Home (?) at last...

"Travelling - it gives you home in a thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land."
- Ibn Battuta

Back in Singapore... I have to say that it's been pretty cool... I miss Paris, yeah, wished I'd have kidnapped a baker so I can breakfast with baguette every day...but well, one can't have everything in life, and life in Singapore is indeed already pretty good...

Touchdown-ed n Changi airport, and somehow, there was a big grin on my face....hmm...familiarity does have a calming effect...the airport felt so cosy, so recognizable, so.....unthreatening.... I guess on one side travelling excites and stimulates, but it feels good too to be in familiar territory... let's see how long this effect lasts before I start missing foreign cities, foreign languages, foreign people...

Oh but the way I ogled at the food sold in shops and hawker centers these 3 days...could be called criminal gluttony...I mean..chewing on sushi while leering at carrot cake, after eating cheng tng, before heading home to dinner? Thankfully it was only for the first day.... I intend to slowly, really slowly, savour back the sights, sounds, and tastes of Singapore, just so I'll have a lot of things to do before I'm back to feeling I know this city-state like the back of my hand...

One thing I noticed that's kind of creepy... was sitting in the hawker center, in the midst of people talking, buzzing sounds, and after some time I realised...I'm hearing French!!! As in, my brain is trying to make sense of the noise around me by forming French words, even though what I'm actually hearing is a melange of English Singlish, Mandarin, Hokkien, Malay and goodness knows what else.... Either my poor brain refuses to accept the fact that it has to hear Singlish from now on (No offense but it's not exactly what one would call beautiful language...), or it's screwed up from hearing too much French guttural "r"s and nose vowels....

And whatever people say about Singapore being hot and humid, these days I'm enjoying the weather...To be able to wear shirt and shorts without fear of freezing to death...ahh... I felt so light I was half jogging when I went to buy groceries.. Yes, I don't fear winters now, I actually like it.. and yes, snow is beautiful...but I'm still very much a tropical person... Now waiting for the first rainstorm since I'm back...which would be perfect to take a nap....aaahhhhh.....

Oh, and taking about buying groceries...the funny thing is I started noticing products that I found in France...especially in the dairy section...I mean, I never knew they sell camembert and brie (types of popular French cheese) at the grocery store! Well most of the other cheeses come from the UK and Spain....but still, vive NTUC Fairprice!

Well, well....still very much enjoying what's there to enjoy in Singapore...in retrospect, it was really lucky to leave Singapore for quite long when I had my Vietnam withdrawal symptoms and couldn't really stand being here. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as the saying goes.

Am in the middle of arranging my stuff..books, mostly...haih... Somehow my room doesn't feel like my room if the books are not properly arranged... On my first night back, I just couldn't sleep, and I spent some time wondering why...surely not the bed because it was comfortable...surely not the air because there was air-con....and then it somehow just hit me that I couldn't sleep because the shelves were bare, and whatever books were there weren't arranged according to size and category (yeah, actually, I just realised that I'm particular about that...). So, from 1 AM till 5 AM I took out my darlings from the boxes, patted them, browsed them, and.... arranged them according to category and size... no, I'm not yet so fussy as to arrange them according to Dewey's decimal system...but maybe when I have time...

As for now, it's great to allow myself to be swept along the usual rhythm...Chatter and banter with Edo and Ren, eating great Indian food (the vendors actually told me that they haven't seen me for a long time! Ohhh how I miss them too...and their cooking, actually hehehe...) before studio, borrowing new books from library then shutting myself up in my room to read them, walking along green, grassy paths and admiring gigantic tropical trees......

And yet, deep down, memories stay.... it's weird to think that this time last week I was still somewhere in Paris, walking along the snowy banks of the Seine...yet I'm sure I was there...and those memories enrich me, shape me, change me...in so many ways, whether deep or shallow...

But let's keep that for another post!