Our language teacher said she wanted a few days off to spend time with her son before he goes back to school next week. I think perhaps it was her nice way of telling us we should maybe take a little break from language study. :) We agreed. But the thought of going somewhere new in this country we're still adjusting to was a little bit daunting. Going to Thailand seemed too expensive and everything else is just too far for a quick trip, so we decided to head back to our old city for a couple days.
It has been fabulous but far from a vacation. For the most part our friends here speak less English than our friends in our new city, which means instead of a break from language study, it's been more like a conversational-intensive. I will say I have been AMAZED at J's language these past couple days. We arrived Sunday evening and while I was exhausted from 5 hours in the car, he was re-connecting with everyone at our Sunday place like a rock star! (He also could have seemed like a rock star because he's been wearing his sunglasses 24/7 so no-one sees the yucky pink eye he's fighting.)
S went to her class Sunday evening and had a blast. B and I wandered in and out of the back of her class and the entryway with the other moms and kids his age. It all starts 1/2 hour after their normal bedtime and wraps up around 9:30 or 10pm so I was amazed at their tenacity, especially since the first 20 minutes were a full-blown photo shoot of all the new people wanting to take their picture. I told them it's ok because we're so glad that new people are coming here and hearing the truth. I don't think they quite grasped the gravity of what I was saying, but they smiled anyway.
It was bittersweet how many people I remembered and how many remembered us. Many of the ladies stroked my stomach and said they remembered when I was pregnant with B "And now look at him", they said with a laugh as he led the other toddlers in jumping off a low wooden box onto the tile floor. One of my closer friends made a joke about how I was still fat from being pregnant with him, followed by, "It's ok. My baby is 16 years old and I'm still fat from being pregnant." Everyone laughed and I couldn't believe how normal it felt. It's still Asia, after all, but we have history with people here like we have history with people back home. And even though our lives look totally different than theirs, we are connected. We are family.
We left with multiple invitations for plans throughout the week and have been slowly reconnecting with everyone more personally. Last night we had dinner with the dear sister who gave us our local names as well as several other sweet friends.
Her son goes to school in our city so we're hoping to connect with him again after the semester starts. Like many kids his age the world around, he's recently decided that what he once believed to be true isn't true so we are really hoping he'll come out hang with us back in the big city and maybe bring some friends.
Look at us, all en-culturated! Even the kids are getting into this "strike a pose" picture culture. Poor S is also yawning. They've been up so late for the past two nights since this culture is such a late night culture. Most kids their age go to bed at 9pm at the earliest and usually more like 10-11pm so people are always appalled when I tell them our kids go to bed at 7 or 7:30, just like I'm appalled when I see toddlers playing outside at 10:30pm.
In the mornings, we've taken time to walk around some of our favorite parks and eaten at our favorite restaurants. Restaurant food in this city is so yummy and so cheap! And the best part is we know all the good places to eat. It's been so nice to know which way to go at every single intersection, to always know where I am, and where we're going. It's neat to remember how once this city felt so overwhelming and now it seems totally manageable. I will probably never know where I am at every single intersection in our new city of 8 million people, but it's encouraging to be reminded that one day it will feel manageable at least. That one day, the budding friendships we're just now forming will feel like the old friendships we have here.
As we look at this beloved city, the hard part is knowing what to do with those feelings. We never intended to live here for more than a couple years, but we certainly meant to live here longer than one. We feel no strong leading to return longterm, but our daughter learned to walk here. She turned one here. She started talking here. It was here we celebrated our 6th anniversary and here we found out that we were pregnant with our son. And all of the dear people that we love here walked with us through all of those things, and we walked with them, through triumph and heartache. For that one year, we built our lives here. And it's hard to know what he wants from all that now.
2 proud papas
When we look back at the past few years of our lives, it seems so disorganized and yet we are confident that we were walking with him each step of the way. It's just hard not to wonder how anything good could ever come out of such chaos.
As for today, we're just trying to continue walking worthy... loving people... being faithful and for now that means following through on the commitments we made earlier in the week.
If I were to be completely honest, this little bundle of joy that we saw earlier today might possibly be our sole reason for visiting this city. Her parents lost their first child just a few weeks before we found out we were pregnant with B. It was a really heartbreaking & difficult time and even a little bit rough on our friendship, understandably so. Now she's here and we couldn't be happier to meet her! More about all this in the next post...