a hop, skip and a dash …

… and i am back. 6 weeks gone, 6 weeks in the motherland, and it was great. i was suppose to blog while i was there, but as it goes, i didnt. so, how does it feel to be back? i dont know yet - it feels weird, not that relaxing feeling of coming home after being gone for a while, but rather an ambivilance to being back.

riding back from the airport (i am in philly), the immediate sense of being back hits you - from the more orderly traffic sense, the crisp winter air, the lack of congestion. there was something comforting about coming back to the east coast - i dearly miss the sense of east coast of winter, the bite of the cold, the clouds in the sky, so it was nice to walk out of the airport to that.

but what was i coming home from? home. india has always been a great time for me in the past, but this time around, i realized it is more then a trip, or a vacation. i experience india in ways that i hadnt before, going out to some bars, enjoying new years on a rooftop party, and most importantly working and having a routine. bangalore wasnt travelling or vacationing - it was living abroad. waking up, going to work, meeting friends, coming home, unwinding. before bangalore, i spent more time with family and learning about family history then i have in a long time. on this trip most, i realized that while every one of my cousins in india has all this right there, i dont. i dont have mama’s, and fai’s in the next town over, or kaka’s living a bus ride away. i took it all in this time around.

i had a moment in the paris airport, where i looked out the window, and thought god, i just want to be out there. i want to live somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere different. this trip made me realize that more then anything else.

now to figure out how and where.

a city divided

at this point, i have spent a fair amount of time visiting philadelphia. during this last trip there, it occurred to me that i would never want to live there. there are probably two reasons for this, first that philadelphia has a sort of faux diversity, and second that it is really the epitome of urban sprawl.

about the second point, when i visit i tend to stay in the rittenhouse area, near center city. that area is probably best described as very new york-esque, lots of shops, restaurants, and bars within walking distance. but i have also stayed with my friend about a 15 min highway ride (on the other side of the river) from rittenhouse which is still philly. to get around from neighborhood to neighborhood seems rather difficult on public transportation, so most people either need a car or a friend with one. i was shocked at one point when we went to a shopping mall area, and drove for 30 mins on the highway, only to still be in philadelphia. not my kind of city.

more important, while there minority populations in philly, there is a very stark and clear division between the minority and poor communities and the more affluent areas. sure it is like this in many if not most cities, but in philadelphia the difference between the quality of life for a black person and a white person is very clear. if you are in the rittenhouse area, it is almost always obvious who is shopping and who is serving, who is buying goods and who is selling goods. neighborhoods go from nice and clean to poor and dirty within a city block. in the end, there is poor integration between communities and truly very little actually diversity in the day to day. not a city for me.