When you're travelling far from home, you can sometimes be overwhelmed by the otherness of the place you're at. The farther (and/or stranger) from home, of course, the greater the chance that you're swamped by some wave of unfamiliar food-smell and the strange shapes of the cars and the body language of the crowd against the unintelligible semiotics of the signage and billboards. I've heard it called "travel fatigue". I've heard it called "homesickness". I've heard it called "I can't fucking wait to get out of this place and get some pussy."

When you are gone afield from the places you know and the novelty is wearing thin, look for a toehold. Look for some touch of the familiar. Look for the simple human touch of an air conditioner drain line run to some straggling flowers, or a cat in a windowsill, or a guy on a bicycle transporting a grip of RPGs - something to tell your brain that you are not somewhere wholly outside your grasp of the way the world is.

Ritual is important too. I could greet, daily, the haunted ruins of a millennia-old alien moon colony, just so long as I had a place to sit for an hour with a pot of coffee and take a peaceful shit before I had to don my armored combat suit and pray that the psychic dampers held out long enough to make it past the not-quite-dormant temple to unfathomable gods of madness.

My local friends were puzzled when my first order of business after securing a phone was to source an electric kettle.

"We usually just get coffee at a shop they are everywhere" the phone says.

I toggle the keyboard to a language I speak and switch the to/from fields. The language barrier and practical considerations forbid that I try to explain too deeply.

"I can't put my pants on before coffee," I peck, "And it's too cold to walk to the corner in my underwear every morning."