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Why are we here?

I don’t think I actually really thought about this until we got to India. After the first day I looked around me and thought, “This isn’t really going to be fun, is it?”, then Alex and I talked about why we are really here.

[Aside: it is never a good sign to be landing in an airport, only to be daydreaming of the elation of leaving from that same airport in four weeks. I blame the jetlag and the completely uncomfortable state I was in.]

To set the scene, when we left Canada, I was in a state of mind that went something along the lines of: we sold a lovely home of our own, I walked away from a great job (and life!) opportunity, this had better be DAMNED GOOD FUN.

And then Alex went, really, fun? In India? All the time? You really expected that?

And I had to agree with him that I probably wasn’t very good at connecting the dots before we left, and yeah, this is going to be harder than we thought.

It’s hard because we are strangers in this land, with no connection to the people at all. It’s not like Europe where we could guess and derive from their words and expect fluent English (or bust out French 12 vocabulary to see where it gets you). There is some familiarity, in that some parts of Delhi reminded me strongly of Taipei where I grew up – except Delhi is markedly different with a lot more chaos, many more traces of military presence, and a sense of uneasiness that comes with not understanding the language around me.

It’s hard because we haven’t traveled “on the cheap” like this since we were students, in 2004. Even then, we splurged more than we should to stay at budget hotels rather than hostels, and always made sure we ate well in the cities we visited (and understood the menus enough to do so!). So looking for accommodation, being comfortable in the accommodation we decide on, and feeding our grumpily hungry selves will prove to be a big challenge regularly. Only when we get in the groove of accomplishing these simple tasks daily, will I be able to move past the stress and proceed on to all-out DAMNED GOOD FUN.

But that’s not why we are here. If we were looking for just “fun”, we would’ve saved this trip for another time on another budget, and gone with a lovely two-week luxury honeymoon in Hawaii, or even the Maldives. We’ve been telling people we chose India because we “wanted to knock off the least kid-friendly places on our bucket list.” That’s the simple answer. The complicated answer is, we wanted perspective, we wanted to see how the rest of the world lives, we wanted to experience something totally different, we wanted to be outside our comfort zone for a while to wake us up from the complacency we have developed in our North American 9-to-5 ways.

For that, we’ve definitely come to the right place. I just have to keep reminding myself that’s why we are here. And I’ll have to keep you posted on the pursuit of DAMNED GOOD FUN.

{ 3 comments… add one }
  • Wes Johnson Tuesday 29 March 2011, 21:51

    Wooo! The adventure begins! Looking forward to the updates.

  • Jenn Stark Thursday 31 March 2011, 12:10

    If it is any consolation, I think every world traveler has this thought at the beginning of their journeys :) Looking forward to keeping up with your adventures and all the DAMNED GOOD FUN that shall be had ;)

  • Paula Wednesday 6 April 2011, 23:34

    You are my hero. Down with complacency!

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