Green

Reading Jun's blog makes me envious. So does reading Shalene's and Janet's. Thankfully Charis doesn't have one. Why am I envious? What do those girls have in common? They're all overseas! Jun, Shalene and Charis are all in Europe, Janet is in America. Angela should be touching down in America about now. Oh, Sheena just came back from London, Jermaine is in Australia where Alvin and Weeli will go in July. Ming Tien spent a couple of months in America working for Cisco.

And Jun went to Rome. She was in the Vatican City. She was in the Sistine Chapel. She saw St Peter's Basilica. Did you go to Florence, Jun? I read a book entitled The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone when I was 16. It's a biographical novel of Michelangelo Buonarroti. I absolutely loved it and was enthralled by the description of Michelangelo's art. How much he loved the human form, how he loved sculpturing. I devoured the text, and visualized in my mind how the various frescos, reliefs and sculptures look like. I went on to google and found images and virtual tours of them. I told myself I will go to Florence one day. I will go to Rome. And I'll see Michelangelo's David, the Sistine Chapel, and everything that the Rennaissance artists created.

Green with envy, that's what I am! I read about the exchange programs NUS offers. I will have to maintain a CAP of 3.0 and above to even be eligible. I worry about my maths. I wonder if my mum will be able to afford to send me on exchange.

There's so much more than Singapore. Some Singaporeans live thinking that Singapore is the best. Cleaniest, most efficient, most beautiful. Best airport, best transport system, best this best that. Load of bull. The Shanghai airport is nicer than ours. The Hong Kong International Airport is so bloody huge there's a train to take you from the terminal building to your plane. And its design is so much better than ours. Of course, I'm comparing airports built a lot more recently than ours, and that's not very fair. But some Singaporeans go to Hong Kong airport, look around, sniff, and proclaim that Singapore's is bigger. That's self-delusion at its best.

I want to travel. I used to consider myself widely travelled. I've been to China, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Australia, Amsterdam, America, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia. But most of them I did when I was a toddler. I can't remember a shit about Amsterdam nor Australia. America and Korea I went with a tour group, and being a singaporean tour group, we were rushed everywhere, ate lousy food, had shopping stops, and experienced none of the countries' culture.

I'm a frog in a damp and musty well looking forlornly up at the perfect circle of sky, counting the occasional cloud that drifts pass the well's opening. Somebody save me. And winamp chooses this time to play Ben Folds' Lonely Christmas Eve. Depressing.