Don't Turn Around

I'm quite amazed at how quickly this past week, the first back at school, has gone by. It's not been much of an issue getting adjusted back to the school environment, but perhaps the same cannot be said about the school hours. Especially when coupled with the remnants of jet lag and late nights, this has meant that i'm sometimes wide awake when i really shouldn't be, and conversely very sleepy in school, of all places. I'm still trying to figure out how purposely sleeping an extra two hours the previous night contributes to me being extra sleepy the following day. I've all but lost count of the number of times i found myself at the sink splashing water on my face. As such, i'm very glad to see the weekend come, and a long one at that. I have to say, never have i been so happy to see a youth day holiday, not even in the twelve years as a student. Not that school has been bad - on the contrary, i think it's been quite a good first week (aside from a giant cca bomb dropping on me, that is), but i really do need the break.

Not that the last break that i had was a long time ago. Why, it was only last Friday morning that i got back. But it really was a good break, and i don't see this first week back at school having gone as fairly smoothly as it did without the holiday beforehand. If there's one thing i regret (ok, actually there are many things i regret - that's just the nature of me and my sometime overanalytical mind), it's that the holiday wasn't long enough and so unlike what i ideally look for in a good holiday, which is a nice, relaxed pace, due to a shortage of available time out of here i spent much of my time on various modes of transport shuttling from one city to another, and much of the rest on my feet shuffling from one place of interest to another, with little time left to just sit back and chill. Ironically, perhaps the most time i had to do something like that was when i was shuttling from one city to another, but as at the time it was on a sixteen-hour ferry, the opportunities for chilling (literally too) were too plentiful for me to not take them up.

If i could sum things up, perhaps the one thing i really enjoyed about where i went was that, degree of modernity aside, it was refreshingly different from here. And as you would probably know by now, the Singaporean-ness of Singapore is at times what makes me so inclined to get out of here so often (and i'm already thinking about where to go at the end of the year, though with the aforementioned giant cca bomb dropping on me, that might be of a far less grand scale than i hope for - and that's before taking into consideration the northern hemisphere flu season rearing its ugly head). While at the same time many of my illusions/fairytales of the place were gently shattered by the end of the trip, methinks that just helped to make the place more real and less artificial/functional/clinical (i.e. less Singaporeanesque).

At least one out of two people who find out i travel/travelled alone give me that kind of "what are you thinking?!" kinda look, and i can definitely understand why. My rationale for doing so basically boils down to the people. I just find it too difficult/troublesome to find people who want to go to the same places as me with a similar worldview (i realise now how important that is especially when travelling), on a similar budget, and for a similar period of time. I mean, each day there there would be a time when i would think to myself that if there was someone with me and he/she were any different from me i'd probably be abandoned anyways.

That being said if i could find good travel buddies i would probably enjoy that at least as much, but from the way things have been going maybe there would be a need first for much prayer and fasting...

Loneliness when travelling is definitely an issue - i don't doubt that one bit. My solution to that during much of this recent trip was CouchSurfing, and i think it probably turned out far better than i had expected it to. At least for me at this point in my life, on holiday i think you can't beat not only meeting up with locals but even staying with them, and this trip made me all the more skeptical of packaged tours too (particularly the Singapore-based ones which never fail in bringing busloads of S'porean tourists to a whole host of exotic cities around the globe, and then taking them for dinner in a Chinese restaurant - oh the shame). And the fact that on the trip, with the help of my hosts, i got to do so many things that a packaged tourist would come nowhere close to doing, just punctuates my point. Apart from that there also was the chance and arranged meeting with friends, which i really enjoyed as well.

Comes as no surprise therefore that the only time i felt rather down during the trip was on my last evening there before flying off the following morning, when there were no more people to meet, and instead i found myself wandering solo for hours on end in an amusement park. As cool as that place is, after eight whole days of quality human contact, the anticlimax perhaps could not have been more anticlimactical.

But well, the highs far outweighed the lows. And speaking of highs (no innuendo, if you got any, was intended), here's one for the road: definitely something you won't see gracing any S'porean tourist attraction anytime soon.


Well, at least when i was there, i didn't do this (caution - R21-ish shot, and if you see nothing that looks like the above, try some of the following pictures)