adventure.

as i wrote last week, i want to continue to think through and learn to articulate why an american woman would come to live in india. you can read what i’ve already written on this topic here.

{image from our recent trip to agra}

for those of you who know me, you know i’m a fan of adventure. not always, to be sure (especially if that adventure may require dancing), but probably more than your average. after high school, i backpacked through europe posing as an austrian student (my train ticket cost me half the price of what an american would have paid!). in college, i backpacked part of the AT and got caught in a thunder snowstorm with two college friends. we ended up camping out for several days in a shelter with some hicks who took apart the bear proof fence around us to grill bagels.  after graduating, i moved out to colorado to work for free for an organization i believed in, though i didn’t know anyone in the city and had no idea how i’d pay my bills. i knew after my first trip to india back in 2005 that i’d like to try my hand at living here, because i love it so much and also just to see if i could do it.

my self-appointed sister recently made a very true statement: the adventurer in me likes firsts.  living in india means i have a great catalogue of firsts: cooking a full meal in our Indian kitchen, hubs’s first trip to kerala, our first christmas abroad, celebrating diwali, visiting rajasthan after dreaming of it for so long, rafting the ganges. as even attempting to accomplish simple things here makes living every day into some kind of adventure, i have more good stories than i do firsts, from that time our sink backed up and our drain overflowed nasty food bits and greasy curry residue all over our kitchen floor to the day we wandered all over tarnation looking for “those demon things to hang on our porch,” we’ve got enough little stories to keep ourselves looking back and smiling entertained long into the future. heck- our boss had a monkey on his porch/ in his kitchen last week!

what’s more, the adventure and challenge each day brings can be incredibly exhausting, and they cause me to reflect more on the little joys and accomplishments far more often than i do at home. trip to the grocery store with everything checked off the list? that, my friends, is a very successful day.  sipping ginger honey lemon tea while listening to the call to prayer over the chatter of our neighbors in tamil, hindi and malayalam every evening as the sun sets? definitely something i know i’ll miss when we return to our quiet little apartment in our denver neighborhood.

life is bigger here, which can be a frustration and a joy. i moved here because i love a good challenge.