March Already?

There is something about being in this country that makes me feel a bit like a beached whale.

I don't know if it is the constant sweat on what must be a layer of blubber,

or the realization that I have magically transformed from a size XS to M in under 12 hours after crossing continents.

For right now I'm going to decide that this phenomena has occurred because my parents are taking joy in feeding me + I am making up for a 4 year vacuum of local food.

The vain part of me is a little dismayed that I'm no longer the skinny girl in the crowd anymore and the sane part of me is just happy to eat and surf.

"You still have a long way to go before you become fat lah... come drink some beer with us" said Andrew at the beach. "A lot of the girls in this country are anorexic anyway."

How helpful that line was for me is questionable, but after looking at some models sporting the latest fashion, I was keenly aware that they looked pretty hungry, and had slender toothpick arms that probably would not be able to pull up a sail in a lull more than twice.

Not that that was a good excuse for lugging a glut around, tomorrow I will add a new resolution to March - that this eating frenzy needs some moderation in this land, the fried rice paradise.

the man with the tattoos

"Are you going to watch or are you going to sail?"

the tattooed sailor asked, glancing back in my direction.

I was surprised by the attention I was not expecting.

You think that a decade away would erase a memory and render you anonymous,

but here at the sailing club, time had almost stood still

faces that were still around had stayed exactly the same

and so had the ritual of waiting for the wind on the concrete benches by the shore.

I had never known his name, but the last memory I recalled of him, he was ancient and I was a young punk still in school. Now it felt like the young punk had grown up a little and the tattooed sailor had stayed the same age. If not aging is one of the perks of windsurfing, I'll take it!

He talked about sailing over the Chinese New Year, because he didn't have to visit anyone.

Normally I would be envious of such a delicious idea, especially since the wind seemed to be cooperating, but after 7 months of solo backpacking, I was beginning to see, that maybe the ordeal of balancing very fickle wind with serious commitments to family and friends was a good problem to have. One I'd rather have than not.

If only I had been that wise while I was in San Francisco.

"Don't try to enjoy your reunion dinner... " He said as I hurriedly bid my farewells around the concrete bench after my session and scuttled home to slice slivers of raw salmon for yu sheng, "Make sure you enjoy it!" Almost as if he understood the anxious thoughts that preoccupy this windsurfing obsessed mind more frequently than not. Nagging thoughts like "Am I wasting these conditions?" "I rigged up wrong and I don't know what it is!" "It's been so many years and I still can't nail a gybe and tack?" were all silenced by one strong motto here on the beach, "just go out there and have fun, what else are you going to do in Singapore right?"

No more pressure for loops or vulcans, just a heap of blokes sitting with beers on the beach making the best of the conditions. For all the famines of wind we get here, this end of east coast is still a special place, where I meet myself again - sometimes as the girl a decade ago trying to uphaul, and sometimes as the oddly placed adult who'd found herself back after the same amount of time, only this time a little more welcomed into the club of the ancients, finding out that even after Maui and Brazil, I still had so much to learn from them.

aloha Singapore... aloha..

Being one with sweat

Today was probably the hottest I'd ever felt in Singapore.

Ignore the fact that I was jogging in the evening, it honestly felt like an inferno was clawing at the peripherals of my skin, only to be let out in little beads of sweat, which in turn teamed up to form a uniform layer of grim all over my skin. My constant condition here on this island home.

The happier news is that I'm freelancing, which is something, as much as I enjoyed my time in the States was something I missed. The bliss of working at 9pm till whatever time suits me, windsurfing in the afternoon, where the wind decides to show up, is so ridiculously intoxicating that it almost makes up for the fact that the wind is rather wimpy and the pay is a lot less than I used to make.

So in between moments of near drowning in perspiration both while running and working, life has been good. Now if only my body would start getting used to the fact that the "hottest day in SF" happens every hour of the day (with the exception of public buses)this latitude of the equator.

Feels a lot like home

There is something about eating D24 durians and sambal stingray with old friends that makes Singapore feel a lot more like home.
To be honest, I was quite the grouch when I first landed. The thought of being stuck had a paralyzing effect on my return.
From a life of trotting across the expanses of Central and South America, to suddenly trying to set up a home again in a country smaller than anything I'd experienced in the past 7 years, was a little more challenging than I had expected.
Tonight I drove home through my old neighborhood to my current one, with a belly plied silly with popiahs, chicken rice, KK and D24 durians lovingly prepared by Lin and her family. The old comfort of being home finally started to sink in, with the knowledge that folks who'd known me since I was a kid, still cared about me, no matter how long I'd been gone.
This listless wanderer is coming to realize that home really is whereever God would have you. Vague as that concept may seem at the time.

never impossible just a lot harder

I think I used to value flexibility a lot,
but 1 month into Costa Rica, I'm starting to wish things were set in place...
My airline tickets to be exact.
The slow speed connections had taken their toll on me and constant calls on skype to verify that transactions that had taken place outside of USA were indeed made by me.
The internet may be global, but the computer you use, is still very much local.

