What do you call it when nostalgia and excitement mix?

I don't know why, but certain physical stimuli bring on rushes of excitement and nostalgia at the same time that make me at once remember something from the past fondly while simultaneously getting excited about something on the horizon. Right now, with school getting ready to wrap up (we only have two weeks until final exams, and a couple of lame duck weeks after that), summer camp lesson plans starting to come due, and changes in the weather happening that create brief moments of recall of the same physical feeling from a previous time, my brain is bombarding me with nostalgia and excitement at the exact same time.

Today I was listening to one of my students blast through a speaking test (good job, kiddo) and a cool breeze blew down the hallway. The minute that breeze hit me and moved on my brain instantly recalled every feeling, sight, sound, and even smell that I remember as we came off of the first leg of our Air Asia flight to Bali. We had just landed in Kuala Lumpur, we were tired, I had proposed marriage just a few hours earlier (thank goodness she said yes, or else I'd be remembering a really awkward experience right now) and we were hungry, anxious, and surrounded by people who wanted to provide us with transportation to downtown Kuala Lumpur. We didn't need to leave the airport, but we were hungry, wanted to call our families, and in a pretty foreign place. Everyone spoke English, and it was really hard to concentrate on conversations because we understood too much of what was happening around us.

That was a really exciting morning. We tried to get cash overseas with our Korea Exchange Bank cards and had trouble (it turns out we have savings accounts, not checking accounts), had to exchange some won into Malay ringgit, and had a small breakfast at the Starbuck's just outside the airport. It was lovely. We purchased a deck of cards and a magazine and sat through our layover in the crisp cool terminal until finally boarding our flight to Bali.  This isn't the part of a vacation or traveling experience that you normally think about, right? Who cares about layovers in airports? It was a really pleasant layover, but I don't think about it all that often. For whatever reason that cool breeze on a warm day brought it right back. It also made me really hungry for a char siu bao, because we had one in the airport and it was delish.

Watching TV a few nights ago we stumbled upon what seemed to be a Korean version of Real Housewives and the housewives were traveling in Hawaii. Something about the color of the water on the screen or the sound of the ukuleles or something visual reminded me of a very specific feeling I would get when I lived in Hawaii. I worked at Jack's Diving Locker and on our boat trips someone would always have to jump in to tie  the boat to the mooring buoy. As a new guy, it was almost always me. Something I saw on TV reminded me of how it would feel as the cool blue water would rush past on my way down to the buoy, and the little rush of adrenaline I'd get no matter what when I would think of the tiger sharks that could be anywhere around me. For some reason they didn't concern me when I had my scuba gear, but when I would jump in to tie the boat up I'd always be a bobble head looking around.

I find it interesting that certain stimuli bring on such a response. In Korea we can only put out food waste a few nights a week. We keep it in our freezer until then, to avoid flies. Our freezer has...well...a smell. When I open it, I think of durian, and the fruit stand we stopped at on our way up Gunung Batur in Bali. We bought a couple of mangoes and gave them to our divemaster the next day. Those big, ugly, pungent durian though, they left an impression, and now the smell of rotting garbage gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, interesting, right? I wish I could say that celery in tuna salad makes me think of lunch sitting on the beach at Menjangan Island, but it's sadly not the case.

Passing thunderstorms remind me of summer in Florida, when you could literally see a entire thunderstorm make it's way by rumbling along like a combustion engine as it worked its way towards the ocean, or sometimes of the cool breeze that would blow by right before a big thunderstorm in Texas in the springtime. I can't say for certain on this yet, but I'm pretty sure that iced lattes are always going to remind me of the mornings that Carolyn and I have spent planning our travels at the coffee shop. We're switching to wedding planning now, so it might have a really good warm-fuzzy feeling to attach to it.

Anyhow, we've all got these kinds of rapid-recall inducing stimuli, I'm sure. I just don't know what to call it. What do you suggest? Perhaps you could leave the real word for whatever this is in the comment box, or whatever you like to call it as a suggestion. In the meantime, I'm going to have fun trying to think about what stimulus will bring forth the to-be-made memories of my upcoming trip to Thailand.