It is always the leaving that brings it all into perspective.

It’s so easy to say that the weather in Sydney is too changeable, my house too cold, my brother and his friends too noisy, my mom too naggy, the lack of coffee in the kitchen unacceptable. But then, looking out on the pink-purple-orange sunrise over Sydney Harbour as we crossed the bridge, my backpack and my suitcase in the boot once again and my dad behind the wheel to the airport, I didn’t want to close my eyes for fear I would miss another priceless moment.

Tasmania was beautiful. Having been once more transformed into a city girl by the always-on lights of London, it was eerily quiet at first; even capital city Hobart doesn’t really feel all that much bigger than York, and as we travelled into the mountains and the (comparative) wilderness I was suddenly struck by how rare, how amazing it was that this part of the world, not 2 hours’ flight from Sydney, had managed to remain so pristinely untouched. This was not some urban-generated landscape, this was genuine nature. And after all this time, there are still no better travel companions than my family.

Yesterday as I sat on the old familiar 174 and went by my old neighbourhood en route to Orchard, looking down the street where I grew up, at the condominium which now occupies the place I used to swim, the playground at Bouganvillea Park behind the old bus stop, I almost didn’t know what to feel. There was nostalgia in spades, there was an ache for what is irretrievably gone, there was a warmth and a deeply felt thankfulness for what hasn’t changed at all. My sister, summing up my thoughts, said to me later in the night that she wanted to go back to our house and our neighbourhood, but at the same time she didn’t want to, was almost afraid to, because she knew it’d be different.

Today, I took a walk down Orchard Road from ION to Plaza Singapura, and at least half of what I saw was completely unrecognisable. Change is inevitable, I know, change is to be embraced. But oh, the dizzying vertigo. And yet – I know that when I sit in the airport again on Wednesday morning, another boarding pass in my hand, I will be soaking it all in and wishing I didn’t have to leave, however unfamiliar to me this island now is. There are still the people. There are still the memories.

My Wednesday and Thursday this week have basically vanished into air (literally), and my body clock is currently in some whacked-out timezone that is neither UK nor Australian, so I’m feeling pretty disoriented. But nothing beats the feeling of being back, of hanging out in my living room with my laptop with my siblings watching telly. Daddy took me out laptop shopping today followed by a trip to the Sydney Botanic Gardens to take advantage of the awesome warm weather, and we had lunch at Masuya, a family favourite Japanese restuarant in town; I also finally managed to satisfy my perpetual xiaolongbao craving with a trip to a new Shanghainese restaurant near our home, and we made plans to hit the beach tomorrow for some good fresh fish and chips, and pancakes later in the day (why yes, I have planned my days around food)!

Speaking of new laptops, I basically presented my dad with my very few specific requirements (must be able to play Dragon Age and NWN2, must have good sound, must have Win 7, doesn’t need to be that light/portable as I mostly just leave it at home anyway, must not be ugly), and he picked out this drop-dead sexy beauty for me:

Toshiba Qosmio X500

This, my friends, has to be the Mustang of laptops or something. It’s clearly built to be a gaming rig, hence its massive size and high-end specs, and I’m just hoping that my back won’t break lugging it back to Singapore and London, but dang it’s pretty. They’ve apparently been flying off the shelves so fast that they don’t even put it out on display in shops because then they’d just perpetually have no stock. We had to ask for it specifically. Thank goodness for the internets.

My dad’s l33t bargaining skills also resulted in us getting a copy of Dragon Age, a new pair of headphones, and a Logitech GX9 mouse thrown into the deal – for less than the RRP of the laptop. w00t! :D

I keep putting off blogging because I keep wanting to redesign, and I have ideas and all and even a Photoshop mockup (done ages ago), but there is no time on weekdays and always so much to do during the weekends. Once I start full-time work, it will only go downhill. Looks like it’s tomorrow or never, but in the meantime… there’s still today, and these words of wisdom from Mr Neil Gaiman himself, which Wee Zi first drew to my attention earlier this year and which I never got round to posting…

Hello, Mr. Neil.
This is my question: You lived most of your life in the UK but now live in the United States, right? Which one do you consider to be your home? And for that matter, what do you think classifies as a ‘home’?

I find myself remembering the Richard Burton (the actor, not the Arabian Nights one) line about “Home is where the books are”. And by that token, home is the one in the US.

But truly, even now, when I go to the UK I think, I’m going home. And when I go, er, home, I think I’m going to America. Probably why I’ve never taken citizenship…

But at the end of the day, I think Home is something you make, not something you find. Something you’re always leaving, and somewhere you’re always looking for or returning to. It’s part of growing up, and not the best part.

- (from Neil’s blog)

As always, Neil totally nails it, better than I ever could even after years and years of struggling with my own words.

Recently, someone referred to the UK as my second home, in casual conversation; my immediate and instinctive response was that Sydney is my second home, and the UK just a place I’m passing through. It doesn’t really make any sense because I’ve spent most of the last five years in this country, and less than 6 months collectively in Sydney over the same period of time, and it gave me pause for thought. As for Singapore – I think I’ve spent even less time there than I have in Sydney, since 2004 at least, so why do I still think of it as my first home?

I think I’m a lot less emo and angsty about finding home now than I used to be (time will do that to you), but it doesn’t mean I don’t still think of it often, turn the question around in my mind, grapple with my lack of answers. And what Neil says here – it’s exactly how I feel about the UK, Singapore and Australia. When I fly to Singapore, I think, I’m going home. When I fly to Australia, I think, I’m going to my family. And when I fly here, to the one country where I actually have a residence (albeit rented) to call my own, and a semi-permanent correspondence address, I think… I’m going to England. Often, I think I’m going back to England, and that back is a pretty key word, but I never think I’m going home. I guess Neil is right (what am I saying? of course Neil is right. Neil is always right :P) that home is what we make, and home is what you’re looking for, what you want to return to. And I think a big part of my thinking of Singapore as home is that so much of who I am is based on my growing up there, and it represents, or is as close as a physical place can be to representing, the idea of a world I want to go back to. I know it’s not the same anymore and that it has changed, in many ways, so dramatically that it is no longer the world in my mind. But the idea of it, the memory of it -

(As for the books, let’s not even go into where mine are. I have no idea, in most cases, and this distresses me.)