le cauchemar

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at the end of our trip, gerard labelled our holiday 'a nightmare'. i can only ever remember having had one nightmare in my life (involving getting trapped in a thorn bush while being pursued by a vampire), and the two experiences were quite dissimilar. in reality the holiday wasn't too bad - it's just that every fairy tale has to have its villain. the villain - in this case - was me! ;)

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i was late leaving darwin because a small aircraft made an emergency crash landing at the airport and it took a few hours to clear debris from the runway (would you believe). i kept thinking of that tiny piece of metal that flicked up into the concorde's engine in paris all those years ago and caused the plane to explode and incinerate its passengers.

i had just come off nights and had missed a day and a half of eating and drinking when i turned up in hot and humid singapore. pre-arrest at hostel reception, i had to bolus myself with 1L ice lemon tea before i could even put down my bag. the bag itself was little (only 6kg plus carry on sack!) and i was feeling pretty proud of myself until gerard rocked up the next day with everything he needed packed into a little carry-on rucksack c/o ms poppins and i had to hang my head in shame.

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we happened to be in KL during the 50th anniversary of independance - merdeka day. jet fighters flew low over the city and a midnight celebration involving the littlest fireworks display in history occurred in our part of town, where thousands of revelers sprayed each other with shaving cream before hurling empty shaving cream cans across the crowd. the sound of metal hitting random skull frequently punctuated the cheering and laughter.

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if you look at a world map, you'll see that anyone wanting to sail from anywhere in the east to anywhere in the west or vice-versa basically had to sail through the straits of malacca, so the straits settlement of malacca is, historically, of infinite importance. first the portuguese, then the dutch, then the english controlled this little town, each leaving suprisingly little evidence of their occupation before leaving it in the hands of their successor. boring. my impression of malaysia is that it is a made-up country - something carved out by colonial powers for trade purposes with no real national identity - and the modern sense of 'nationhood' cannot aptly be applied to it. i don't know much about indonesia, but it seems to be a made-up country on the other side of the dutch/english dividing line, and i think we'll see many more 'new nations' and civil wars before things attain some sort of natural balance in the region.

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my first impressions of singapore were of a sterile utopia. a country where you can get arrested for kissing or possession of chewing gum, where there are multi-storey billboards in the middle of the town warning of the dangers of jay-walking and the benefits of being a considerate pedestrian, and videos being played on loop in all metro stations educating people on how to spy on other commuters and report suspicious behaviour to the police. people were neither happy nor sad - just shopping.

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but as i dug a bit deeper i found a place in my heart for singapore - and not just because one of my favourite people comes from there. there's something classy about it, and as gerard and i sat in the colonial palm-tree lined raffles hotel indoor courtyard being served singapore sling cocktails by waiters in full livery with a lounge band strumming a double bass in the corner, i realised that at least for one evening, i was not above looking down my nose at the rest of the world, not above treating myself, and certainly not above being bourgeois.

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i'm back in darwin now, living in a beautiful raised, airy house in the burbs with a (mercifully) non-medical housemate. i've finished a week of nights in the emergency department which i found fascinating, and am looking forward to more. and yet part of me feels bored and concerned that a creeping stagnation is on the horizon. big ideas have been replaced with no ideas, and spontaneous activity with general debility. gerard was right about our nightmare. he's suspiciously right about most things. the biggest challenge awaits - it's time for ondrej to face his waterloo.