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I arrived in Finland on Thursday evening. The flight was late because of the mess at the Frankfurt airport. A thunder storm brought the whole Frankfurt airport to a halt and my plane from India had to land on another airport first. We finally reached Frankfurt about 4-5 hours late and I missed my next flight by only a few minutes. I got a seat on the next one, fortunately, and made my way to Finland. However, 8000 bags had gone missing in Frankfurt due to some technical fault somewhere, and even I lost two bags. The staff convinced me that I will get the bags back. Hope so. I took a bus from Helsinki-Vantaa airport to Jyväskylä and my dad picked me up from there and we came home at around 4am. I was surprised at how amazingly bright the summer nights are over here and how clean, silent and fast the bus was. And the car ride from Jyväskylä to my home felt like a drive into the middle of nowhere! But I also found that it is very, very beautiful here, just like I remembered.

I have now been home for a couple of days, mainly sitting at the computer writing emails. Friends had a small Midsummer party on Friday but I decided to stay home with my family. I called up a couple of friends to say hi. It feels strange to hear their voices! I will spend the weekend here at home and sometime next week go to Jyväskylä to check my new flat in Kortepohja and sign the contract on it. I will also meet Kati, a girl from Jyväskylä, who will go to Chandigarh, India, for her traineeship next Thursday.

I just got a call that 1 out of 2 of my lost pieces of luggage is being delivered home right now. Hope I get the other piece of luggage as well, since it contains one of my diaries and a lot of pictures on CDs. I am also still waiting for three parcels to arrive by post, containing a lot of books, my winter clothes I sent home from Kathmandu and the souvenirs I bought from Jaipur.

I feel that I am still kind of in between two different worlds. I am slowly getting used to living here again but at the same time I am sending a lot of emails to India to my friends and talking with them on Messenger or Skype. A reunion is already being planned for next summer 🙂

Because I came back about exactly the same time as I left last summer it seems that nothing has changed here. That might actually be true about my home, since things don’t really change all that much here 🙂 Well the new barn is there and more cows are there but that’s about it. Since there are no (other) big changes, the whole India experience feels a little like a dream. Luckily I can use the pictures, the Hindi movie DVDs and the souvenirs to take me back to those days I spent on the Great Indian Subcontinent. There is also a big chance that I will go back there some day, but right now I am concentrating on my life here. I can feel, though, that the traveling bug bit me while I was away from home, and I am more curious to go to places now, more curious than I was before. I really liked my life in India, even though the work was sometimes very hard and the last couple of weeks at the job left a bitter taste in my mouth. Still, there were so many other things there that put any difficulties I experienced in their shadow. I am damn happy that I had the courage to go there. I can now see which things in my old life I don’t miss at all. It is very easy to get stuck on something and be somewhat happy with that as long as you don’t know about anything better. I have also seen people who are much, much worse off than I am or anybody in Finland is. I am sure it makes me see things differently and appreciate my life in Finland much more.

So… all in all it was a great experience and I don’t even want to see it as something that as ended. Instead I want to think that it is part of an ongoing process of personal growth and finding my true potential. And I think I might just go back to India some day. It took my friend Andrei seven years to go back even though he was planning to come the year after his first trip. So I won’t make any promises about when I will be there. I have time.