If there is one thing I have learned by this point of the trip, is that though indecision does´nt make things impossible, it does have the potential to make life increasingly difficult the closer it gets to the decision date.

Welcome to grown up life, May, I can almost hear Polina saying...

Other random things I have learned on this trip...
- Don´t wait to do something tomorrow when you have internet today, it may not be working tomorrow.. for days...
- Always plan your return trip before setting off.
- Ask questions, many of them to as many people as possible, because some will be wrong, and you really do want to get on that 9 hr bus ride as early as possible.
- Being cheap often costs you fiscally, emotionally or physically or all of the above... you know that sagging foam mattress will have you aching the next day.
- Always look at the bright side of things, even when everything is going hideously awry... because anyway you look at it, I'd rather be here sitting in Costa Rica in conumdrum over how to get to Peru after a day of weeding the farm, than back at my cubible, any day of the week.

Drenched

It's been pouring in Costa Rica and everything is wet
the clothes won't dry, pages from the books are limpidly damp
I too am damp and honestly pretty yucky at the moment
Not to mention smelly, for as much as one tries to shower here
inevitable rainspells and high humidity often mean you smell
less than lucious within minutes of your hard earned shower.

It is exciting to find things that you need here,
it is like finding prized needles in haystacks...
so far the hunt has involved,
The Bolivian and Brasilian Embassies for my visas,
- all done with every ounce of 5 days of Spanish classes
Mosquito netting, neosporin in powder form,
electrical tape and a 4GB memory card -
all testimonies to an ill-planned trip and
unexpected travel needs.

Looking back, I barely believe where I've been
and where I'm going. To think I was in Cuba 2 weeks ago,
desperately finding my way around in a Spanish speaking world.
and that now I've been surfing for a week and a half,
and chatting to my neighbour about her day and her family in a newly adopted language.
still blows my mind.

This is all rather surreal and I struggle for words or photos to capture the spirit of this trip. Except I know I never will be able to, because travels of this magnitude are a very personal education of the mind and soul, a horrible meeting of yourself for the longest stretches of time, and beautiful meetings with other kindred travelers who too, have left home, braving cold showers and bunk beds and manic mosquitoes, to see a world beyond their own,
beyond the sterile tour buses and immaculately planned intinaries.

It is all quite fascinating - meeting other crazies from all over the world, who for brief moments in time, share tables, rooms and stories, and the select few who will share their stories with us for the rest of our lives.

Time without consequence

Missing Mirrors

If Maui was about feeling at home in my skin,
Then Andros Island was about the beauty of inconvenience

I had the luxury of riding in many cars
Some without mirrors, some right hand drives, other left hand drives,
And one which had to be jumped into half a block from home because there was a swarm of bees buzzing around the drivers’ side door.
The van I drove to pick the girls up had half a key stuck in the ignition and
a power seat that was jammed, nothing a simple pillow thrown behind me wouldn’t fix

The day I picked up Ebony from her work place, the car ran out of gas
And though we were at a gas station, the lady at the grocery store kindly informed us that they had gas, but the pump was not working.
We sat in the van waiting, not really minding much,
for help from family, which came in the form of uncle Tibby, who drove half the island with a canister of gas, and after topping up the van, drove off again with barely a word, suggesting that this was a rather routine occurrence.
We later found out that the gas pipe was leaking, draining the car of gas.

The internet had been down for 2 weeks,
kocked out by a storm
In order to plan the next leg of my trip Ebony, Shiraz and I drove 20 minutes to the airport almost daily, armed with a laptop and no extra battery.
We roasted in a van in the hot Bahamian sun - squatters in a parking lot shamelessly calling the Western Airlines Terminal Andro’s latest internet café for an hour at a time.
At home, there was dial-up – as long as the phone lines were up – and a phone book
Despite all of the seeming inconveniences, a lot of things got done,
The only difference, other than the speed,
Was the noticeable absence of stress I was more accustomed to.

I started to wonder if my suspicions had always been true, that less is more.
I wondered if we weren’t distracted by a million events in a day,
Constantly pushing ourselves to work at peak efficiency,
worried if we made it on time to 3 appointments a day,
when 1 would have been enough to satisfy
Would we trade the life packed to its gills with activities, striving perfection in order to achieve our schedues’fulfillment,
for one with a little less - but as I’m starting to see - one that is infinitely richer.

My mind drifts back to the dish washer in San Francisco
Where Katya commented, almost reading my mind,
That when you are living life out so loud,
You really don’t need a dishwasher in your life to keep you happy.