Wanderlust and Beyond

Greetings to all ye faithful servants of this blog.
It's been a long time since I've done justice to this blog and yet to ravish you guys with the tales of my adventures over the past couple of months. I got back last wed and have been spending the last week trying to get used to the drone of familiar life back home which seems familiar yet altogether strange at once. I've been busy battling the wanderlust that has consumed my soul and dispelling it hasn't been easy. But I've come to terms with it. I've set my sights on the practicalities of the life before me for now and ambitions of Europe will wait. The elections and the politcal scene was one of those things that helped get me back into the swim of Singapore life. However, Singapore has never appeared so small before and I've never felt so confined within this little red dot before. The conflicts and uncertainty which have been swimming in my head for the past week have more or less settled down in my cranial recesses but nonetheless have been resurfacing from time to time. Question: Where does my life go on from here? Of course, it's university. Many do not realize that this is but the most superficial answer one can ever give. Indeed, university is but the semblace of where my life and all your lives are heading towards (for Luke, he's arrvived) - it's just the physical and tangible representation of where our lives are headed to. My question really means more than that. It really invokes a multitude of questions of where our mind, body, soul and spirit is progressing towards. I use grammatically wrong english here due to the fact that all these 4 components are empirically 1. In a worldly and mercenary sense, these can be replaced by 'what does the future hold?' and 'am I making the right decisions?' In my opinion, life is all about the progress of the human being. Basically, am I gonna become a better in every sense of the word? I feel that there must be resolutions set at this point of our lives to lay down some yardsticks to follow to improve ourselves and start envisioning the person we want to become in maybe 3 to 5 yrs time. And no matter what comes along the way, we should always stick to these yardsticks that we set and ensure that the pollution of this world does not serve as impediments to our progress and conscience.

Taking a step away from the philosophical gibberish which I couldn't resist spouting partly due to my long absence, I must say that I'm gonna disappoint some, particularly Kenneth who expects a mega entry of Gulliver's travels. I've kept daily journals of my sojourns in India and China and would be glad to let you guys read it, but why I ain't gonna post it is due to a couple of reasons: I'm just too damn lazy to do it cos of the volume and having to decipher my bad handwriting, and those are often tired and biased entries. But I'll fill you guys in on a macro overview of my 2 trips which consisted of 14 days to India ( S'pore-Calcutta-Delhi-Agra-Delhi-Mumbai-Goa-Mumbai-Calcutta-S'pore) and 21 days to China (S'pore-HK-Shenzhen-Shanghai-Zhengzhou(Henan province)-Xian(Shaanxi province)-Beijing-Jinan(Shandong province)-Shanghai-Hangzhou-Shanghai-Shenzhen-HK-S'pore).

Ok, let's start with India. The reason why you guys didn't hear from me during my 1 wk back home after India before China was because I had a bad bout of diarrhoea. It's my second bout of diarrhoea since the first one in India. This should give you a foretaste of the litany of unpleasantries sustained in India by yours truly. India's development is slow and steady. It still has a long way to go in terms of becoming a developed nation. The cities I visited are considered the richest in India and yet I see poverty everywhere and the incongruity of seeing beggars and squatters just across the fence of the Taj Mahal Hotel (the equivalent of our Raffles Hotel) was quite a mouthful to swallow. There are touts loitering everywhere vying to cheat the tourist dollar, people who stand around biding their time and waiting for opportunities to come by to get the next dollar for their next meal or smoke. My friend and I came up with a couple of games, one being 'who dares to open your map bigger'. If you open up a map or flash a lonely planet or look lost, chances are a tout will be approaching you soon enough. After a day of walking in sandals, your soles will be dyed pitch black under a layer of filth and grime. For many natives, their vocab does not include the words 'queue up and consideration' but instead 'jump queue and elbow and push that bugger' are words that sadly replace them. The calamaties that befell me include having maddening trouble with the bureaucracy, ignorance and indignance of the Indian system particularly at the Calcutta train station, having an inconsiderate family with a wailing kid sharing the train compartment with us, having acrimonious and sarcastic exchanges with carpet and handicraft dealers, diarrhoea, a signboard crashing on my calf just a cm short of smashing my skull, getting into a cab with 2 huge Singhs and arguing with them cos they were trying to cheat us and finally ejecting ourselves and our luggage outta the bastards' cab, and yes, the highlight being having shit surreptitiously dropped on my sandaled foot so that I could go back to the culprit to have it cleaned for a price - not only did I not do that but I turned and gave him the fly and said fuck you in his sorry face. If not for the bucket of shit he was holding that could potentially decorate my body, I would've chased him and given him a flying kick with my foot. The veneer of bollywood was something I never saw in India itself. These are just the major incidents and there were other minor ones I'm not mentioning so this entry doesn't implode upon its own length. However, there were redeeming points of my Indian trip such as the splendid historical sights (Victoria Memorial, Taj Mahal, Baby Taj, Agra Fort) and magnificient architecture (esp the gothic structures of Mumbai) I witnessed, the culture I experienced, the great local and restaurant cuisines, the dirt cheap political philosophical books I bought, the few decent people I encountered along the way that include both travellers and natives with the latter putting the glimmer of hope in my mind that India has a future afterall. Indeed, India is an eyeopener and a superb lesson in rough travelling which serves to make one tougher, more open-minded, independant, aware and does a +50 travelling experience. On hindsight, with the first-hand experience of India under my belt, I forgave the guy that splattered the shit on me. He deserves the understanding and empathy that we can offer cos afterall, he is throwing the shit that he yearns to clean up - how more pitiful can it get? According to Atticus Finch, you have to put yourself into his shoes to understand him. I might just end up being that guy if I was born under those dire circumstances. God is the merciful one who gave me this fortunate lot in life. He wasn't that lucky. Overall, India's still a rough and dirty place but for the more experienced traveller, it could be quite fun once you know the tricks of the trade and do away with unnecessary apprehensions.

