Home

I am home.

Well, not home right now. I am in Bloomington, Illinois to attend a teacher hiring fair at Illinois State University, looking for good candidates to teach at Whitfield.

I arrived home Saturday, the 25th after a challenging trip home. From Paharganj I rode in a cab out to the airport through gray-blue hazy evening air, dense traffic and the suffocating smells of Delhi street life: burning trash, frying pakoras, animal dung, incense, bus exhaust, dust, cooking fires, and closely packed people.

The airport was packed, and after going through the layers of security and airline check in, I wandered around just looking for a place to sit. I listened to my MP3 player and read for a couple hours and then just after midnight we boarded the 777 for Chicago. Every seat was full.

Two hours into our 16 hour flight, American Airlines served me a nice case of food poisoning, so the trip home was less comfortable than the one to India, but I managed.

O'Hare airport felt like Xanadu, with its broad, gleaming concourses, storefronts bursting with luxury goods and every manner of clean, safe, familiar food. I changed clothes, washed and shaved in a restroom and then boarded a small plane for the 45 minute flight home to St. Louis.

Saturday was an odd day since I arrived home at about 9am. I had been awake for about 36 hours, but wanted to get back on my sleep schedule so I stayed up until bedtime.

It was good to see friends at school yesterday.

I've been adding photos back into my blog entries, and it is taking a while to resize and place them, but I think they help capture another tiny slice of what I experienced.

I have a lot of thoughts about my trip now that I have had some time to think about and react to what I experienced. I will need to do another post soon...