{"id":6281,"date":"2025-07-29T15:10:40","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T13:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=6281"},"modified":"2025-07-29T15:10:40","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T13:10:40","slug":"abroad-without-pets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=6281","title":{"rendered":"Abroad Without Pets"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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It\u2019s been a few days in the land of the Cheesesteak and I\u2019m acclimating nicely. By that I mean that I have yet to stab anyone with a pencil. Being home offers its perks \u2013 the family time, the food, the increased blood pressure. Then there is the comfort of being at home, which makes me feel about ten-years-old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have slipped into my family\u2019s summer routine. There is camp and work and little trips. I do my part to help out and otherwise stay out of the way. My family and I get along great \u2013 until we don\u2019t. Fortunately, I have a room of my own. So, when the fam stresses me out, I can go to this room and, hypothetically, lie facedown into a pillow and scream curse words until I fall asleep. This works well and not only because I am usually awakened by my mother calling me into whatever meal is appropriate to that time of day.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have slipped into my own routine here. I get up early, write, walk, work out, drink coffee, eat Grape Nuts, sprint to the toilet. In the unbearably hot Langhorne afternoons, I retreat to my cooled room for work and reading. When I have control of the living room TV, it is playing a show in which a bad British person is murdered by other bad British people and some other less bad British people try to figure out who did what and why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems that everyone around here is doing their part to help me feel at home. They are too loud and they invade your privacy. A man broke the sacrosanct bubble of quietude at a bank\u2019s ATM vestibule by shouting complaints into his phone while standing two feet behind me. It made for a disconcerting transaction on my part. In the Czech Republic, that man may seriously have been arrested. A woman at the next table in a diner yesterday overheard our conversation and commented \u2013 at length \u2013 in a personal way that didn\u2019t relate to what we\u2019d said at all. Despite enough free tables to run a speed dating night, minutes later a man and woman sat directly next to us on the other side and proceeded to have the loudest conversation in the history of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These things stressed me out, proving with surprise that I have a little more of the Czechs in me than I thought possible. But I crunched my toes and prayed for a car to drive through the window. Instead, we paid our check a few minutes later and I was home on my pillow until Mom woke me up for third lunch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Even the heat, were we to consider it, adds to my nostalgic pleasure. This humidity and heat encompassed every summer day when I was a kid. If it was cool and clammy now, I\u2019d be worried. If I was comfortable, I\u2019d be stressed. I am hot and uncomfortable \u2013 as in, there\u2019s literally not one minute of the day when comfort and heat aren\u2019t dueling for my soul. Home.      <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I miss my Prague Home; I miss my Burke, but we speak on the phone every day. It\u2019s my cat and my dog that I sorely miss. Yesterday I opened a yogurt and put the yogurt-gooey lid on the ground and clicked my tongue. My dad looked at me though I was insane, but it\u2019s not clear whether it was because of the floor thing or just for eating yogurt. A woman in our neighborhood has a Shih tzu and I keep trying to get him to let me carry him. He does not trust me and he is right. There is a fat cat in our house here and she meows all the time like my cat. I called her to me this morning and she treated me genially, evidently not exuding the undertones of physical violence that my cat squirts at us like faux pheromones at a Joe Rogan festival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I miss them and I know they miss me. But they are a little stubborn in their forgiveness. When I get back, the cat with butter me up with several drawn-out flybys of my calves before finally sinking her teeth in and scratching me to the bone. The dog will give me the cold shoulder for a few days, literally refusing to look at me until I have fulfilled my penance for leaving her.    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s this famous dog, Hachiko, who lived in Tokyo. His owner died and Hachiko waited for him outside his train station for years until he himself died. I have been to the statue and I can tell you that it is tear-jerking. But what is not pictured is the yogurt lid on the floor in front of him.      <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been a few days in the land of the Cheesesteak and I\u2019m acclimating nicely. By that I mean that I have yet to stab anyone with a pencil. Being home offers its perks \u2013 the family time, the food, the increased blood pressure. Then there is the comfort of being at home, which makes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6282,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/damiengaleone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Lmda2llv.jpg?fit=1536%2C2048&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-1Dj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6283,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6281\/revisions\/6283"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}