You think I looked pretty goofy in the weird beard video?

Well, here is a picture of me when I was a foreign exchange student in Wichita, Kansas in the fall of 1998:

Eh…

Since then, I had only made it back over there one time. That was in the summer of 2001, almost exactly ten years ago.

So I was pretty excited when I got on my plane today. It was going to take me to Atlanta, Georgia, and then to Wichita, Kansas:
Munich-Atlanta-Wichita on larger map

The flight was okay, but the screen in front of me only left me a choice of three movies. So I watched Barney’s Version and loved it, then I made it through the first half hour of Black Swan and hated the crap out of it, before I desperately turned to something weird called Narnia. It involved a speaking lion that was supposed to be God or something.

Oh well, better than psychotic Ballet chicks anyway…

I felt very relieved when my plane touched down in Atlanta after more than 9 hours. I wandered around the airport for a little while, and there it was, the object that I had always associated with the United States of America more than anything else:

The drinking fountain.

…

I made my way through Homeland Security, got on another plane for a couple of hours, and then I was finally there.

Hugging people in Wichita.

The city seemed like it had changed a lot, but the people apparently hadn’t. They were just as nice and welcoming as I had remembered.

When we got to the house, my all-time favorite drink was already waiting for me there. It was ice-cold and delicious, and it tasted like home:

Everyone was all smiles.

I remembered what the lady sitting next to me on the airplane had said, when I had told her that I thought Midwesterners were a very friendly old bunch: “Oh, honey, I guess we are pretty friendly!” she had said and laughed with a big hearty voice: “We just don’t know any better!”

Soundtrack: Walter Murphy – “A Fifth Of Beethoven”