you can hear it in my accent when I talk, I'm an Englishman in New York...

I haven't blogged in a while; this holiday has become far too busy. Cousins needing extra tutoring, going on a trip to the hills, nights out with friends, going to work and trying to remember how to use AutoCAD, seeing my first cockroach in the bathroom (I'd expected to see the dirty little bug[ger]s sooner in this country; clearly we have become a cleaner island in my absence)...all in all, it's been quite an eventful string of days.

Today I was going to work with my father and saw the word "...A l u m i n i u m..." on a board in the street. I frowned briefly...wasn't I the only one who spelled it with two i's? Didn't everyone else call it a l u m i n u m? Oh wait. Wrong country. I'm at home now.

And it was then that it struck me that as of late, I have begun to always feel as though I'm in a foreign land, regardless of whether I am in Colombo, Sri Lanka, or Princeton, New Jersey. It's a very strange phenomenon.

I feel as though America will always be a slightly foreign land to me, because it is such an amalgam of people who should be of different nationalities, but all call themselves American, people who range from stubbornly conservative to ferociously liberal, and people from such different latitudes and longtitudes that their lifestyles and ways of thinking are all completely different. There is nothing really, to unify Americans except the sheer fact that they are American.

Sri Lanka, on the other hand, changes her face completely within the space of the few months that I am planted in NJ. The roads change, the buildings change, my friends change. I come back and I am completely out of my depth to find that this building has been torn down, that road is now one-way, and the other friend is now a completely different person.

I always feel vaguely tourist-y, living out of boxes and suitcases, packing my life away and then sitting on it so that the zips will close, and then flying through the skies to ever-new destinations that I thought were familiar, but have changed in the time it took for me to return. Nothing ever seems permanent, and I always feel like I'm on the move, or going to be on the move soon.

Incidentally, perhaps I am most comfortable on planes, because they don't change, or so I thought. This time when I returned to Sri Lanka for the summer, I was upgraded to what the flight attendant assured me was still an Economy seat (so not really an upgrading?) but was much larger and roomier than the tiny seat I'm used to. I could press buttons and it turned into a bed! What excitement for someone like me who knows so little of the world. But then I started to miss my weeny little window seat...I wasn't sure about all these buttons, I couldn't find where to plug in my earphones, and I missed my favourite sight in all the world - seeing night turn to dawn, the Indian Ocean turn to land, and the tops of coconut trees and little houses in Colombo as I land.

It's a curious feeling. I don't feel like a citizen of the planet a la Alanis Morissette; I feel like a Martian on holiday.