Fire breathers, violinists, and mountaineers

She almost fell asleep listening to the faint sound of a choir in the empty St. Nicholas Cathedral. She just let her mind be still and let the building, and the color and the light, and the smell of incense just pass right through her. The sound of traffic outside was a constant reminder of reality –but she savored a few more minutes of being in this magnificent building that was much more important than she could ever know. After being in this city for the past week she had realized something - that people are the same. Not a person - persons are different, very different from one another, but people are the same. This town has the rich women in high heels who struggle to cross cobbled stone streets, it has the smart and cool students who are themselves and believe in good things, it has different people who talk to themselves as they stumble along, it has drunks who struggle in vain to enter restaurants, it has old ladies who go and sit inside churches - eyes closed in prayer for future generations, it has the poor who beg on the corner showing off missing limbs, it has eccentrics who feed birds from their own mouths, it has maniacal men who blow fire in the middle of crowded bar streets, it has beautiful old men who sit beside shopping centers with their violins playing somewhere over the rainbow, it has the twenty-something nomads who sleep on doorsteps with their dogs. People had warned, had joked, that you must be prepared for the coldness of the French, the impolite, stuck up attitude of their culture. She had not seen it anywhere. She had met many different persons- who all held a unique place on the spectrum; but the people here were the people of her hometown and her college town and other places across the world (sans or variations of firebreathers and birdfeeders). And that was very comforting. That though it looked very new – it wasn’t, not really.
And she had been passing the rainy nights reading – this time –three cups of tea. About a mountaineer who commits his life to building schools in Pakistan, a genuinely amazing person who leaves his everything, his life of climbing and exploring for a single idea and single passion and who changes everything for small pockets of people. And …well, reading that begged the question, being here, living here, given this opportunity.........what is the purpose of an adventure and what was the purpose of this one?