We arrived back in the sandpit on Sunday, but it’s taken me until today to resurface – because, despite there being a tiddly three hours’ time difference in summer, I always develop a flu-like case of jet lag when travelling eastwards (pathetic, I know!).
My pilot DH has to put up with me lamenting about needing to sleep, but never at the right time (at bedtime, I’m bog-eyed with a fidgety wakefulness for hours), and believe me, he shakes his head at me, absolutely dumbfounded that anyone could be so utterly *hopeless* at jet lag.
She’s travelled back from the US. I have no excuse.
“But I think I was still on a mid-Atlantic time zone after the US,” I protest, with a yawn. “You have to fight it,” he responds, at a loss.
And so it goes on: me plodding through the day, which has a surreal, otherworldly quality when you’ve just landed in the post-apocalyptic 43° heat of the desert, and unable to sleep at night; him business as usual despite having flown to six different time zones while we were away.
Aside from the insomnia (which the kids also have. Ugh.) and the wading through hot treacle, the other thing about arriving back in Dubai after a long period away is the brain dump that takes place while travelling. Simple things, like the route to your local retail centre, making a packed lunch, or locating the cupboard in which mugs are kept, require deep thought, while grocery shopping feels like a thousand-piece 3D puzzle.
Still, even though I drifted onto the highway today in a daze rather than into the supermarket car park, and have climbed the staircase a total of eight times tonight to soothe the two riving insomniacs upstairs, it feels good to be home.
EDITED TO ADD: At 11.30pm and decamped to the children’s room with my laptop, I can now say, hand on heart, jet lag is the SCOURGE of summer travel. Sigh.
A warm welcome back 🙂
Thank you very much! x 🙂
You know, I think it’s easier to deal with the 13-hour time difference that we have between Seoul and the US than with those 3 hours! I think 13 sort of spins you right around and makes it easy to get back to normal fairly easily. After a couple years over here, I have my jet lag down to a science and do pretty well: I inevitably wake up between 3-4 am(occasionally can even go back to sleep) and usually have a terrible slump at 3-4pm (good excuse for a coffee break.) It usually lasts just under a week and I rather enjoy being wide awake at 5:00. I was a little sad when my inner clock returned to normal and I stopped waking up before my alarm…
The heat and humidity here in Seoul are brutal – can’t imagine what you are going through – but welcome home anyway!
Thank you MsC! I love that feeling, too, of waking up early and feeling wide awake. I only get it when we travel to the States, and it’s such a shame it only lasts a couple of days!