Longing for Paradise

My relationship with the paradise is a love-hate relationship of sorts. OK make it lovelove-hate because my love for it far outweighs the hatred. If there is any. But the point is, as much as I love it sometime I get fed up with the things there, how things work - or how they don't work, to be more precise - and countless elements that are so ready to piss you off. It's dirty, life is not easy and things never work the way you think they will over there. But one thing you can't accuse it of is life being uneventful.

Take Japan instead.

Things are so nice and orderly. Everything works the way they are supposed to work. Trains come and go on time. There are no sudden breakdowns of electricity. The place is clean - no dust, no mud. People are nice to you, it rains when the weather forecast tells you it will rain and you can order everything online. In short, life's so easy over here. But it sucks in adventure element. I can pretty much tell you how my year is going to turn out in 2010; it'll be the same monotonous crap until the end of March. Then the spring will come, and with it flowers and nice weather. I'll happily trot around with my camera in hand, and the FB profile will have a couple of new albums afterwards. Will follow that with about a week long holiday in May, we'll arrange a BBQ with friends and a lot more sleep. Then nothing of interest until August where I'll get Summer holidays. Off to somewhere, hopefully, for a week or two and then back at work in no time. Cricket would have begun, but that's about the only thing I'd have left with for the whole summer. Come the Autumn, there will be Autumn leaves (obvious, isn't it?) and another photo album. Then back to goddamn winter and hopefully a trip back home in December. That's about it, and it will work out exactly the way I have said here.

But this would have been a whole lot different if I were in Paradise. There are no seasons of course, but say, the rainy season could very well start with a three month draught and a power cut. There will be no power most of the time and candle lit dinner table (not for romantic reasons, obviously) conversations will be full of dissing the government. Meanwhile there will be a couple of strikes and a protest ending few people getting killed. By the police. Leaving us with ample things to talk about. And the planned trip to Galle will have to be cancelled because the hired van guy had some other last minute arrangements, but it will happen two months later on a Saturday after discussing it over booze on Friday night. Probably by bus or better yet, train, which will be delayed and cause the two day trip to be a three day one. Meanwhile, my laptop will break down but there will be no place to get it repaired. However, few calls to friends will end up with me and one of the said friends taking it apart and fixing it without a cent being spent as opposed to 10K you'd have to spend in Japan. I will go to university grounds every other weekend and play touch rugby with some known but mostly unknown people, and will make new friends. Booze with friend will be lot more fun, and sometimes will have to walk 10 miles because you missed the last bus and there is no cash in hand for a tuk-tuk. Parties will actually be fun, and there will be Baila tunes to dance to. And the food; OK, I stop there.

Yes, I'm seriously homesick all of a sudden.