my childhood has strings from another culture

The decor of the hallway of Glasgow Airport is a forest (with sounds).  Welcome to creative, quirky and clever Scotland. 

On the drive down to New Jersey Friday, I heard an episode of Fresh Air with Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette talking about Boyhood.  Ethan Hawke described early conversations with Linklater of how the story was born:

"It's strange.  It was hard not to think about - when Rick first told me about this idea, you know, he was talking about how there's this lie in every film - even the best ones - about childhood, this little, tiny lie you have to accept that somehow, some enlightenment moment happens in one moment, rather than being in a series of moments when we come of age. You know, they may come to feel like one, but he was saying, wouldn't it be amazing to make a movie where we actually just captured all the little moments? The feeling of growing up could actually be tactile."

This morning, our plane flew over the green misty lowlands of Scotland as the Sun was rising.  This has been a familiar sight for me since I was six - when I first remember traveling over to Britain.  To many, heading to Scotland is an exotic vacation.  But to me, it feels like going home.

To conceptualize what traveling here was like for me as a child, I must start with ketchup.  I distinctly remember going for breakfast, once we were off the plane, and noticing that strangely the ketchup tasted more like tomatoes.  I remember my grandparent's house smelled like toast.  I rollerbladed in the street and ran out from the dinner table to buy a 99 from the ice cream truck.  We turned as red as lobsters with our cousins at the beach in England.  My mom's cousins made my brother and I drinks when we were in high school (shh).  We spent a New Years in the streets of Biggar, with gale force winds, as a bonfire swallowed the town, the bottom of my jeans freezing to a puddle.  I rode on the back of my uncle's motorcycle through the yellow rape flower fields of Kent.  I spent a week with my grandparents where I understood their WWII generation much better after scrimping in Uganda.  My mother and I have driven on the blustery roads through the Cairngorms and I've witnessed a mist hide a mountain within seconds.  There are so many bits that have shaped my girlhood over the years.

It's so good to be back.