some shirts are carefully picked and added
to the old wardrobe which had been travelling through whole Central America already.
It is an easy habit of wearing the same clothes all over again the next week
and the next and the next and…. From time to time it is time to open the
wardrobe and stare at all these clothes hanging there like a famous painting in
a museum. But, please, do not touch it! Same when entering one of these huge
fashion stores. You are like: Uh and Ah, and then turn on your heel and walk straight
out again. The sense of going shopping is totally lost. Four T-Shirt and one
Jeans have been enough for 10 month, so they will be just fine for some more
time.

But, and that
is maybe by far the worst, you do not feel to belong anywhere anymore. Or at
least not to your home country. Maybe long-time travellers just loose this
feeling over time. And it is not only you, who feels somehow disconnected from
your home country, no it is also the others on the street that make you well
aware of it: the fact that you can’t possibly be a German citizen. The other day,
while walking down the street, somebody just held me up, asking: 

“So, where
are you from?”

 “I am German”

“No, I don’t
mean where you were raised up. I mean in which country you were born!”

Of course,
it does not end with that one incident. Imagine a nice market setting. Fruit
stalls, fresh vegetables, you walk towards one of the stalls to buy something and
then the owner just starts a conversation in Turkish with you. Only your surprised
look makes him realise that there might be some misunderstanding, literally and
“Oh, sorry. I thought you are also from Turkey.” is all he says in the end. Then,
suddenly, you realised that you lost all your ‘germanness’. Something you
actually ever wanted and now it has come true: You are not recognisable as a
German anymore and are a tourist and a migrant in your own country.

Luckily
some things do not change, compared to life in Central America. There is still
pasta with potatoes, rice with beans and fried bananas for lunch. No, and it is
not like that I am cooking it on my own. My grandmother serves it to me,
claiming that she always ate that. In fact, fried bananas seem to be one of her
favourite foods. Now it is up to me, to believe it or not. But, at least I get
some fried banana…