Fourth of July

We're in Siem Reap right now, the home base for Angkor Wat tourism. We got robbed on Saturday, at the main place, Angkor Wat, lost a pile of money, but recovered quickly because the atm card showed up, and because the place is spectacular, giant beautiful temple after giant beautiful temple, evocative and amazing even with the hordes of tourists everywhere, and the people hawking.
     We've been three weeks on the road now, after leaving Indonesia, two week in Vietnam and one in Cambodia. Funny thing about travelling like this, after a year in a community like Salatiga, is that it seems like a rock skipping across the surface of a very deep pond, only it never sinks. As soon as we arrived in Hanoi, it felt like we were on a tourist program, and everything felt a little pre-ordained. You have to work hard, in a place like Vietnam, to not get sucked into the program, but the program flattens everything. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me after living for a year in Salatiga, where there were no tourists, ever. I learned a lot about Vietnam, and now about Cambodia, but very little about Vietnamese or Cambodians. Of course I cannot speak Vietnamese or Cambodian (I could never speak Vietnamese, I am convinced. Impossible to hear those tonal distinctions), so that makes it harder. Still, it has been incredible to visit these places, and I am really glad that we had this opportunity.
    We leave here on Wednesday morning, fly through Singapore, pick up our bags and my machete there, and leave from Singapore at 6 AM Thursday morning, home home home. We'll be back by Thursday afternoon. It's a strange thing to write that, like I could make dinner plans in Bozeman for the weekend (this is not a hint, by the way. I don't know if I will be able to move when I get home). It's just so odd, so surreal, to think about home, about Bozeman, about our life there, about how things just get turning again, cycles, habits, frames of mind. I can't wait to see my friends again, and I'm even ready to get back to my job, but I also am not sure what any of that means.
     I will write more in this blog after I get home, more reflections about returning, about the year, about the things that I have learned taking my family away. As it has been before, I will write it mostly for myself, to process the experience. Only I have loved that people have read this too, and it has changed the way I write it, and I never thought I could sustain a blog, or enjoy writing one, and I loved it. So if you are one of those people who reads this when I write it, or check it every now and then, thank you. I have been grateful for the chance to share this year with you. I don't know what it looks like as a narrative arc, from this end. Maybe someday I'll read the whole thing again, and see. I don't know if anyone will care about what I have to say, once I get home. In any case, thanks for reading this far. It's a lot of pages, and if you'd seen it in book form I don't think you would have picked it up. So I am glad that I tricked you.
    Today, the fourth of July (they have the fourth of July here too, but they don't capitalize the F), we are taking a break from temple hopping, which we've been doing in the jungle heat for two days, and will do again tomorrow. We slept in, we'll do some laundry (i.e. have someone else do our cleaning), wander around Siem Reap a little, eat some more food (Cambodia does meat really well), ride bikes, maybe go to a silkworm farm, just stuff like that. I hope you have a lovely Fourth, or, if you're not in the US, a good fourth. See some of you soon. See the rest of you when I see you. If you're in Indonesia, I miss you already. If you're in the United States, I can't wait to bore you. Trust me, we will be insufferable companions for about three months, and if I were you, I would avoid me. Cross the street if you see me coming. Pretend not to be home when I stop by. Maybe this is old habit already. Soon, though, one of you will be saying, as I launch into another paragraph about Javanese neighborhoods, "Well, better let you go."
   I better let you go.