When India isn't foreign enough...

Since January our office director, Matthew, and one of our staff architects, Ivy, who happens to be his wife, have been on sabbatical in Hong Kong, Ivy's home.  Just today, Matthew and Ivy sent us a box of mystery bags full of things that sort of resembled food.  In the enclosed note he stated that he clearly didn't label the bags so that they would remain mysterious as we all went around and tried them.  There were about 8 or 9 bags and we deduced that one of them was a thousand year old and another one was fried scorpions but as to the rest, it's still up in the air.  Although I don't have pictures of the actual food (unfortunately), our graphic designer, Susan, put together quite a nice montage of our reactions to send to Matthew and Ivy. 

Four year old Hudson in the bottom left corner after eating a piece of the thousand year old egg (the absolute worst of the lot) clearly wins. 

Addendum 1

I totally meant to link this in the post, so I'll just put it here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Premier_League

The IPL is basically what the NFL would be if it were the only sport in all of America. Just imagine an entire country's enthusiasm for sports funneled into one sport and then essentially funneled into one 6 week period. It's all anyone talked about while it was going on, and it was awesome that we actually got tickets to see a game in Delhi. And as the wikipedia article will convey, it's a gigantic money making machine. (first sporting event to be broadcast live on youtube?, yea it's that big)

The Horizon Is In Sight

Wow.  Life can be fickle. 

As some of you have noticed, I’ve been quite neglectful of this blog this past month.  Although this has been by far the busiest month since I’ve been here, that is only part of the story.  As some of you know I’ve had work in Nepal, gone to Delhi for an IPL game, and started an epic war with monkeys that insist on coming into our kitchen to steal loafs of bread and bunches of bananas.  On top of that, work has been frantic, with computer problems, generator problems, and the looming shadow of my eventual departure pushing me to finish all I can before I leave.  This is the first Saturday I’ve generally had to myself in about 5 weeks or so and I took the afternoon to not really summarize all that has happened as much as to talk about how what is to come is affecting me now.  As I finished the last sentence, reread for spelling mistakes, I truly leaned back and believed it to be one of my finest blog posts yet – a true, beautiful expression of life as I know it.  Then quite tragically, and maybe predictably, wordpad crashed and a little part of me died.  As we’ve all inevitably experienced this before we are then faced with two choices – through shear will, try miserably and painfully to recount everything you wrote, vainly trying to regrasp the magic you once had or, the alternative, move on, create again.  When phrased like that it’s hard to imagine why anyone would ever choose to reproduce what we had.  It can never be as good as it once was.  Yet if we allow ourselves to let go and create again, regardless of whether it’s better or not, at least it won’t be a miserable attempt to retake what we once had.  With that in mind, let me approach this whole thing anew.

I’m at the point now where my weeks are laid out carefully in front of me.  Every single week from now until I return home I know where I’ll be and most likely what I’ll be doing.  That makes it really easy to look past the 2 and a half months I have left.  There is no uncertainty left.  It’s all right there for me to look at, to live out.  For that reason, it’s been hard to keep my mind here.  Sure when I’m working, trying to finish up as many drawings and projects as I can before I leave, I’m here.  But in those down moments, I can feel my mind wandering.  I can feel myself thinking about eating nachos and watching an afternoon Cubs game.  I can imagine what it would be like to take a shower again, drive a car, or wash my clothes in a washing machine.  You know, I imagine a lot of things.  So most of the time, I’m not really here anymore.  I’m just biding my time, riding out my schedule.  That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? 

Actually I think there is something else going on here.  You’d imagine that in my last couple of months I would have this ravenous zeal for activity, trying to take advantage of as much as possible, making sure every last moment was worth it.  I don’t feel any of that.  There is no desire to go on some Indian adventure, see parts of India I haven’t seen yet.  In fact, I feel quite the opposite.  I’m quite relaxed.  I feel quite settled, quite at home.  Really, that was one of the main purposes of this year long endeavor.  I’d grown up in a land that wasn’t my parents, only ever hearing about India or visiting it, but I never had any idea what it was like to exist there.  It was still a place that existed only in theory.  This year was about making it real.  Surely, I could have picked a more “real” place than Mussoorie, a mystical hill station with temperate climates and a sparse (ish) population, but let’s not get picky.  This year, India became more than my place of ancestry it became a country and a people that I was able to understand more intimately through service.  Not only has this year shed light on who my parents and relatives are but it has shed light on who I am, thereby fundamentally changing me.    

For that reason, I can’t help but imagine what it will be like to be home.