Arrived in Seattle

Seatttle
Arrived in Seattle at Darius' house. Darius shares a house with 5 other Singaporeans. JD will be picking me up once she returns from Victoria tonight.

I left HI Fisherman's Wharf at 4.30am in the cold morning of May 10th to go to the SF airport to catch a plane to Seattle. I only slept for about 1.5 hours and was so tired I think I was in a rather stoned state of mind as I drifted from the check-in counter to the boarding gate and finally onto the plane. It was just a 2 hours plane ride but a whopping $37 shuttle ride from the airport to Darius' house!

I just met Stanley and Sarah, who just came back and rushed out again to catch a football game downtown. I can tell that all of them, Darius Erfem Sarah and Stanley, are very nice Singaporeans. Sarah told me to help myself to anything in the kitchen, as long as they are 'safe', haha.

I guess I will hang around and R&R here until it's time for lunch.

Backlog: Days 2 and 3 of San Fran
Backlog from all the tiring days in San Fran!

Day three (last day) was a fun one as Mica, Liam and I teamed up as a trio to go and take a walk around the Japan Centre area, Mission district and downtown area. We walked alot (almost 7 hours) and had a great day with each other's company talking on the way. Liam is a well-travelled Dutch guy who has a lot of interest and knowledge in geo-political and environmental stuff. He is the second person, after Carlet, that I know who is from Netherlands. He had backpacked Europe and is now travelling West coast N America, NZ and later on Southeast Asia, including Singappore! I've told him to look me up when he is in Singapore. Liam is also easy-going guy who is so easy to befriend and strike up a conversation with. I like this kind of person because despite being a stranger from a different background, there is a no palpable barrier in his attitude.

Day 2 of San Fran was an adventurous outdoor one. As we rented bikes for 24hours, we still had half a day to use the bike on Friday. Mica and I decided to take up the "medium" rated route to the Golden Gate Park. It was a good 32km journey. Halfway through there, I thought I was going to die going up all those slopes. On hindsight, it seems dangerous that I was cycling in the cyclists' lane right next to the vehicle lanes when I am a cyclist who has not cycled for about 10 years and was still nursing bruises from a bad fall the day before. In the end I realized that it's all about control and braking. We had a picnic lunch at the Hippies Hill where groups of 'hippies' looking unkempt and dressed in a rather gypsy-ish way go about their normal routine of making music, dancing in a relaxed and trance-like manner, playing with 'fire-ball' chains and according to Mica, get high on drugs. The last part wasn't quite visible in the daytime but it was an experience sitting at a slight distance and observing these people whom Mica would call, the 'alternative people'.
On our way back, we passed by the downhill Golden Gate Bridge again. I told myself that I must conquer the slope where I fell and of course I did!
We returned the bike at 5.30pm in the evening, 24.5 hours after we rented it from the same shop. Although it was just one day, we felt like we've been through alot already-golden gate bridge, the not-so-well-trodden paths in the golden gate park, the difficult hills and everything. There was so much mutual support and care on the way, well, maybe more from Mica then from me. When the chains on the bicycle gears came loose I was in a loss and didn't know what to do. Mica took control of the situation, casually and matter-of-factly mumbled that it is a very common problem, flipped the bike upside down in a jiffy and fixed it up with her bare hands. Her hands were dirtied by the grease but she non-chalantly rubbed her hands against her tights, smiled at me and told me reassuringly that "don't worry, it is just grease". I felt like giving her a hug that instant.

Mica is a wonderful person. She has such a compelling personality- she is cheerful, fun-loving, sensitive, caring, candid and lucid in her thoughts, articulate, opinionated and maverick in certain ways. It still surprises me how providence and destiny brought us together to meet in HI Chicago and later on to be in San Francisco at about the same time (if I had not had to cancel my San Diego trip, I would not have had three days to spend in San Fran). I can still remember the day when I entered the HI Chicago hostel room and a voice emerged from the sheets in a lower bed bunk to say 'hi' to me- it was Mica on the first day we met and it just went on from there. She said that she'd keep me posted about her San Fran trip and she really did. I shall also remember the dinner she offered me on my first day in San Fran (instant noodles which was so comforting for my empty stomach), the dinner we made together on our second day, the walk back from Safeway in the dark, cold and eerie front yard before the hostel and the secret hide-out places she invited me to go with her.

Recounting all the events in my encounter with Mica since three weeks ago makes me feel that I am a character in a movie- where a slightly paranoid and sheltered 22-year old student from a backwaters state (almost, by geographical standards) met a 28-year-old hippy, free-spirited and streetwise Australian girl in a foreign land, who then let the innocent and ignorant student into snippets of her slightly more choatic life and opened up the student's eyes to fresh perspectives which the student has never been exposed in her neater and monotonous lifestyle back home.

Contemplative Mood
I am still amazed at how destiny could bring people to cross paths at confluences in life and how such a brief and fortuitous encounters could make an impact on one's overall experience as a human being. This sentiment is not confined to just the San Fran trip, but also to the exchangein Western- Cynthia and her family, Adriana and her family, fellow exchange students and people from all over the world whom I met while on my travels: Jessica and Zoe (in NY), Mica, Sabine, Karen (in UBC), Erin and Clemence, Michael and Liam. For people like Erin and Clemence, I've only met and talked to them a few hours before I left Ottawa and I already feel that I have developed a bond with them such that if I ever visit Taiwan and France, I would surely remember their invitation for me to visit them. And for Michael, the geologist whom I talked to over breakfast yesterday morning-I would really like to look him up in New Mexico City so that he would bring me to go caving as promised.

I guess such is one of the beauty of venturing out and knowing more people. I don't know if I would ever get the chance to do this again because an exchange programme is once in a lifetime and any prospect of doing this kind of carefree and free-roaming travels in the near future is so remote that it is almost non-imaginable. It is not that I think I would particularly relish travelling alone to new places again, but just that I think this way of meeting new friends from all walks of life is an incredibly valuable and enriching experience. I am not even sure whether I would be this lucky if I do this again in the future. The mindset of a being a young, impetuous and experimental novice traveller is an essential pre-requisite for such an appreciation of the experience, I think. I'm really not sure if I can ever return to this state of mind ever again.