It's official! We have our tickets and land at Sea-Tac on October 29th.

There are definitely mixed feelings going home... excitement about seeing family and friends; re-emergence of food and place cravings; sadness about leaving behind new family, friends, and food here; satisfaction at successes and lessons learned; and thoughts of the things we're not getting around to, and want to come back for another time. Making it all happen (skiing in India, living in Thailand) was such a big focus for so long that shifting to longer-term goals back home has been tricky, especially as we try to enjoy our remaining time here.

Thinking about seeing all the familiar faces at home reminded me of an article I read a while ago about facial recognition. The researchers said that we recognize faces by comparing them to an internal template in our mind that's a composite of the faces we're used to seeing. We recognize the face of our grandmother, our favorite barista, or our best friend by noting how that face differs from the template. The idea is that a person's template is likely tied to the ethnic group(s) they are familiar with, and when dealing with another group it's really not that "They all look the same", but that they all differ from the template in similar ways. We noticed when we first got to India, we had trouble recognizing people we'd see periodically. But after several months, remembering new people got easier. The same happened in Thailand. I wonder, now, if we'll go through the same process back in the US? I went to a pub that's one of the main foreigner hangouts in town the other day to trade some books, and had the startling realization that all of them looked the same! To be fair, they're all middle-aged, portly, balding men of (mostly) British decent, but still.

Big, big thanks Tarah, who gave me the lovely birthday gift of carbon-offsets for our flights home. More info on offsetting flights (or almost anything else you can think of) here: www.TerraPass.com