Coming home can be hard, but the sooner you get back into your routine, the better.
Jetlag, my old friend, how have you been? I guess I should consider myself lucky to be wrapped in your fuzzy embrace again so soon, but I’m not feeling it. And like catching up with a long-lost friend, I am at the same time, giddy and exhausted, mind racing with thoughts and yet completely drained.
And it’s 3am on a Tuesday. Work will be fun tomorrow, right? Yes, yes, let’s do this again soon.
They say jetlag is more prominent when you travel west to east, because it’s apparently harder to advance rather than delay your body’s internal clock.
In my experience, jetlag is always harder to shake when you’re coming home, rather than when you’re about to explore a new city, spread out in a super-king hotel bed, or swimming on a whitesand beach. I’m sure there’s a study to back me up, somewhere.
When you’re freshly checked-in and the holiday is just beginning, you have adrenaline on your side, countering any of the damage done to your circadian rhythm by the process of hurtling across time-zones in a passenger jet. When you touch down on your return, that’s all gone and all you have is memories, maybe a tan and certainly a depleted bank balance.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll try to squeeze everything out of the last few hours of a holiday away – last-minute dinners at hip city restaurants you’ll soon forget the name of, using local phrases for the final times, or buying local tipples and threads you’ll grow an aversion to as soon as you touch back down.
At the same time, the mourning of the end of the traveller’s life begins to set in.
One of my main ones starts even before we’ve arrived back into the country. Up in the air, in a wifi-free zone, the scroll through the screeds of photos from our days in the road: ‘‘Delete that one. You can post that one. Look how sunburned we are! How great was that meal?’’
And now that most people are beyond the days of actually printing and framing photos, this midflight scroll may be the last time we gaze upon our sunburned and care-free tourist selves for months.
At the very least, this ritual prompts me to appreciate my privilege of a respite from the rat race – as well as reminds me why almost all fellow tourists cannot be trusted to take a good photo of you at a monument.
And it’s these little arrival procedures that maybe ease the whiplash of returning to normalcy. Some people unpack their clothes and display their trinkets and tourist tat as soon as they get in the door. Others collapse in a heap on their own bed. Your own bed, finally!
I, meanwhile, immediately put at least one load of washing in the laundry (essential, as the dirty clothes always seem to taint the less-dirty ones in my bag) and make a cuppa. Tea or coffee, I don’t mind, made exactly my way.
Because whether you’re in an Asian megacity, desert safari, or along a cobbled street in Europe, seldom are you handed a hot drink just as you’d like it. Freshly caffeinated (just to confuse the body clock even more, right?), it’s time to do some disaster assessment and damage control.
But what to open first: the work emails or the bank account? What horror awaits? If you’ve been plugged in to both while you’ve been away – and perhaps that’s a whole different problem – you’ll know what’s up, but if not, now is probably time to come crashing back down to Earth.
If the news isn’t too distressing, you can move onto one of my favourite rituals after dropping my bags back in my own room? Too easy: brainstorming and booking the next place to escape to.