Night Shift

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
It's 04:00am and I'm sitting at the reception desk.
I'm on the night shift. 

Piano nocturnes play in the background.
Chinese guy is sleeping in the laundry on pieces of cardboard.

Just a regular night at the hostel I suppose.

I've been staying in KL for almost three weeks now and I've been slowly transforming my lifestyle into that of a true traveller. By that I mean spending half my time doing jack shit and reading about Buddhism. 

I didn't even think Jack Kerourac's 'Dharm Bums' was that good but somehow it seems to have influenced my thinking without me realising it. Here I am in the early hours of the morning basically writing stream of consciousness pieces which just seems to spill out of my mind like poo exiting my body.  It costs nothing and basically everybody can do it; some more than others.

I think that once you spend a certain period of time 'on the road' (no pun intended), your perspective on life changes somewhat. At some point you make the switch from 'a person who is travelling' to 'traveller'. The difference being that the former is taking a period of time out from their typical routine back home to travel somewhere for a defined period of time, whereas the latter is where it becomes a lifestyle with no defined closure.  It's quite easy to distinguish one from the other.  The former doesn't spend 6 weeks in Kuala Lumpur or wake up at 3pm and eat breakfast cereal before spending the rest of the day playing the guitar and watching 'Who is America'.


At least I'm not writing poetry.


I'm going to try and pull out a banger in the next few days. It's about time I produced something decent for a change.

For now here's a little game I made up.
It's called: 'Spot the woman' - A physical depiction of gender ratios on Tinder

It's like where's Wally except you're trying to find the woman. (She's hiding in one of the images)

The Work Bubble

06:50
My alarm clock goes off.
It's remarkable that I managed to even fall asleep this morning.

Usually I wake up at around 10-11am, but today is different. Today I have important business to attend to and I need to be there at 08:00. (No it's not a court hearing but it involves sitting in front of a computer for 6 hours.)

I roll over and look out the window onto the street below.
Men in long sleeve button on shirts and backpacks walk unnaturally fast along the footpath as if their livelihood depended on it. (Which is probably true)
It's only natural that in a city filled with office towers that you find office workers; but what really hits me is that during my time in South East Asia, I have never actually witnessed the modern ritual of the morning rush hour as I have been operating on a very different schedule.

I want to talk about this because I back home in Christchurch, I lived a very different lifestyle. I used to spend the majority of the day inside an office building, largely isolated from everything else that occurred in the city. I used to partake in the commuter ritual twice a day and it was just a normal part of my life. I saw Christchurch from the perspective of an office worker.

There were times where I would find myself at home or in town during a weekday (or at least not at work) for whatever reason and I would feel like some kind of unemployed junkie slob. This belief was probably instilled from a young age back when I was in primary school where the kids who bunked school were labelled as the 'bad apples' who had no future. For whatever reason, that belief persisted into adulthood and even something as innocent as taking time off on annual leave and going into town during the daytime had me feeling like a wreck.

It's August 2018 and I now find myself in Kuala Lumpur. On one particular day I woke up at 11:00am, watched Youtube videos, played guitar, and ate breakfast cereal for dinner before going back to bed at 2am- all without even leaving the hostel.
It's at the extreme end for me but throughout the past few weeks, my day-to-day lifestyle has largely been about waking up sometime after 08:30, walking/driving around, taking photos, eating food and then going to bed at various hours of the night/morning. I am displaying the true qualities of an unemployed man. - A man who's spent the same money on whisky as he has on food over the past two days.

That said however, I have a foreign passport and this somehow grants me the unique status of being unemployed but without the stigma. (It also eliminates the stigma attached to drinking corn flavoured milk-based drinks outside a playground)

The only time I've seen corn in SE Asia is in a can or in a shrink wrapped plastic bag.

Throughout my travels in Indonesia, Singapore and now Malaysia, I have seen things from the perspective of a backpacker. There are many different ways of perceiving a particular place, which all depend on how your life is structured and how you fit within that society. Our lifestyles and daily patterns create the lens with which we perceive our environment. To truly judge a place fairly, one must take the time to experience it from different angles.  When you say a particular place is boring, ask yourself "Is it really"?
Perhaps it is you who is boring.


As a traveller, I have access to the widest lens of them all and it is only a matter of choosing to use it.

Now I see why they say it changes your perspective.

I paid way too much for this perspective

Will Singapore make me obese?

Standing at an ATM machine

3 Notes slide out of the dispenser.
'3 notes, is that all!?' I think to myself.

I had gotten used to leaving ATMs with a equivalent of a wallet boner.  When you withdraw Indonesian currency in 50,000 note denominations, it's basically like putting a block of plywood into your wallet. But I wasn't in Indonesia anymore. It was time to say goodbye to those fat stacks of paper and 1c coins which couldn't be used for anything practical.

Welcome to Singapore

Downtown Singapore 

Abdullah Zeinab once said "Singapore is like one big food court, with the occasional tourist attraction..."

I can say with first hand experience that he was indeed very correct in his brief description of the the compact sovereign city state. Singapore for me is the land of hawker centres, an amazing public transport system, abandoned bicycles, drunk Chinese people, old people permanently bent at 90 degrees, and social housing done right.

If there is one thing you need to do in Singapore, it's visit one of the numerous hawker centres. Street food vendors do not exist in Singapore, and instead their equivalent can be found within large open-air complexes known as hawker centres, compete with bathrooms, dining facilities, wifi, and chinese people.
They might not be pretty but they sure offer great food at a great price. It's possible to grab a decent sized meal anywhere from $2.50 - $10SGD, with most of them priced at around $4 SGD.  Do you like Chinese, Indian, Malay or Western food. Take your pick because they're all on offer, and if you're not particularly hungry, then perhaps try one of the 50 different beverages on offer. Overwhelmed? Try the green one with the name you can't pronounce!

I found myself planning my days around a combination the MRT system and hawker centres which actually worked out quite well as most of them are within walking distance of a MRT station. 

Seeing as accommodation in Singapore is relatively expensive, I restricted the number of days here and subsequently, make a conscious effort to consume more food that I normally would. (Exception to the time I ate a family pack meal by myself at California Fried Chicken)

The 2nd most expensive meal I've purchase in Indonesia

I don't actually recall what exactly I ate or drink during my time in Singapore but all I know is that I barely scratched the surface.  Whatever it was or however much it was, I sure as hell spent most of it waiting in line for 2 hours and 20 minutes at immigration.

Good thing I loaded up on the chicken kebab wrap and balls of meat back in Singapore. (By the way I was walking and eating at the same time within the bus station, people must've thought I was American).

In Bali 2 minutes. In Johor Bahru, x90 that.
(If the immigration officer decides to take a shit, x92)