Popagandhi

1. I must watch too many scifi movies. I'd rarely been convinced of the malleability of time, but these days I measure out everything in two-week units. Time seems to race ahead of me. It always has, now more than before.

2. When I say these days, I don't mean it facetiously. Yes, I turn just 27 in a couple of months, but I feel old, cranky and grumpy most of the time, especially around younger people. This must be what growing old feels like at first, not with a bang but with a grumpy whimper.

3. I must tell my endocrinologist about my worsening memory loss problems. If only I didn't keep forgetting. I will set it as a Reminder in my iPhone, and tell it to alert me when I enter the hospital. I must also set another one to remind me of the same thing as I'm leaving the hospital, because… I really worry that I'm losing my mind.

4. Walking away is hard. One would think you'd get used to it, after having done it so many times, but it doesn't get any easier. It sounds base, but it's when you pack up an apartment with all your physical possessions into many, many boxes and bags, and load them into the back of a car at 5am, that seems to be when reality bores into your thick, numb skull. I'll remember next time.

5. Life has taken on an interesting turn. I've had to scale back on life and ambition in some ways, because I literally cannot remember things, and physically cannot do some of those things. I've undoubtedly become a new convert to the "quality of life" school of thought when it comes to work. That part I'm scaling up on.
   Some new favourite lifehacks: putting my phone on Airplane mode and not turning it on until I get to work, not checking email until I get to work, bringing a book to read in the bus so I spend more time reading books than email, reading and buying more physical books than ebooks, doing things differently (like buying an orange notebook instead of a black one), making it a point to take the women of my family out to lunch every Monday, among other things. All of it sounds trivial now that I write it down, but I'm also at that point in my life where I favour incremental, trivial changes over the huge coming-at-you-with-a-mack-truck changes I used to favour (mostly of the "I'm leaving the country for an indefinite period!" variety)…

6. I've started making some tentative steps back into the world of meeting and dating interesting people. There have been many interesting people. But. c.f. point #2: I'm just older and grumpier these days, so you can imagine how that's going.
   Also, I have transformed into a crazy dog lady whose primary concern in life for the next 110 days is to spend as much time with her quarantined dog as she possibly can. I feel about as attractive as anybody who smells of dog kennels most of the time can be.

7. Singapore has been really good to me since I came home. In some ways it feels like I never really left. I'm surrounded by incredible people in my industry who inspire me and others; I'm around people who really do walk the talk. It may or may not be naive optimism inspired by my homecoming, but I am so excited by what I see around me now in Singapore. My calendar of projects and events has filled up at a good pace. At this point, I have a just nice amount on my plate. It helps.

8. The hardest part about breaking up with anybody is walking away from the memories of what you once wanted to accomplish together. I may feel like I'm losing my mind and my memory, but this isn't one of those that I've lost.

If only it were.

Five years ago, I said: "Ask me again a year, three, or five from now and all I will remember is driving up, around, up, around, up, around, in the swirling clouds as the rain lashed at my windows and I feared for my life, balanced so daintily in this tin can navigating itself on the hairpin road."

Plenty has changed, these five years, but at least this part remains familiar: "Ask me again a year, three, or five from now and I will still tell you the same thing: I’m not sure why I do the things that I do." Then, I was referring to the heady, exciting days of a student who had the chance to criss-cross across the hill tribes of northeast India and investigate the ailments of rural Bangladeshis suffering from leprosy, TB and lymphatic filiarisis. I got to go on the amazing adventure of my life, never really expecting it to end. It hasn't.

Much has changed, but adventure has never left me.

The last five months have been tumultuous. It was the sort of chaos that was ultimately a blip in the universe (though still a large one), and not, thankfully, the sort that led to destruction and the end of the world as I knew it.

In a few days I will make that trip to Kuala Lumpur for the last time. It will be awkward. On it, I will return to the apartment I've had for two years, but haven't lived in for the last five months, and I will assemble everything that I own in that city and that country, and pack it into several boxes. I last packed all the things I owned in the universe into several boxes under far happier circumstances. This time I pack a dog into the car, too.

I don't regret a moment. Life has dealt me a pretty good lot, and I have milked it for what it's worth. So from Singapore to Dubai and the Middle East to London to Kuala Lumpur I now find myself surprisingly, but not that much, in Singapore. I left a Singapore I didn't like very much, and returned to a Singapore I absolutely love (there's an essay in that somewhere). You can't come home again, but you can definitely make it home again, for the first time.

The single life is interesting, but difficult, in equal parts. I haven't dated in such a long time, I really don't have it in me anymore.

The life with hyperthyroid is worse.

I can't remember shit. I quite literally feel like I've lost a major chunk of my former cognitive abilities. It sucks.

How am I dealing with all of this? I'm… dealing. If you know me in real life, you probably can't tell. I've worked very hard to keep it invisible. My heart rate still goes nuts. I drop a ton of weight or I put it back and I drop it again. I am manic and then I am exhausted. I am utterly intolerant to heat, even in an air-conditioned room I am hot. I don't need any medical diagnosis here (I am actively under the care of the medical professionals here, no worries). I just wish I could get my memory back. I've gone from one of those people with super memories to one of those who has to scribble down everything. I don't remember people I've just met (this has never happened before), I don't remember even meeting them, most of the time. It's amazing I can even work at all.

