Category: Travel Musings

Forgotten moments of 2017.

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I haven’t been able to write for weeks. I don’t know why but words just do not seem to flow anymore.

I’ve tried everything. I’ve blocked out time to just sit down and write. I have sat down and gone through my hard disks full of pictures over and over again to find inspiration. I have opened the Everywhereist and reread old posts more than I care to admit. But nothing seems to work. Nothing has yet spilled on this screen, no moment of sparks that made me go ‘aha’. Even if I had set myself a topic to write, I opened up my blank canvas, browsed through the pictures that I could potentially use, and did not feel inspired to write.

So the only way left now is to address the elephant in the room: the writer’s block itself. I have decided to look at the gargantuan problem straight into the eyes and say, “Hey I acknowledge your presence. Now can you please get the heck out of here?”

And I know that it’s not because of a lack of stuff to write. I have so much that I want to share with you from the countless trips that I took over the past two years. But I guess this being a travel blog, I sometimes find it inappropriate to share about my past trips when I’m technically not an active traveller anymore, at least for now.

And when I looked at old pictures from this year (yes all those travelling days felt soo long ago), I was surprised at how much I have forgotten, and there were even pictures of myself that I did not recognise. It felt much like when I was reading “The world this year” section of The Economist’s Christmas Special edition. I kept saying to myself “I can’t believe this happened earlier this year.”

So here are some of those moments, the forgotten pictures that have been part as much a part of 2017 as those that I had somehow remembered more vividly.

A picture of pure happiness of me at a Copenhagen Metro station. My happiness knew no place.

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Sunset at the Big C, Berkeley.

A favourite spot in Berkeley that I only got to visit once.

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Sometimes, I think it is up to us to make the days count.

When I first arrived in Berkeley, I had too much time at hand. I practically had no friends. I only had classes for a few hours each day, 3 days a week. There were not many assignments and no academic paper to read. My ‘commute’ involved a mere 10-minute walk to my (very lovely) house.

This was not something I was used to. I started feeling uneasy, not knowing what to do with all this luxury. I could use it to acquire some new skills, but the irony of life is, the more time you have, the fewer the things you will get done.

So one day I decided I needed to get my lazy ass out of the house. Instead of lying around on the couch, I put on my sporty outfit, my colourful crocs and decided to go for a little hike to the Big C.

The Big C, I had read, was a giant concrete block of the letter ‘C’ built on the Berkeley Hills. It offered a stunning view over the UC Berkeley campus, where I was studying at the time. Definitely a perfect incentive for a rookie hiker. I decided to go during sunset because I wanted to witness the transition from the golden soft lighting of the sun to the dark expanse being studded by the city lights.

The starting point was from the North Gate Hall, Berkeley’s journalism school.

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From then on, I just needed to follow some paths that led me to the top of the hill. For example, these stairs that greeted me right in the beginning of the journey.

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Back in Copenhagen, again.

There is nothing quite like your first love (in Europe).

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Everyone remembers their first love.

It probably happened a long time ago.

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This was taken 8 years ago in 2009, when I was probably 8 kg lighter.

For some, it might have been just a short-lived crush. But for many, it lasted for a few years.

Because for some reason, you kept coming back for more…

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2010

And more…

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2012
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2013
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2014

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A crazy long year that was 2016.

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I used to measure my year by the number of countries I visited. Travelling has been such an integral part of my life – it is largely how I spent growing up into almost-adulthood since I was 20. The swift movement of packing, catching the planes and trains (or missing them) and exploring new sights while getting helplessly lost have in themselves been valuable lessons and shaped very much who I am today.

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I figure out life just like how I travel: looking perpetually lost.

This time round, however, counting the number of countries I visited seems to be somewhat… superficial.

