Sunday afternoon, after the State Band concluded its outdoor concert, adi and I aimed for an Italian restaurant. The last chords of Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture were still echoing in my head as I strolled the empty Oaxaca streets. The warm air, the shuttered shops, the quiet vehicle-free streets, all cooperated and allowed me to walk in an introspective, dream-like state, ignoring my surroundings.
"Yeobo, look at the view!" Adi interrupted my silence, "It is so special; it looks just like a painting."
'That's ridiculous,' I sneered to my unmeditative self, 'paintings are supposed to look like life, not the other way around.' yet dutifully, I glanced up.
I was immediately jolted awake. The mid afternoon sun, hiding behind the houses on our side of the street, illuminated the opposite side with its full equatorial force. The yellow, orange and purple colored facades of the Oaxaca houses radiated their bright colors. These surfaces, not the sun, were the primary source of illumination, providing a magical hue to everything around them. The low buildings on both sides, joined together by the darker cobblestones of the wide street, formed a classically proportioned frame that drew me into the inside of the picture. Shadow on one side, fire on the other, the empty street led my eyes in a ruler-straight line Northward, until it climbed up a hill and dissipated in a tree-lined village. Directly behind the village, without any indication of the intervening valley, stood a tall steep mountain. Its long south-facing slope glimmered in varying shades of green. The air was clear and the visibility was infinite. I could almost see the pine trees that grow at the peak. Above the green, rose the sky. A sky so blue, as to be impossible except in a postcard. 'It is the dry air' I thought. It sucked any trace of white out of the sky so that neither haze nor cloud interfered with the sky's bright primary color. The blue, which previously I could not see, now seemed to be everywhere. It filled the background beside the hilly village; then overflowed the boundaries of the picture's frame to rise above the roofs and form a blue canopy at the center of the street, directly above me.
I stood there for a few seconds, transfixed by the beauty. 'Thank you.' I whispered to the unknown painter that prepared Adi for this moment.
The thin-crust pizza with a glass of Italian Chianti, tasted even better than I remembered.
You commented correctly that even when you experience the best food of the world, you need to get your fix of the "Comfort food". To what extent do you feel the same "missing the familiar" in other areas such as music, arts etc? I am wondering if the travels can connect you back to your comfort zone.
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