Brazil... home or not home?

These past couple of weeks have been interesting.... to say the least. Brazil is a wonderful country, with lots of sunshine, miles upon miles of beautiful sandy beaches and millions of tropical fruits that cost horrors elsewhere, but here you can literally raise your hand and pick them right off the trees, in the middle of the streets. NO joke!

This is where I’m from… or at least, where I was born. But to quote a friend of mine, I felt like a tomato in a fruit salad. Sure, tomatoes are a fruit… but they have no business being in a fruit salad.

I have few friends left here. I’ve been gone for over 10 years, so the ones that remain are true friends, and there’s only a handful. So every time I come here, I call them up and we have a happy reunion, we spend hours talking about our lives, where we are, what we’re doing, and it’s wonderful to see that time and distance have done nothing to harm our friendship… but I feel like I’m so alien to life here. I feel like if I were to come back to stay, there would be no place for me here… and that’s not a very good feeling.

I guess this is a result of change. I have changed enormously in the last 10 years (for better or for worse), and when I get here, even though I’m sure everything has changed as well, everything feels the same as it was 10 years ago. It feels like I’m going back in time, it feels like I’m regressing instead of progressing… I’m not talking about the country… I’m talking about me... don't really know how to explain it...

All that aside, this trip has been wonderful! Sunshine everyday, in temperatures nearing 40 degrees Celsius (which is like 100 F), amazing food and fruits and juices and everything a tropical paradise should have, friends and family, beach and pool outings, and generally a great time! I will soon be uploading some pictures to Facebook, so you can all go check it out, though I must admit I didn’t take nearly as many pictures as I should have… it’s home! It’s weird to take pictures when you’re at home…

Maybe I should just stop philosophizing and accept that things change and we have no control over them. That sometimes things change for the better, and sometimes for the worse… and our job is not to control the world, but to make ourselves better people, to react in better ways when things change.