I get a severe writer’s block every time I try summing up what last year has been for me. Often times, 2016 felt like a giant piece of blanket, made of patches of different cloths randomly sewn together, each piece as distinct as it is colourful. Way too often, the parts felt like it would give way any time, the thread holding them coming loose, but somehow it worked out, the fabric all stitched up somewhat nicely in the end.

(And you can tell that I am excellent at analogies. Not.)

Last year was my craziest so far, and by far. I lived in three different countries within a year, and did some extensive travelling in between. Most of my friends never quite knew where I was, and to be honest, sometimes I didn’t really know either.

I know that people say the older you get, the faster time flies. But I think I have found the recipe to slow down the time. You just need to have things keeping you constantly on your toes, so much so that it keeps you awake at night sometimes.

For me, trying to keep half-watch on what I own has been keeping me on my toes. I needed to make sure that by the end of every few months, I could still cram everything into my suitcases, ready to hurl them to the other side of the world. Being the hoarder and over-packing person that I am, it was a challenge in its own right.

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I have had 100% success rate so far packing all these into suitcases.

Not to mention that it was the first full year that I was jobless in a long time – the fact that I didn’t have a steady stream of income was hitting me hard. I had to think hard for a lot of purchases that I used to take for granted, although on hindsight, it did keep my possessions in check, hence helping me to be less of a hoarder.

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The streets and flowers of North Berkeley.

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During my last week in Berkeley, one of my favourite things to do was to wander aimlessly through the streets of North Berkeley.

Although the city is famous for the UC Berkeley campus and hipster street of Telegraph Avenue, my first impression of Berkeley would always be this.

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The quiet street.

Not to mention how fiery it turned one magical sunset in March.

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So it was only appropriate that I said goodbye to the city by taking my time to admire everything about the neighbourhood.

I admit though, that there isn’t much to write about the day. I roamed around for hours, just lost in my thoughts, mostly wondering how did time fly so fast. And taking  pictures of flowers. A great part of admiring North Berkeley is the flowers, along with the Victorian houses that come with them.

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There is something about Berkeley.

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There is something about this little city.

I remember feeling slightly dreadful when I arrived here late at night a few months ago, jet lagged from my long plane ride from Denmark. In the dark, the place did not look like much – the sparsely-lit streets looked depressing and unfamiliar; the shadows of the houses looked rather creepy and I wonder if I had just moved from a small Danish city to an even smaller town. I started questioning, as I always do, what in the world I had gotten myself into.

The next day, however, draped in the famous Californian sunshine, Berkeley became beautiful. The Victorian houses turned charming, the campus buzzing with life, the streets outside quiet and peaceful, the green trees a nice change from the leafless ones that I got used to during the Danish winter.

I fell in love with the place from the very first fiery sunset.

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And then one day I walked past an Indonesian restaurant. I did not realise it until then, but I was missing home and felt a surge of relief and excitement at the sight of the place. When I finally went there with a friend that I was (and still am in many ways) very fond of, and spoke a few words of Indonesian to the waiter, I immediately felt at home.

Sunshine, a trusted friend, and excellent food – life could not have been better.

If only I had found a place to live. I came here only equipped with two days of Airbnb room booking. On the second night, I woke up at 4 AM (partly because of jet lag but mostly because of the panic of not having a roof for the next few months yet), and started firing emails to every single Craigslist listing that I saw (that I could afford). By some stroke of luck, I found a place in a beautiful house, for a reasonable price, and with the most wonderful, fun-loving and caring roommates I could ask for.

Life in Berkeley was finally in order.

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Then the heavy rain came, something that apparently California had not seen in many years. I was never one affected by the weather, but I was alone, away from my friend (who had been excellent in showing me directions) for the first time after days, and I was stuck in the middle of the campus, lost, my umbrella barely keeping me dry. I suddenly felt miserable and realised for the first time that I was in this all by myself and did not have the luxury of my friends in Denmark who wouldn’t let me out of their sight when something bad happened to me. I started questioning, again, what in the world had I gotten myself into in this miserable city.

