nine days in.

For all my talk of city-living, it turns out I’m still a girl from the suburbs.  I arrived, for better or for worse, in my new neighborhood last Wednesday evening in a state of shock.

Twenty-five minutes away, and it is a different world here, truly.

It turns out that the thread of my confidence in living in South Asia was very tenuous indeed.  Uproot me from my familiar little neighborhood, from Skyline apartments, and I am lost.

I spent the first couple of days holed up in our apartment, kids bouncing off the walls, paralyzed by intimidation.

It is loud here.  It is crowded.  Yes, all of South Asia is loud and crowded, but this is different.  Our windows rattle all night with sounds of traffic—motors and car horns and auto rickshaws.  There is a mosque nearby, and the first few haunting calls to prayer jarred me, especially at 5 a.m.  And the people come in throngs—on the sidewalks, in the shops.

I moved from knowing where everything around me was—the supermarkets, the meat shop, the pharmacy, the tailor, the market—to knowing nothing.  Our street is short and tight, and the criss-crossed streets on every side of it are a maze I dare not attempt.

What have we done?

That first week, everything in me longed for the familiar.  I didn’t know I was attached to anything in this country enough to miss it, but it turns out I am.

We have been busy, busy getting our flat in order.  Unpacking.  Organizing.  Overseeing the multitude of workers coming through to fix what’s broken.

And I feel isolated.  Home with the kids in a strange new place.  No close-by friends.  No car, no knowledge of my immediate neighborhood—of where the nearest supermarket is even.

But David sent me out on Friday afternoon, to find a space to just sit and be.  Nothing motivates me like a chance at a couple of hours all to myself.

I walked to the end of our street and turned left.  The big, big corner up ahead is a main intersection.  So I turned left at the intersection and walked north and looked around me.  Traffic careened by from all directions.  Crossing the street here is not for the faint of heart.  In less than a kilometer, I began recognizing landmarks of one of our city’s major shopping districts.  I was heading into familiar territory, just coming at it from a different direction.

I found that place to sit with my laptop and my book—a two-story, glass-walled Café Coffee Day, filled with sleek retro furniture and community tables.  It was lovely, the nicest coffee shop I’ve seen here.

Since Friday, I’ve tentatively ventured out more and more, in between piles of laundry and helping David hang pictures.

On Wednesday the kids and I went walking and found a pharmacy—a wondrous, cramped, Diagon Alley-esque shop on south Brigade where you stand right at the sidewalk to place your order.  And yesterday, I bought milk and green bell peppers and hand soap at All Saint’s Bakery, a supermarket around the corner that carries all the basics and where the cashiers smiled at me, a new-comer, in a friendly way.

And all while I’m walking, I’m noticing, wide-eyed this noisy new world:

The sidewalks are much, much nicer here.  The kids and I can take a real walk together without dodging enormous pot holes and rats and raw sewage.

We live in a Muslim neighborhood now, which means beef can be bought and more women wear burkas.

It seems like fewer people speak English in this part of town.

I notice a few more foreigners like myself, but no Americans yet—East Asian, European, African.  But the area is still predominantly South Asian, which surprises me, right in the heart of the city.

Now we have been here nine days, and some of the shock is easing.  Each day brings a new find—where to order drinking water, a market for fresh fruit, a hidden away park.  I’m still in way over my head.  But we’re all starting to sleep through the night noises, and are beginning to see the move less as trauma and more as adventure.

That is a gift.