Tripe!

Tripe:  The lining of the stomach of ruminating animals, when prepared for food.

I always have to remind myself when I travel that jet lag is real.  I'm not sure I get it, exactly, but my body lets me know.  It's weird to be hungry at odd times, wide awake when I should be tired, and totally lost in the bathroom.  Something about circadian rhythms being disrupted.  I forget to eat regularly and drink too much caffeine and sleep poorly.

Being a man of immense power I think that I should be able to overwhelm biological processes that were installed at the dawn of time.  I should just will my body to change.

Culture shock is a thing, too, that I forget about.  I don't really understand this, either, but I do feel out of sorts until I get my bearings.  On our first night here we decided to stroll a bit before rendezvousing with our friend and hitting a meeting.  We're staying in an old Medieval district, a warren of narrow streets and alleys angling off indiscriminately.  It's not an area for directions - you know where you are or you don't.  

So we got lost.  We tried to make our way back to our apartment using my stellar sense of direction until we were hopelessly lost.  It seemed that we were so close but we weren't recognizing anything.  We stopped and asked at a restaurant and no one knew where our street was, let alone the address on that street,  never a good sign.  We backtracked all the way back to where we first got lost and then went all the way back to where we started.  Our higher power must have been laughing because we were precisely one block away from where we wanted to be when we began the backtrack process.  The 2 minute, one block jaunt ended up taking an hour.

There is something about being forced into new adventures that must do something for the soul.  I think about how hard it is to order a new dish in a restaurant that I go to all the time and compare that to going into a restaurant for the first time, in a new city, in a new country, maybe being able to read the menu or talk to the waiter, and trying to get fed.  I ordered tripe once, not knowing what I was doing.  

I now know the correct spelling and pronunciation of "tripe" in 87 languages.  I'm not going to make that mistake again.