Category Archives: Travel

Saigon by Scooter

Last week I went back to Saigon to spend Têt with my grandmother, aunt, uncle and cousins. Têt is the lunar new year, commonly referred to both here and in the West as Chinese New Year, and it’s pretty much the holiday in Vietnam — as it is in Singapore. My office here was closed for the week starting on Tue afternoon, so it was the perfect opportunity to take advantage of the incredibly convenient proximity of this city to Vietnam. The flight took less than two hours — two hours!

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Visa to Vietnam

VisaNext week is Lunar New Year, often referred to (in the West and in Asia) as Chinese New Year, but known in Vietnam as Têt. It’s the biggest holiday of the year in Viet Nam, and I haven’t spent it there in over twenty-five years. Today I bought my ticket and received my entry visa to go and see my grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins in Saigon next Wednesday.

This is the great thing about being in Singapore — or being in this part of the world, at any rate. A trip that would have taken me nearly twenty-four hours from New York instead clocks in, according to my itinerary, at just 01:55. I mean, wow.

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Just as I Left It

When I left New York and moved away to Singapore the first time in July, I told my office coworkers not to be sad, it wasn’t as if I were leaving the family (which is to say, it wasn’t as if I were leaving the company); rather, it was more as if I were heading off to college. It was a convenient analogy then, and it’s kind of a convenient analogy now that I can use to describe how odd it is for me to be back here in Singapore, finally, after four months away. Imagine that, after the first month in your freshman year at university that you had to slip back and do four more months in high school.

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Amsterdam

After some delay, the circumstances around which I may explain to the general public one day but for now I’ll just conveniently skip over, I finally left New York last night (Wed 03 Jan). I’m in Amsterdam right now, one of the nicest airports I’ve ever traveled through. I should get back to Singapore by midnight on Thu evening.

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You Can Never Go Home Again… Again

Way back in September, I wrote somewhat cheekily, “All of my Asia plans may as well be on indefinite hiatus if I find myself still here, handing out mini-sized candy bars to costumed trick-or-treaters at Halloween.” Ugh.

It’s early December now, and not only did I see Halloween go by, I also had turkey for Thanksgiving and I’ve even nearly finished my holiday shopping. All of this from the cozy confines of the borough of Manhattan, fifteen thousand miles away from my sock drawer in Singapore. Which is not to say that it’s been misery for me since I left Singapore. I’ve actually had quite a bit of fun, and I feel fortunate for the opportunities to do the work I’ve done and to spend more time with the friends I thought I’d left behind in July.

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On Travel

People travel by air from business affair to business affair, literally and repeatedly leaving behind the notion of being rooted in a single place for any indeterminate span of time. This is a way of living for a population of transient professionals, whose lives are divided into mini-chapters, opening and closing with airborne views over cities seen in miniature, and buffered by time spent in the raspy, captive climate of airplane cabins.

Earlier this summer, I met a Westerner in Asia who hadn’t been home in nearly two months. He’d been on a string of digressing business trips for weeks, starting off in California, and bouncing through Australia, Singapore, China and Japan. His home, when he was at home, was Denver, Colorado, so chosen because of its convenient location in the geographic center of the continental United States. "It works out great," he explained, "because when I travel from coast to coast, I can always stop off quickly at my apartment to pick up a change of clothes."

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Anywhere I Go, Here I Am

Leaving New York a second time isn’t going to be much easier than leaving it the first time. I think I understood this, at least subconsciously, before I left Singapore; it was part of my reluctance to come back. I knew once I grew re-accustomed to the particulars of living in this city again, I’d renew an attachment to it that I’d begun to suppress at the end of July. Now it’s two and a half weeks since I’ve returned, and I’ve spent that time working among my old colleagues and hanging out with my old friends. Generally, I’ve been having a blast in all of my old haunts while, in the back of my mind, also dreading another impending departure.

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