Happy New Year!

It was funny to get back to Jakarta this week because I feel like I have home in two very different places. Indianapolis was delightful (even without snow), and we had a grand Christmas. I am very blessed to honestly enjoy spending time with my family. And I got the party started quickly. I was able to cancel my flight from Chicago to Indianapolis, so that within two hours of having my passport stamped at the airport, I was at a birthday celebration for my great-uncle in Zion, Illinois, north of Chicago. We spent Christmas in Indianapolis and then my sister, my mom and I drove to Grand Rapids, MI for the New Year.

The beginning of 2009 gave me the occasion to reflect on all the cool things that I did in 2008. I started last year at Cedar Campus (one of my favorite places in the world), took great classes at Wheaton, lived with some awesome girls, traveled to California with my sister to visit family for spring break, graduated from college, celebrated with a road trip to Florida, visited my roommate Megan in Seattle, got to spend a little more time at Cedar Campus, moved around the world, started my teaching career, found new friends, settled into a new life in time to introduce my parents and Megan to it, and traveled back to tell everyone what an adventure it's been.

Traveling here sometimes feels like an adventure in itself. I think my brain works really hard to forget those 30 hours of traveling because they feel blurry every time I try to remember them. It truly wasn't bad this time. I was a little worried about getting on my flight from Chicago to Hong Kong because they didn't give me a boarding pass until there were only 10 minutes to board, but I even got an excellent seat, a blessing gratefully accepted on a 15 hour flight. After a minor luggage hiccup in Singapore, I arrived in Jakarta with both my bags and was back at my apartment by 10:00 AM on Wednesday. The hard work was staying awake until bedtime. Which I didn't. I took a loooong nap in the afternoon before going to dinner at Joseph and Karla's house. (Warning: what follows is a pharmaceutical cautionary tale.) Before bedtime, I thought it would be a good idea to take some Benadryl to help me sleep. Usually, one little pink pill knocks me out, but afternoon naps can throw off my nighttime sleep, so I decided to take two just in case. Now, I've never had a hangover, but when I woke up Thursday morning, groggy and headache-y, I think I was as close as I've ever been. Lesson learned. About Benadryl, that is.

With a few days to recover under my belt, I'm actually excited to get back to teaching. In some ways, I felt like my first five months at IPEKA were a little like another student teaching experience since I didn't have very much control over lesson and unit planning last semester. On Wednesday, my old 10th graders become my new 11th graders, and I become the lead teacher for 11th grade English. Karla and I will still be working together, but she's taken on other teaching responsibilities. We're starting the semester with Animal Farm and Marked this time, so I'm looking forward to improving what we did a few months ago. It's nice to have a fresh start. That's one of the things that I like about teaching. There's always a new year, a new semester, a new unit, a new lesson plan, another chance to do better than the last time. And I need all those chances.

Everyone has different signals for what home means, and home in Jakarta for me means: morning light and evening darkness with 6:00 o'clock precision, Walters on my kitchen counters, the call of the mosque, sweating, the ding-a-linging of vendors in the street, heat, air conditioning, the funny smell under my kitchen sink, drinking from a water cooler, my too-big bed, saying hello to my security guards when I enter or leave, my ugly pink bathroom, time alone to think or read or waste, figuring out what time it is for the people I love, and a thousand other pleasant and not-so-pleasant things. It's nice to be home.