of homecoming

I’m home, with a bad throat and some jetlag and a lot of happiness and a little bit of sadness.

The trip was amazing, as if there was ever any doubt, and I think everyone knows what the best part of it was, so I’m not even going to go there, except to say that if I had to do it all over again, even the 19 hour flight home with screaming children and a nonfunctioning inflight entertainment system, I would do it in a heartbeat, because it was all worth it for those few hours of solace and bliss.

I took over a thousand pictures, as Nut, Doof, and KH can testify. Ducks went through every single one, and even helped me to orientate them all correctly. I’ve uploaded pictures from the first two cities to facebook, but now I’ve reached the part of the trip where we hit Vegas, and sifting out the best of 276 photos taken over the span of 3 days is just too daunting a task for tonight. I’ll definitely have them up eventually though, my uncle and cousins have given me strict instructions to share the pictures with them.

I think if I had to pick one thing aside from the obvious that I absolutely loved about the trip, it would be meeting my mom’s side of the family. They’re lovely people, so very welcoming, and they made me feel like I belonged right from the get go.

There was so much more than that though, just exploring, and annoying peewee, and Vitamin Water (oh god I’m going to miss Vitamin Water) and the weather, and the bookstores…

It was our second last day when we walked along Haight and Ashbury, and stopped in at a bunch of little bookstores, and in one of them I was taken back to when my sister and I were little, and we went back to India every year, and our parents or an aunt or uncle would take us to Crosswords, this huge bookshop in the middle of Baroda where my grandma’s house is, or really near my uncle’s clinic in Bombay, and we’d spend HOURS in there, picking out whatever we wanted. I always came out with piles of new books, that I steadily made my way through during the rest of the holiday.

I’m so glad my mom cultivated that love for stories in my sister and I. There’s this wonderful sense of peace and comfort I get from just stepping into a place filled with books. Everything becomes a little more hushed, slows down a little bit more, and just by running my fingers over the spines of the books on the shelves, tracing their letters, reading a couple of excerpts, my mind and heart and soul begin to feel whole again.

Yeah, I don’t know how the “I’m back bitches, check out how awesome my holiday was nanny nanny booboo” post turned into a bookgasm entry, but there you have it.

And now, I’m going to go grab a snack before I try to sleep some more. I can’t help it, it’s brunch time back there. You know the holiday routine: wake up, watch morning cartoons, finally get so hungry you drag yourself out of the room and grab a meal which is way too early for lunch but definitely doesn’t consist of breakfasty foods.. explore explore explore, get hungry by four, whine till five when it’s dark anyway so you don’t feel bad having dinner early, go home, watch trashy tv (mostly porn, of course) till you fall asleep, and start all over again the next day.

Hells bells, it’s going to take some adjusting back to get back to normal life.