Thoughts of Going Home

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Geo: 13.75, 100.517

I have been in Southeast Asia since November 10, 2011, almost half a year of traveling adventures, far away from my home in Maine. Anticipating my return flights tomorrow, I have mixed feelings about going home. It will be wonderful to see my family again, friends, the cats, and our house! But I already know I will miss being warm, feeling the lovely sun on my skin, boring right through to my bones, although there have been many days here in Thailand when it has just been too hot. And I will miss walking barefoot on the beach, swimming and playing in the ocean, bobbing in the warm waters of the Gulf of Thailand!

What else will I miss? Khao phat je, vegan rice and veggies; yes, I will even miss my staple dinner in this part of the world. I will truly miss so many incredibly ripe, delicious fruits: mangoes, mangosteens, bananas, jackfruit, rambutan, watermelon, dragonfruit. I never did cultivate a taste for durian though; its texture is wonderful, but it smells bad, and the horrible smell remains as a taste on the tongue for hours afterwards. If a person buys durian at a market, they are not allowed to take it home on a bus, as it has such a bad smell. I wonder who was first brave enough to decide to eat it, since it smells so awful? (But I also wonder that about tomatoes, since they were originally thought to be poisonous. Maybe someone tried to commit suicide by eating a tomato, and not only did not die, but really enjoyed the taste! Maybe it made them want to live again, try other forbidden fruits.)

I will miss not having to wear many clothes, or any shoes at all. Flipflops are the basic footwear here; stores sell very fancy flipflops for females who like to dress up. At school we all kick off our flipflops entering classrooms; I taught barefoot to children who were also barefoot. This is really very nice. Even at the entrance of shops and stores, except for very large malls, and of course in front of any temple, you see flipflops everywhere right outside the entryway; no one wears shoes inside as that is disrespectful and unclean.

Yesterday I sold my bicycle. I loved my one gear pink Schwin City Bike! But I can't take it with me, and I already have two other, better bicycles at home, so I sold it at a great discount to one of the workers in Sinsiam, the community where I lived in Laem Mae Phim. Every morning I would put on my school flipflops and bike to school. I will miss that! But I will not miss being chased by snarling dogs trying to catch me as I bicycled past their house; that is the stuff of nightmares: hearing dogs barking and growling as they run after my bike, hearing their paw-falls closing the gap between us, my biking faster and faster, thinking they are getting closer and closer, but I always escaped.

What else will I miss? I will miss teaching the little children, the three year olds! Once each week I would ask someone to save us the car for a morning, so we could drive to nearby playgrounds, and take the kids to work on their gross motor skills, climbing, hanging, sliding, running. We had a lot of fun. I will miss the beautiful Kindergarten room that I decorated with their drawings and paintings, and my teacher-made charts and drawings. I will miss the kids draping themselves over my back when I sat down, or calling me mom, or sitting on my lap for storytime, or hearing them tell their parents they don't want to go home at the end of the day, that they like going to "Laura's school."

I will miss the people here in Southeast Asia. Gentle, sweet, calm, easy-going, but I think the weather has a large influence on shaping their personalities; no one wants to work very hard or very fast when it's hot! Relax! There will always be more time later to get something done. Here is an example of that philosophy: my Thai assistant in the classroom was supposed to be in school from 8:30AM through the whole morning; sometimes she would arrive after 9AM, sometimes after 10AM, many days she didn't come to school at all. "I will call her," said the director when I mentioned this to him. But still she either didn't come, or came when she was ready. Interesting work ethic, but one that does not mesh very well with mine.

Temples. I will miss seeing wats with their soaring elephant trunks raised to the skies, helping to send their prayers to the heavens. And the monks; I will miss seeing parades of orange-robed monks walking through the streets or countryside, or blessing a passerby in the street. I will miss hearing their chanting, monotonous and musical.

And I will miss the vibrant colors, the always blooming, intense landscapes, the amazing flowers and flowering bushes and trees. I will miss the sounds of the animals too, the wild jungle calls of birds, the comical voices of the geckos, the cicadas and frog choruses, and my friend's three puppies bounding and bouncing about my legs as I walked home from the beach late each afternoon.

Looking back, overall I have had a very enjoyable time in Thailand and Cambodia. It's hard to leave, but would I come back? Absolutely, yes. But tomorrow I have to get on a plane, a rude reintroduction to the life I left half a year ago. What an adventure it would be to simply travel through the world, living wherever I wanted, staying as long as it felt good to be there, finding employment enough to make a living being a wanderer. But would I miss having a home, seeing family and old friends? Would it be the same, traveling, but not having a tether to connect me to a loving center? No, it would not, and so it is time to go back home. For awhile, at least, until the next adventure begins.

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