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Visiting the ‘rival’, Stanford.

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One of my favourite songs of all time is “I’m not that girl” from the hit musical Wicked. It is probably the most depressing song of the whole play, but one that I could definitely relate to during one period in my life, when I did not like myself for being this awkward person and not the conventional pretty girly girl that guys like.

One line of the song particularly hits home with me.

Don’t wish, don’t start
Wishing only wounds the heart
I wasn’t born for the rose and pearls

But don’t worry, I am not about to launch into a sappy story about my love life. The reason why I’m telling you this is because I was reminded of the very line of this song when I visited Stanford a few weeks back.

Before coming to Berkeley, Stanford was just the name that I had heard being thrown around by very smart people around me. My super smart junior high school crush graduated from Stanford a couple of years back, my colleague-turned-friend went there after quitting his job. I didn’t have any idea where Stanford was, nor did I care to find out – the elite air around the name suggested that the place was somewhere too remote and had long ago been filed in my brain under the category of “unreachable places I will never go” (said the girl who had travelled all the way to the Arctic to see the Northern Lights).

Life, though, has a funny way of working itself. I somehow ended up visiting Stanford not because I was particularly eager to see the place, but because my friend, who lives in South Bay, and I were trying to find a hiking trail that would be accessible for both of us. Stanford Satellite Dish Trail seemed to be the best place for us to go that weekend, and my friend then of course very kindly requested her friend to bring us around to see the campus.

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On being constantly on the move.

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Almost exactly a year ago, I made the decision to uproot myself from Singapore and move all the way up north to Denmark. I remember it was during the Easter holidays that I had a long conversation with my parents about quitting my somewhat decent-paying job and pursue something completely different (and one that is potentially not going to pay me very well).

It has definitely been one of the best decisions in my life.

I have learned a lot of new things, become a little street-wiser (although I know someone who thinks I still have a looong way to go, to the extent that I need to live on the streets in Nairobi before I can even be somewhat decent. Yep, he is brutally honest, but we are also still friends, which probably means that I agree with him), travelled to some amazing places in Europe, seen the Northern Lights and lived in two new cities (so far).

But it has also been one of the most confusing situations that I have got myself into.

I have been having a lot of difficulty in updating what’s been happening in my life on this blog. Whenever I sit in front of my computer, I simply do not know what to write. Not because nothing has been happening and that I have very few things to update. In fact, I have a whole Airbus-sized-cabin to update, but I just can’t find a way to do so.

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The A380 that brought me here.

At first I couldn’t quite place why this is the case, but these days I have come to realise that the reason I have been having some writer’s block about my own life is because things have been happening so fast that nothing has properly sunk in on me yet. I left Singapore, my home for nine years, last September, tried to settle into my new home Aarhus, only to find out a month later that my supposedly one-year stay would be cut short to mere 6 months because I got this incredible opportunity to finish my first year of Master’s at UC Berkeley. So within a span of half a year, I have had to move across three different countries in three different continents.

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Appreciating Aarhus.

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I still have a lot of things that I want to write about my trip in December. There is a story about my first encounter with the whales somewhere in the Norwegian Sea, there is something to say about my visit to the charming city of Bergen, or when I somehow found myself in Paris for the last day of 2015 and the first few days of 2016. And I haven’t even talked anything about my (almost) annual ritual of visiting Stockholm yet.

But something happened that completely snatched my attention away from all these things: the arrival of February.

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Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing bad about February. In fact, February is generally an excellent month: a lot of my close friends’ birthdays are in February, Chinese New Year often falls in February, and 2016 is a leap year, how exciting!

There is just one tiny little detail that is different about this year’s February compared to the previous years (apart from the fact that I am spending Chinese New Year away from my family for the first time in my life): I’m moving to a different continent at the end of the month.

