Happy New Year! 

I'm back in Jakarta after almost 3 weeks in California and Texas, visiting family, friends, eating tons of good food, enjoying the weather (although it was a bit freezing for my taste) and driving a car(!) which I haven't done in more than 6 months.  

I'll admit that when I left Jakarta for California, I was a bit apprehensive -- would I want to come back to the "Big Durian" after a few weeks of blue skies, great food, Peet's coffee and NPR?  But now that I'm back... I can't quite explain how happy Jakarta, and Indonesia in general, makes me.  The first mutters of Bahasa Indonesia that I heard a grandma saying to her granddaughter at the Taipei airport made my heart jump and when I landed and walked off the plane in Jakarta, the humid (slightly stinky) air was a weirdly welcoming sensation after three weeks of cold drying up my skin. :)

I'm beginning to realize that even though Indonesia is perpetually foreign to me... somehow it has become home in the last six months.  The unexpected, yet totally expected, traffic that pops up, the busy-ness of the streets where 20 million people live and eek out a living, the street kids who walk up and down the street near my house with their empty burlap bags asking for food and money, the rhythms and sounds of my colleagues talking to each other in a language that I have yet to grasp....somehow this has become home, and I love it.

Currently Reading Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia By Elizabeth Gilbert see related