March 8, 2024

Some things stay the same

I took a break from staring at a screen and picking my brain about whether that one word on the slide could be a little bigger.

Reality begins to set in.

I haven’t left campus in 48 hours. I gotta go.

Walking out of the gates of UTC, I toss in my earbuds and take a left, then another left and then a left at the first street. Order momos from Ying Yang and walk across the street to buy a blueberry slushy. A set of actions I’ve made countless times. Once food and drink are acquired I begin to search for a logical place of consumption

Instead of walking back, I decide to take another left and continue down the street past the salon where the man cutting my hair told me about traveling to see his sister in Bangalore for the first time and discovering his passion for cutting hair upon a visit to the hair salon. I walk to the park past the “good” market and reflect on me and Adam’s first day here when we watched a group of men here play cricket and a woman learning to ride a scooter for the first time wondering what possibly could happen next. I walk around the neighborhood until I find a nice curb on which to devour my food.

And that’s where I sit now writing this blog reflecting on just what the hell happened to these past 9 weeks. In some ways I think I romanticized India and thought it would be this grand life-changing experience, and now as I sit and reflec,t what sticks with me is the humanity of it all. I thought India would make me into something or someone else, but as I sit here now reflecting on how this experience has changed me, I can’t help feeling just like my same old self. I’m just me, and I guess what I’ve realized is, you know what, that’s something to be excited about! And maybe I signed up for this program for a million different conflicting reasons, but I ended up learning exactly what I needed to hear a year ago when I chose to do this in the first place.

By Quinn