It certainly does not feel or seem like it at all since I don’t have anything sorted out for the big move yet. I have no visa (hopefully it is on its way), no flight booked (although I already have a very rough idea which one I am going to take), no accommodation (okay, this is the real problem I think, although I have a few kind souls who are on the lookout for me).

But I’m not here to complain about my administrative problems. Instead, what I’m trying to say is that the realisation that I’m leaving this month brings in another sinking fact: my time in Aarhus from now on can be counted in days.

It felt just like yesterday when I wrote this post about my first impressions of Aarhus just after my arrival here. But when I read through the post again, it felt like ages ago since my first visit to ARoS, when I lost my wallet and found it back thanks to Danish people’s astounding honesty, when interactions with my class mates were mere awkward exchange of conversations with strangers.

But how times have changed. Back then I had no clue that I was going to leave the place so soon and that some of the people here would be very dear to me.

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And as for Aarhus, after almost 6 months, I have managed to take the place for granted – for a good few months up until before Christmas, I had formed a view that the place is a mere small ‘city’ where you could get nothing done and nothing much to do – accompanied by perpetually horrible weather which ‘sucked the energy out of you’ (to quote a friend), you would practically want to do nothing else but escape from the rain and get into the comfort of your room (although I have to admit I’m extremely fond and proud of my room – see above picture). For someone who had previously lived her whole life in the world’s capitals (Jakarta, Beijing, Singapore, Copenhagen), I found this change in energy level unexpectedly hard and unsettling.

It was not until my last day in Aarhus in 2015 before I left for Oslo for my trip that I realised I had not taken enough time to appreciate the city and its beauty. I had been so engrossed in my little bubble at the outskirt of the city (hereby known as ‘the countryside’) that I failed to notice some of the beauty it had to offer.

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This practically looks magical.

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The 30-year journey, and to many more.

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If you think I love travelling, you need to look no further than my parents to understand why. I grew up in a family where travelling is an annual ritual (we would have a big family trip for two weeks every year) that I have no idea how to live my life any other way.

Now that the kids have grown up with two of us living abroad, my parents seem to bear the torch of our family tradition very well. They would be in China one day, Thailand next, some other city in Indonesia afterwards and Singapore probably a few weeks after. Sometimes I lost track of where they are, and would wake up to a constant stream of pictures of them posing with some landmarks that were definitely not anywhere near our home in Jakarta.

So, really, I could just blame it on the genes that I am spending so much time (and money) travelling, all in the name of satisfying my sense of curiosity. Not that it is a bad gene to have, I have been having the time of my life for the past few years exploring new places around the world.

However, it is a bit ironic that the very thing my parents have inspired me with, this unwavering sense of wander, is what makes me unable to be with them on this very special day. Today marks the 30th year of their journey together as man and wife, and here I am, way up north in a different continent and very much wish that I could be there with them today to celebrate.

My parents haven’t just been parents to me, their (slightly rebellious) daughter. They have been my role models in life, work and relationships. They are the rare example of how long-distance relationships can work (they spent several years in different countries and continents before getting married to each other), they teach me the meaning of being with each other through thick and thin, and simply how you can make things work if you have the will to.

Their humble journey started from their hometown in Medan, before eventually moving to Jakarta where they started to build a family while still trying to make ends meet. Now when they can afford to live comfortably, they have decided to spend the time conquering city after city with each other.

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And just enjoying each other’s company, basically.

Even though things haven’t always been easy for them and my family, it is heartwarming and refreshing to see their determination all these years through the hardship in life, and learning together to overcome their differences to be where they are today.

One of my favourite travel quotes comes from one of Malaysian Airlines advertisement campaigns (before their reputation went down due to the missing planes saga). I remember stumbling upon it on my way home from work and just stood there thinking that this pretty much sums up what I wish for in my life.

My parents have been lucky travellers who find that great someone in each other to journey this life together. I certainly hope to find mine too one day.

Happy 30th wedding anniversary, Mom and Dad! 🙂