Traveling, leaving home, micro-homes

So, 10 days or so in the road, we've been finally getting into a something somehow called vacation, in the sense of you arrive in a place, be there for a few (>3) days, don't look for the next hotel/worry about checkout times... you get the idea. The place? Jogjakarta aka Jogja by the locals. We arrived a few days ago, as Sarah has previously written. The plan is to be around, look at the big'ol temples, stupas, palaces, markets and whatever else you might wanna see around. So far, the trip has been great, which doesn't mean that we haven't been ripped off, or only Iloveyous flow between Sarah's beautiful lips and my mouth's enclosures... we believe we're learning to travel, taking this as metaphorically or straightforward as you want... I know, travel must rank #2 in the biggest commonplace metaphors after love, followed by water, moon and day/night (cycles in general).... but there might be a reason why there's a bunch of people, including yours truly, who still write about those things after Shakespeare.

Back to the travel learning, these are things that we learned how to deal with, or that's why we want to believe at least:
-Figuring out ways to cope with unrequested offerings
-Find the way back to our room.
-Listening 1,000 times per day 'hello mister'
-Did I talk about the kids who knows what they say to you as they laugh after saying "hello mister" or "tourist"?
Regardless, I hope to not to loose the ability of smiling back 2,000 times to those
lovely old ladies whose wrinkles can't hide a cocktail of laughter, charm and awkwardness upon seeing us walking in otherwise tourist-free backstreets.

So, we made our room in Jogja our micro-home, our temporary homey place where we feel comfy to be. The hope: extend this feeling to everywhere, regardless the place, country or duration of stay. Would that be possible? I hope so. We'll try, for a good bunch of this year at the least.

Finally, thank you all for those wonderful goodbye parties. We miss you all. Hope to see you again in 2010. Madison was our home, and you are part of it. Cheesy but true.

Happy year of the tiger!
RP