Between worlds

This is an excerpt from Anthony Bourdain's book NO RESERVATIONS, based on the TV show with the same name (airing on Discovery Travel + Living). It really "spoke" to me, althought he talks about travel to many different places.

"... When you're a tourist on vacation, coming home means coming back to real life: familiar places, relationships, work, love, the rent... But when you travel for a living - when "work" is drinking ayahuasca with a jungle shaman or standing on a glacier, when you're as likely, on any given day, to be trudging down a riverbed in Borneo as standing in line at Starbucks - you start to ask yourself: Which of these is my "real" life? And if the answer is that the road is the real thing, how do you go back? How do you pick up your old life, your normal life, after you've seen all this? Returning to grilled cheese and bacon, or even a good piece of fish - sauteed Western style with a drizzle of butter sauce and microgreen garnish - seems flat and lifeless after experiencing the colours and condiments of Asia. The expectations of a meal become distorted... The clothes you see and wear back home seem shapeless and washed out... The bar at the W hotel in Westwood starts to seem alien, airless and sterile. And you fear that one day you will look at your friends and loved ones and think: "I was sitting under a bouquet of human skulls, drinking rice whiskey and eating wild pig with my new headhunter buddies last week. How do I feign the appropriate level of interest in everyday things?" It has been said that we find out more about ourselves when we travel than about the places we visit. And it's true that I always look for a universality - some common ground, a unified theory of human behaviour. A comfortable takeaway that would describe the world and the behaviour of everyone in it."