3 years

Today marks 3 years since the day I arrived in Natal. Coincidentally, I was just tackling an email inbox clean-up and went to the very beginning. I found a lot of emails from that time. It's pretty cool to read how excited I was...how clueless I was...how anxious I was...how bad my Portuguese was.

It's amazing that it's been 3 years. I'm reading these emails as though it were a completely different person who wrote them. And in a way, it was. Usually on these anniversaries I blog something sentimental, showing you pictures of the past 12 months or whatever. But today I don't feel like doing that. I think maybe the past two anniversaries I felt like it was momentous, I felt like looking back. Not today. Today feels like a normal day, just like any other. I don't feel sentimental, nor do I feel like I accomplished something huge.

Maybe it's because now Natal is home. My life here is my life. It's not a vacation, it's not a trip, it's not an adventure anymore. It's not something I feel like blogging about all the time like that first year, because now I think it's normal to buy eggs one at a time.

So how have I celebrated this non-momentous momentous occasion? Last night 5 of my friends from church came over. We watched a movie, ate some pasta, played some Uno, and laughed with our friend as she tried to catch a slipping 2-liter Sprite and inadvertently sprayed it ALL OVER my dining room wall. It has been so, so long since I laughed that hard. I told them about this special day and we all kind of just sat there staring at each other. "Wow," one said, "has it really been three years?" And then we went back to laughing about the wall.

Like I said, this is home. This feels normal. And that's exactly how I think it should be.