Hello, I blog!
I share all my sporadic and toilet thoughts in here, because I am random like that.
Just because I can.
Just because I am fully aware that as a traveller, we (possibly) lose all right to privacy (within a reasonable limit, of course) where our personal belongings are concerned, and are quite liable to have our baggages opened and checked post check-in without our knowledge.
And because I hate having people rummage through my stuff because (by my standards) absolutely no one is as neat as I can be. Plus, laziness usually prevails and these people just might leave my stuff in an absolute mess.
Friendly message to security officials.
Just in case you are experiencing trouble reading the text in the image:
OH HELLO (:
If you (anyone else except me) are reading this, you are possibly inspecting my bag for security.
One request – please put my things back where they belong when you’re done with your inspection because I am really anal about tidiness.
THANK YOU (:
Dearest security officials at Changi Airport, Hong Kong International Airport and Vancouver International Airport – please be nice to my belongings. Kthxbai.
I’ll be flying off in less than eight hours. Until then!
The Organized Traveller
Generally when people travel with me, their jaws drop when they see the amount of documentation and research I do prior to a trip. I admit, I can go a little overboard sometimes – but well, it is better to over-prepare than to under-prepare.
I have compiled a travel folder for the upcoming trip to Canada and the U.S. commencing this Saturday – comprising checklists for everything I would be bringing there, right down to schedules for clothes-washing, important telephone numbers, maps and the like.
Travel folder.
As this would be my first travel to the U.S. – I hadn’t quite realized before that there was so much registration to do before I head there, such as the registration of ESTA for entry into the country, and with the local MFA (because of terror risks surrounding the U.S.).
In view of the number of registrations I had to do, the last thing I wanted was to lose track of all of them.
Different sections of the folder.
And why the checklists? Apparently, writing/typing checklists prior to a trip has been a habit ingrained from young. No, it wasn’t taught to me by anyone. I picked it up myself … since I was eleven. This was due to a past experience.
The last time I let someone do the packing for me was prior to a cruise trip when I was nine. Apparently, that someone had forgotten to include the most important item (hint: ‘u’ is the first letter) in my baggage. As a result, I vaguely recall the embarrassment I had to face walking around in my mum’s oversized (and really uncomfortable) panties.
Okay, I think that was too much information. But well, that was the most pertinent experience that made me swing towards my obsession with checklists (and demanding to pack my own bags ever since).
Since that incident, I devised a standard template for travel checklists and have been sticking to it religiously. I type out my checklists on Microsoft Excel now but I used to have a special travel notebook for this stuff before computers became ubiquitous.
And yeap, I check things off the list whenever I pack, and (sometimes) even when I unpack!
Australia Part IV: In a nutshell
To sum up the whole load of things I miss from those two weeks of freedom in Perth, Australia:
1) Having one entire house to ourselves, and having the run of the place. Cleaning was a bitch considering the vast amount of space, and we had to clean the floor without a mop – but it was still fun, nonetheless. D threw a pail of water on the ground and soon after, we were slipping and sliding around on towels. Wheee.
2) Cooking together. I wasn’t much help because … I can’t cook as well as the others so I ended up washing dishes most of the time. I didn’t mind, though. Seeing clean dishes drying next to the sink actually gave me a lot of satisfaction, strange as it sounds.
3) Long drives along the Kwinana Freeway to and from Perth City from our place. Especially in the mornings and evenings because the view of the sunrise/sunsets were just to die for!
4) Stormy nights. The storms in Australia were nothing like Singapore’s. The wind would howl all night long, making me snuggle deeper into the blanket, with the sound of hailstones occasionally pelting our rooftop. I still wish I got to see a tornado, though.
5) D’s singing. Well, not his singing per se – but more like the fact that there will always be a noise-making machine in the vicinity when the house becomes too quiet.
(Click for the enlarged version.)
6) Grocery shopping in the local supermarkets, where we would gawk at the wide assortment of Tim Tam chocolate biscuits, and the fact that the prices of our favourite junk food were so much lower than that in Singapore.
7) Having to pile on layers and layers of clothing each time before we leave the house, and having to strip all those layers upon re-entering the house.
8) The cold weather. Singapore is effing hot, period.
9) Street malls. Meaning shopping-dedicated streets which are no-entry to cars and other motor vehicles. Wide pavements, pretty streetlamps with rows and rows of shops lining the street on both sides. There would occasionally be bands and other performance groups busking there which livens up the street-shopping atmosphere – proper performers – not those harmonica-yielding uncles and aunties we see in Singapore.
10) Looking out of the window during a drive around Perth City (and the suburbs) and never failing to spot something interesting.
11) Having instant pasta. Especially the microwavable nacho cheese pasta. Speaking of which, I still have two packets left over from the trip. Nom nom nom.
12) Meeting friendly Australians every single day. Well, almost. There were a handful of salespeople we encountered that had attitudes of raging buffaloes but the bulk of them were really affable. Not to mention how there were some really good-lookers around. Hrrmmm.
13) Packet milkshakes. Looks like an ordinary milk carton but packs a punch once you shake them really hard for at least a minute. The milk within thickens and froths. Yummy instant milkshake!
14) Picnics and barbecues. The barbecue pits provided at public areas are electric. Place yer food on the metal heating element, press a button and you’re ready to go. No need to grabble with messy (and dirty) charcoal and having to put up with black, sooty smoke. The Australians are an environmentally-friendly bunch!
15) Having two people screaming into my face every single darn morning to “wake up, already” … because they are morning people and I’m not. (I think I was the last to wake up every single day. Yikes.)
16) G’s aunt and her interesting use of language. She would mix both English and Mandarin together in a way where it sounds really jumbled up. I will especially remember the most CLASSIC example, when she was asking us to get into the car.
进去car里é¢!”
(And because ‘car’ sounds like another word in Mandarin, we were all wondering “she wants us to go WHERE?!“)
17) The slow-paced lifestyle. I went there and promptly forgot about everything that has been bugging me when I was in Singapore … like my health problems. And escaping from doctors for two weeks was a breath of fresh air.
18) Waking up to “Lucky I’m in love with my best friend. Lucky to have been where I have been” every morning – the song that was set as G’s phone alarm.
19) Us attempting to stargaze out in the dark in the dead of the night at 1 A.M. with a simple camera and tripod set-up. (ZOMG, Australia’s night sky is really full of stars!) Then, the sprinklers got activated by nobody knows what, which sent us scurrying and shrieking while initially thinking that it was a wild animal.
There are actually a lot more but my memory has somewhat faded considering the sheer amount of time that has elapsed since the trip until now.
Let’s stop at nineteen. It is a nice number.
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