Michele Womble: Blog

We have been in America now for a week and a half.  What with packing and traveling and then adjusting to the time difference and recovering from jetlag, I’ve kind of dropped off the radar for several weeks.  They say it takes a day to recover for every hour in the time difference, so I guess tomorrow we should be starting to feel more or less normal, as it will have been 11 days since we arrived.

Traveling from Russia to America and from America to Russia is not just physically difficult, but emotionally difficult as well.  On the one hand we are excited to see the land and people that we have been apart from – but at the same time it means separation from the ones that we are with currently.  Our “hello’s are always preceded by “goodbye’s”.  It is like we are part of two completely different worlds, both of which we love, both of which seem to preclude the other.

We had two 4-hour flights on Saturday the 5^th through Moscow to Frankfurt, Germany, and then a 9-hour flight from Frankfurt to Atlanta on Sunday.  We have traveled this route many times and always stay in the same hotel.  I call it my “wood between the worlds” because (for me, obviously not for those who live there) nothing happens there.  There’s nothing to be accomplished, nothing to get done.  I love sitting at breakfast drinking my coffee with a feeling of peace that is so often elusive in my two worlds – elusive because in them there is always the next thing to do.  In the wood between the worlds my bags are packed, all the things I can “do” are far away – all there is to do is watch the trees grow (and wait for the time for the shuttle to take us to the airport). 

The Frankfurt airport has a McDonald’s and tables near windows from which you can watch planes taking off and landing.  It’s our tradition to have dinner there.  This is a treat for us since there is no McDonald’s in Novosibirsk, in spite of the fact that Novosibirsk is a city of about 2 million.  It’s a double treat because of the view of the runway. 

Usually we arrive in Frankfurt too late to make any excursions into the city, and because of this we had never actually seen anything of Frankfurt besides the airport and the hotel and in between.  This time, however, we arrived at 1 pm and were able to get checked in to our flight for the next day and to our hotel, eat a late lunch/early dinner, and still have time to get a family pass for the train and ride into the center of the city.  We strolled around for about an hour.  It was so interesting to see the old and new side-by-side.

Our flight to Atlanta was the next day at noon, and as we all woke up fairly early because of the time difference, we had plenty of time to eat breakfast and for the kids and Joey to go for their traditional morning walk.  And for me to sit and drink a second cup of coffee in my wood between the worlds. 

But you can’t stay in the wood between the worlds forever – nor would you want to, really, there’s too much treasure hidden in each pool leading to new worlds and new experiences.  And we found our pool (okay, okay, our gate at the airport) that would take us to Atlanta and our summer in America. 

Frankfurt - old and new.

Frankfurt airport

Ya'll know where this is!!