China was a far, far cry from the Indian experience and boy, did I have a good time. First of all, my friend's dad has business links in China and hence privileges come with those links. These include a night of free hotel stay in HK, being received for dinner and sent to the train station at Shanghai, being chauffeured to a number of puke-inducing dinners ridden with the clanking of overflowing beer and chinese wine glasses held at expensive restaurants and private rooms at Xian, having an all expense paid day at Jinan including attractions, a night of free hotel stay, yet another puke-inducing dinner and even the insistance of having our mineral water paid for. The rich Chinese are spectacular hosts who spare no effort and cost to keep their guests entertained and happy and make painfully sure that the dinner table runneth over with all the delicious Chinese cuisine a Singaporean can only imagine. Being a good host to your guest is something the Chinese are very particular of and I'm pretty sure the less well to do will also be as good hosts within their own means. The general Chinese appetite, I must conlude, is big, even for the lower classes. The only difference is the type of food they eat. I visited way too many temples, pagodas, mausoleums, museums, archeological sites, scenic spots and attractions to mention but of these, the more significant ones include Shaolin temple that has tourists outnumbering the monks by like a few hundred times, the Yellow River where Chinese civilisation stemmed from, Terracotta Warriors, the magnificient Hua Shan (for the benefit of Luke and Malik, Shan means mountain), the majestic Tai Shan, the famous Baotu Springs, the huge and grandiose Forbidden City which we explored for a tedious 4 hrs, the huger-than-expected Tiananmen Sq, Badaling Section of the Great Wall, the famous scenary and silk factories and tea plantations of Hangzhou that bewitched Marco Polo, and of course Shanghai, the hub and epitome of nascent Chinese capitalism, decadence and hedonism. We travelled from city to city by train except to and from Shanghai. The trains are very modern and the soft sleepers are broken down into 4-men cabins ala cruise ships that are very clean and comfortable, with a couple even furnished with individual built-in screens for each bed that screen 5 movie channels. The weather at that time was perfect spring temperature and extremely pleasant as you can imagine. The modernisation of China has been extremely rapid over the past decade and believe it or not, the lesser cities as compared to Shanghai such as Zhengzhou, Xian and Jinan are very modern and the city centers are anagalous to our downtown areas. China is exploding with development and you constantly catch the whiff of paint and thinner along the streets, which is yet another harbinger of its constant transformation. It's amazing, I must say, how the commies are reforming their country so rapidly and I came upon the realization that the reason behind me being able to actually feel and experience this transformation so naturally, is that China is reforming every aspect of its country from mirco to macro, top-down to left-right to bring about such a significant transformation. Even the attitude of the Chinese is changing from the hardened communist to what it is now where you feel more warmth in the people and more efficiency and courtesy in the service. Sex shops lined one particular street in Zhengzhou and the Paulaner Brauhaus pub I binged at in Shanghai was redolent of a fun-filled western watering hole with a Filipino band playing tunes from Rolling Stones, CCR, Bon Jovi and J.Lo to boot. Liberalism is pervading this society and is even seeping through the ranks of the hardnosed commie government. One highlight of Shanghai was the ancient sex culture museum that I visited and that was cool with all the phallic sculptures, sex manuals, obscene artifacts depicting sex, dildos and more. But among all these, I must rank the food and esp the beer in China as tops. The different provinces and cities we went all boasted different cuisines and specialties and an abundant meal at an expensive restaurant with live top notch fish can't set you back by more than 15 bucks per head. The beer was the constant factor in the whole of China - it was constantly wholesome, refreshing, delicious and dirt,dirt-cheap (30cents for a 650ml bottle bought over the shelf). You could just bathe in it. We weren't so extreme so we stopped at making it a part of our daily diet. China has given me a whole lot of insight of where I came from and allowed me to at least grasp some understanding of Chinese history, culture and way of life first-hand. My friend did a fine job in helping me with these revelations along the way. But after all said and done, there's still one enigma that bugs me: why do the Chinese love to spit so much? Perhaps they have overly-active salivary glands.

So, this is it for my mega entry and for those who managed to sustain through this entry, thank you, for those who didn't, you missed out but it ain't too late to backtrack.
Ciao...

Justin