back in kl and back to reality ... not a good feeling.

as an afterthough of my travels and meeting all these random people doing the most random things with their lives, i suddenly feel my life is somewhat mundane. sure i have a decent, stable job in the tallest twin towers in the world with a company that is destined for great things. i have my own car, i have interesting and wacky friends. i live in a (albeit somewhat small) decent place in a decent location that's (albeit somewhat in the middle of nowhere) quiet and serene and not traffic-congested.

but that's just it, i'm rooted, bound. i almost crave the freedom that others have that i met, like the guy from australia who works on a boat and decided randomly to go to thailand for a few days. heck it took me 2-3 weeks to plan my 1 week trip.

or the guys from ireland who spent the last 6 months just wandering around. sure to an extent its a wonder how you could live without a certainty on where you're gonna be tomorrow, but there's a certain blissfullness to having the freedom to be in bangkok today and saigon 12 hours later, having everything you need in a backpack on your back.

and then i realize that my blissfulness in my travels is also partly due to the certainty of stability that i do have at home, as in i do have something to come back to in the end (or in event of problems). even if it is a temporal thing such as a dorm in the university.

on the other hand, if i were financially self sufficient, would i care about having roots i can come back to? when i had the means to grow temporary roots at wherever i happen to be if i feel like it or my feet are weary from walking from place to place.

and now i sit here in my office staring longingly out the window, feeling trapped behind a glass with a necktie as a dog chain. i look at the proposals on my desk and the slides and reports i'm supposed to do and suddenly, being a consultant doesnt seem to interesting anymore.

as a second afterthought, it sucks being in a country where your currency is only worth so much. considering that my beach-side bungalow in phangan was RM 35/nite, that would've been less that USD 10/nite if I were American. maybe thats why you don't see too many asian backpackers wandering around (not including asian-americans/europeans).

its also interesting travelling in a foreign south-east asian country, where, looking the way i do and yet being the foreigner to them that i am, i stand in between the statuses of being a local and being a foreigner. i don't get treated as a foreigner automatically (e.g. i get less offers from street touts in pat pong for "special shows" and "happy hours" and "chip chip luv u long time" than my fair-skinned caucasian conterparts, and yet being a foreigner i lack the ability to blend into the society as a local would, language barriers and all.

so i stand in between two worlds and get to observe the two disparities from an aloof distance. i get to observe the masses of old, white, balding caucasian men dragging behind them young, local call girls behind them and feel sorry for their torture of having to service wrinkly men for a living. and i get to view the masses of 7-Elevens and McDonalds and young thai teenagers in their attempts at westernization in definition of a self-identity that would be acceptably "cool". and the clash between the westernization of fast food chains and the modernization of a high-tech transportation system, and the remnants of a traditional life of small stalls of local delicacies (including a cart of what appeared to be deep-friend insects) and river-side huts.

standing in the middle, do i represent a bridge over the gap?