Adjusting . . .

It is Sunday morning and we are doing art surrounded by the sounds of India after having eaten our curry, chutney and dosas for breakfast. There is always a period of adjustment after travel from one culture to the next (the sounds, smells, tastes, weather, customs, etc.); jet lag always seems more difficult when the culture is drastically different than one's own comfort zone. And travel seems to strip away any semblance of structure and self as you are put in lines for ticketing, customs, passport control, bustled onto a bus and loaded into a plane where there is no personal space and you become well acquainted with your seatmates, then dropped off into a foreign country to transfer planes and search about for food, bathrooms, a place to sit and your next gate--but isn't that the joy of travel, the unknown, the shattering of regularity to explore something new? So, this morning our patterns--making tea and doing art--seem to ground us as we adjust to our new environment and possibly our new selves (?) as we sit here in our salwar khamezes (tunics and loose pants) surrounded by the sounds of India.