sOmeThiNG oLd, sOmEtHinG nEw....

Things are cherished more when they are gone, therefore how does one cherish it when one has it?

dear jess,

in a land where the sun is always shining seemingly hotter than back home, and your now-under-your care nephew is in desperate need to use the loo, surprisingly, you can become a tourist in your own home.

Back in my native roots of malacca, where the only few portuegese words i speak from bong natal to well kumi arus, the others being to vulgar, i find interesting revelations. Do you realise, that you can be a tourist in your own home? On my first monorail trip to kl today, the dirty streets of kuala lumpur suddenly had an appealing sense of beauty and strangness to it. I noticed the artistic beauty of the temple, the church and the messyness of the melting pot heritage.

In malacca, i longed to go back to "my" A famosa or the bits that was left of it, and just bask in the glory it once was, of course i didnt get to, cos that would be quite an oddity to say i wanted to visit those places wouldnt it? after all, ive been there a million. Instead, i found myself appreciating a many other things, i guess due to my thirst for local culture. Shops that sold bargain goods at RM1 had really expensive looking sculptures that spit water.

So here i was in awe of things that weren't totally strange to me, in fact we've all seen it a thousand before. It felt somewhat like an out of body experience permitting me to see things for the first time again. Maybe that's how it should be isn't it? When you pause and appreciate something like you were doing it the first, and never before. Well, yeah perhaps that too, and of course the wonderful, wonderful taste of durian cendol and satay celop.. sighhh i can feel myself sinking in the chair right now.

yours in need to burn some off,
jess