An achievement quite ordinary

In "The Third and Final Continent" (from Interpreter of Maladies) Jhumpa Lahiri writes:

"While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."

I have such moments as well. When I walk to the Old Town, which I do almost daily, all I have to do is look up to see the Alps like a wall across the horizon and it hits me all over again: I live in Switzerland. It's easy to let go of that fact between the shopping and the cooking, playing with Small Boy and changing the sheets; I do all the ordinary things of life here in Switzerland just as I would have to do them back in D.C. From day to day, it's just life after all. The expat life can't be a stream of adventure forever; there are the groceries to be put away and the trash to be taken out and the bills to be paid. It's life. It's fun and it's messy and it's boring and for long days at a time it's nothing to blog home about.

Then I see the Alps on a particularly clear day or walk to the Münster (cathedral) on which building began 1421 or smile at the crowds of tourists waiting for the magnificent Zytglogge to ring the hour and I remember that it's a bit more than life. It's life here in this strange place with this strange language. Do you know that in five years I have gone from being a woman who couldn't order a meal in German to being a woman who can meet with her Reproductive Endocronologist in German? Although I do not speak dialekt I can watch a television show about PGD (Pre-transfer Genetic Diagnostics) in dialekt and ask R for the meaning of exactly one word (which turned out to be a term of art that the moderator asked the doctor to explain). I have come to know this city better than R., who grew up 20 minutes away. I have made a life here, here at the foot of the Swiss Alps.

An acheivement quite ordinary that sometimes takes my breath away.