Well.
Everyone.
If I don't have some news for you.
You may be able to sense what is coming, spider-sense style (that and the title of this post...). Surprises! Two of them! Hurray!
Everybody...most people...OK, some people like surprises. (I hope. It's what I'm basing this post around). Anyway, here goes:
Surprise the first: Some people already know this (in fact, I had to wait to post this til some people found this out, hence the gap between posts) but...WE ARE HOME. Really and truly and for serious. I am writing this in my lounge room; my recently reunited cat skulking around the bedrooms and my Dad completing his TESOL course in front of the fire. The fire! Because it is freaking freezing and not at all the sunshiny spring weather I was hoping to step breezily (how I thought I would be stepping breezily anywhere after a 36 hour flight-transit pancake I don't know) into from the plane. But no problem (maybe a little problem). We are back!* Back in Radelaide. Back in our normal lives- sans money, jobs and routine. Back.
Surprise! Gotcha, right? Good.
Because now it is time for surprise the second. Except this is more the announcement of a surprise that will be coming to you shortly, a surprise in the making. But it is thus: I have made a book! I spent three months in HutLand cooking, scribbling, writing, drawing and painting and now I have a book. It is a book of the Keralan food that we ate all the time at Our Home (it happens to be delicious so this was a good thing) and I am going to be selling it to raise money for my favourite bunch of Indian kids. Except that right now, I only have the one copy. The original, definitely not for sale, it took me so long to do that it is bizarrely precious to me now copy. We were going to get it printed in India but because I enjoy the rush of leaving things to the last minute and this doesn't work in India because it is India, it didn't happen. So we are making a plan. When that plan is made, I shall let you know.
Keralan food for everyone!
But now here are some pictures of our house at Our Home. Our favourite place in India and a place that wasn't as sad as I thought it would be to leave because we know for certain we will be back within the year. Except when we told some of the small boys we were leaving and they stood and stared at us with the blank faces of the 'just-awoken', tinged with sadness (I'm sure I didn't imagine it), I thought I might cry. But I didn't. So I win.
It feels strange to be back at home so suddenly. Whisked from the busy dirtiness and chaotic noise of the Indian streets and planted in the staid quiet of an Adelaide Tuesday. It's odd. It feels like I am on a little break from Our Home and I will be back there, building a toilet, playing chasey and sleeping in our bamboo hut in a day or two. I miss HutLand already but I am glad to be home. I think. I am pretty deliriously tired from some stupid long airport-y travel so I don't really know how I feel just yet. Except that I am happy to hang out with my dad and my cat. And my bed is reeeeaaallllyyyyyy comfortable.
Welcome home us!
*There is a little delay between when this post was written and when I published it. There is a reason though, not laziness I assure you. I wrote on the eve of my homecoming, so everything would be fresh and true. But I had to wait to post, because I had decided to surprise certain people and I can be a bit stubborn so there was no way I was giving this up, so this could only be posted after said surprises had been surprised.
P.S. Yes, I really did light a campfire inside the bamboo hut. Because I was halfway through cooking a curry when we ran out of gas in the HutLand kitchen and the daily downpour was about to start. And I was NOT giving up on that curry.
No comments:
Post a Comment