The last five months have felt like a massive blur. I feel like time and space has compressed for me. Or that I'm living in a time warp, splitting myself between two universes. One: pre-illness, pre-breakup, pre-everything. When life was, I thought, sorted. For the time being. The second one, the one I inhabit right now: plagued by a disease that doesn't threaten but bothers me, learning to find my feet again without the woman I love and the life and businesses we had. Breaking up gets more and more expensive as you get older.

I'm okay, I'm good, I'm pretty happy (seriously) — I was just telling someone that I thrive in change in ways that many people don't understand, but I do. Change works for me.

I should be more careful what I wish for, you know? Now there's so much of it I am still finding my feet, but I'm not sure how. That suits me fine for now.

It's just that I hate packing.

In my mother tongue we have a brilliant turn of phrase. Geh kiang. Separately, they mean fake clever. Together, it means some approximation of 'smart alec', but that's not quite good enough. It's hardly translatable at all. 'Smart alec' does not embody the degree of stupidity we are usually referring to when we say 'geh kiang'.

My mother will tell you I embody geh kiang, every bit of me.

I was especially geh kiang when I packed up my bags and bicycle, mostly under stressful circumstances, in order to take them somewhere.

Why did I bring a bicycle to northern Europe? I found myself wondering that all throughout my Nordic escapade. I wondered the loudest and grumbled the most when it was time to pack up my bags and my bicycle all over again. Five times. I know, I counted.

I packed up my bags and my bicycle when I had to move, when I had to get in a plane, when I had to jump into a train, when I had to do all of that entirely by public transport (cabs are totally out of the question in Europe!) and onto train platforms and then into trains.

It was difficult, to say the least. Lucky for me — and my sanity — my love for cycling, and the relative benefits of having one's own bicycle in a foreign place, far outshone the logistical barriers. I will probably do it again.

When you commit to having such a piece of equipment by your side of the entire duration of your trip, you're committing to a relationship that will be the primary relationship, one that will be far more important than the by-now boring concept of luggage. You have to look after it. Endure the glances. Fight for it at airport check-in desks. Hold it, dance with it, around the feet of heavily pregnant commuters and swerving around nervous people, trying your best not to jab anybody with your hulk of a piece of equipment.

So what happened? In a nutshell,

I broke my bike

Finnair treated my bike brilliantly. I flew them three times: to Helsinki, to Stockholm, back from Copenhagen. All three times my bicycle more than survived, and the entire experience was very easy. I highly recommend Finnair for their quick, no-nonsense flights to Europe from Singapore. Helsinki Airport is also my new favourite airport.

I, however, was very stupid. I tried to fix what I thought was a loose nut, myself. Being no bike mechanic, I promptly broke the weirdest little part I could break — the plastic doohickey in the stem of the folding post of my bike. Without it, my bicycle could not stay folded. Foldable bikes like mine haven't taken off in that part of the world at all. Even though the Finns speak amazing English, most people anywhere have never heard of a plastic doohickey. Not unless you are very familiar with foldable bikes of the Dahon make.

Somehow, I managed to find an excellent bicycle shop where its owner and mechanics were super helpful. Since it's not even a part that my bicycle's manufacturer offers for sale, it seemed pretty dire. Thankfully, a quick-thinking mechanics with extraordinary ability in plastics (he had a degree in plastics engineering) took a look at the broken plastic bits, and he made a brand new doohickey for me. That entire process took a week so I had to go to Tallinn without my bicycle, but I was relieved that I wouldn't be travelling around with an unridable piece of junk for the next 3 weeks. More glad that it got fixed. I got lucky.

I had to be rescued by Swedish police

Not something I care to repeat ever again, but.. what an experience.

I was cycling along the bike lanes from Kungsholmen to Stockholm Central, happily zipping along at 25km/h with an air of familiarity. I was starting to really get where things were in Stockholm, and I'd had some amazing city rides. Seems like Stockholm Central hates me for some inexplicable reason. The last time I was there in 2010, I got locked out of Stockholm Central for many hours while my luggage was locked in.

This time, I guess I missed the sign that said "IF YOU ARE A BICYCLE, GO LEFT! NOT STRAIGHT!"

I went straight.

I realised something was amiss when I started descending down a steep flyover. I saw many heavy vehicles. I saw that I had no way to filter right (they ride on the right) without being in the middle of oncoming, converging traffic from another steep flyover. I jumped out. I saw that I could not go back up, and that there was no way I could walk off that bridge (water, water, everywhere).

I jumped onto my bike and kept going.

At some point it dawned upon me in my puny little brain that if I went any further, I would be bus chow in the middle of the underwater tunnel that crossed islands into Södermalm. I got out.

I don't know what I was thinking — probably nothing — I remember I was extremely calm. I called a Swedish friend, who could not help; I texted the Swedish friend I was riding to meet and told her I'd be late, that I'd explain later when I saw her.

