After the Plane Ride Home
Hi, folks! It’s your international correspondent here…except I’m not so international anymore. My big trip is over and I’m back in my own North American urban life. More or less, anyway. Travel changes the traveler. I’m not quite the same person I was when I left, and that means my sense of home isn’t quite the same, either. Everything’s just slightly off-kilter. For example, I no longer take for granted: electricity that works all the time — in Kerala, India, power outages were common, and in Kathmandu, Nepal, the power was turned off for eight hours a day sidewalks and sane traffic — throughout Asia, sidewalks were sketchy and traffic operated by no natural laws that I was familiar with equality of women — on a more serious note, in a lot of India we saw very few women driving vehicles, working with the public, or walking around after dark