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Hello!

After a huge 50 hour journey which involved a 4.00am rickshaw, a 12 hour train ride, a taxi ride and 2 aeroplanes, I am finally home, and back where it all started 2 long months ago. Before I left, everyone was telling me that the 2 months would fly and seem a lot less. Well sorry folks, I hate to be a smarty pants (actually sometimes I like it) it seems like I have been gone 6 months at least.
Coming home was strange, unsettling and beautiful all at the same time.
As I sat in the car being driven home from the Adelide airport the streets seemed so empty and so very clean. The world I have returned to seems to ordered, clean, mundane and right now, pretty tame, or dare I say, boring! Coming home to my partner was fantastic, but leaving India was heartbreaking. I don't know how people with no job, house or partner actually make the adjustement to coming home after travelling. Yesterday we went to the pictures which involved going to the local shopping mall, something which is usually a stressfull undertaking due to the amount of people one needs to jostle through. Even though it was the madness of christmas shopping, I could hardly believe how EMPTY it looked, large spaces between people! I wonder how long it will take my perception to change, hopefully never.
On Monday I return to my full time job which is already creeping in at the edges of my consciuousness with a plaintive,and irritating whisper.
But, enough of the doom and gloom! India is amazing and a place that should be visited at least once in a lifetime. Already I am thinking about when the next trip will be, only next time I am taking Jonas with me.
This is my last blog, but before I go I wanted to leave with 11 things that I have learnt in my time in India...

1) Patience
2) You can fit 18 people into an auto rickshaw (if you count those hanging off the outside)
3) Everything, including (or maybe especially) happiness, is relative.
4) Just when you think it has all turned to shit, something wonderfull will happen. THAT is India.
5) You can actually spend 2 months with only 120 rupee Indian camel leather sandels (chappels) on your feet. It is possible to walk 6 hours a day in them, naviagate the public transport system in them, and belive it or not, trek in them (possible but ridiculous).
6) The Indians are a beautiful, hospitable, and generous people and we can learn so many truths from them.
7) Patience
8) Time is not linear, ISD (more commonly know as Indian Strechy Time) is proof of this. An eight hour wait in Australia is unbearable, in India, it is a reasonalbe amount of time wait for your next train.
9) To paraphrase Dorothy, There really is no place like home
10) Even though you can't save India, you can do one random act of kindness for someone every single day in India, like buy them a meal. It is the least a traveller in India can do.
11) Patience

Thanks for reading , and thanks to all of you who sent me emails, some from home and some strangers reading this blog, it certainly made the trip easier.

So, until my next foray into other regions, I bid you all a fond farewell, and...Hello!

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