Mostly I just stood by the side of the road and looked pathetic, I think.

A Stockholm city police car came within ten minutes, bundled my bicycle and its stupid owner into the back of the car, and drove me to Stockholm Central. I figured motorists might have called in to tell them that an Asian tourist was dangerously obstructing the lives of motorists on the highway by looking pathetic and helpless.

(They did confirm that they received calls about me, which is why they came; I didn't care to ask what had been reported!)

Stockholm police's parting words to me: "you should take a photo and show it to your friends."

Damn malu.

I had to carry a ton of weight every step of the way

Let's just say travelling with a bicycle, no matter how light, is not for the faint of heart. I only moved all my bags and the bicycle when I moved to a new city or went to the train station or airport, but when I moved, I moved.

One of the last minute decisions before leaving for Helsinki was that I would bring a silly little trolley with me. The kind that aunties go to the wet market with: the flimsy, plastic ones that are given out free at computer fairs or promotions. I don't know how I managed without it. Although my Dahon D7HG is quite tiny when folded, and it was also in a soft bag, the overall package including the paddings, foam and bubble wrap made for an uncarry-able package. I also had my large backpack and camera backpack. Why didn't I just pack it in a Samsonite case? I've tried that many times, each time to devastating results. First, dismantling the bike is pretty easy. Getting it to fit isn't. Unlike most other 20″ Dahon bikes, the D7HG Vitesse that I have has a large rear fender. It is close to impossible to remove, and without removing it, the bicycle does not fit into any luggage. It also has a hub gear, which makes it difficult to remove the rear wheel. More importantly, because of the hub gear and the rear fender, I'm not able to confidently put it back. I decided to avoid that nightmare this time. mrbrown and Ryan helped me zhng a makeshift soft bag carry method. It served me well.

Eventually, I gave up on the lousy trolley and went to a trolley superstore in Stockholm (yes, there is such a thing!) and purchased an amazing, sturdy, well-made Swedish trolley.

Would I do it again? Yes, absolutely! That was my first time travelling with my bicycle. To be honest, I don't think I was ready for it. I'm lucky in that I didn't get flats, I didn't need to change tubes (though I brought them anyway), that I didn't need to remove my wheels or do any repairs of any sorts on my own (other than the plastic doohickey incident). I'm no bike mechanic. I'm a little stupid about those things, in fact. I will get better at it because I now know what and where are the gaps in my knowledge.

I had an amazing time on the bike.

The Nordic countries are light years ahead of us in terms of cycling as part of the urban landscape. It was such a joy to ride there, especially in Copenhagen. Real bike lanes, bike traffic lights, an entire culture and city where cycling was a real, and sometimes the only, way of life. It was liberating.

Before going, I was quite shaky on the roads. I did not like the idea of riding on the roads in Singapore as I was not confident enough to do it. Because I got so much mileage on the roads of Copenhagen (breezy sweat-free 40km days were typical), I learned many things about what I needed to know from them. I now ride on the roads of Singapore regularly, and don't find it particularly difficult, although there are some challenges to be mindful of (car-dooring, for example).

Since I got home to Singapore, there's been a lot of talk about how public transport has become absolutely terrible. I agree it has deteriorated substantially, but my own personal way of getting around that problem is to ride more and talk less. I would be quite happy to cycle-commute at least 40% of the time in Singapore. Next time I travel, I am taking the bike with me again. Anywhere. Everywhere.

Super Geh Kiang Me.

Those of you with elephant memories will remember what this site was 7 years ago. The web was a very different place. This blog was a different blog, I was a different kind of kid (19 years old! Yowch), and the ecosystem was other sites like this with no Facebook, Twitter, not in the ways we now have them anyway. The only external outlet we all plugged out to was Flickr, and we know how that went down. It's hard to believe we once lived in a world when Yahoo! was still important.

Through all of that, I was running the same Textdrive box. I had one of those legacy accounts with 'lifetime hosting'. There was no cloud (not in the way we know it now).

The point of all this is: the world has changed, Facebook has IPO-ed, I have changed (in the midst of some pretty huge personal, professional and geographical transitions at the moment), and while I'm still figuring it all out, I figured the easiest thing I could change was the server that this site runs on..

Isn't it so much faster now?

I'm home now of course, whatever home means, and I've been retelling a couple of stories. The same ones, but many of them, just because I've had such a crazy time in the Nordics.

This one isn't very much of a story. Just a little tale that, once again, shows you how crazy we Asians are about our food.

I spent the first three weeks of my big Scandinavian/Finnish vacation on my own, and/or with friends from that region. In the last week, a friend from uni came to meet me in Copenhagen.

We did stuff, mostly in this order:

Eat. Drink. Eat. Drink. Eat. Cycle. Eat. Drink. Eat. Bring our bicycles to Sweden.

To buy chocolate cake. From a supermarket. She'd been on student exchange in Sweden, now lived in Geneva, and missed Swedish supermarket chocolate cake terribly. I'm sure it's nice and all, but damn if I ever go to another country to buy chocolate cake again.