the thing i hate about travelling

each night, each taiwanese stallholder prepares enough food in anticipation for at least a hundred servings. sales is brisk. there is a cuh-ray-zee amount of food consumed at the 廟口夜市. and i thought, naively, that only singaporeans ate *that* much at any given time.

in 2 nights' time, i'll leave taipei. though i can't deny thoroughly enjoying my month-long stay here, i look forward to being back in singas. but the final week of being in a place always makes me reluctant to leave it.

i'm afraid i have to blame my parents. they started me on this whole travel thing way too early. there ought to be personality tests performed before they determine the minimum age for an individual to start travelling. perhaps they could group this test with the application for passports. with different temperaments, unprepared individuals having a taste of the divine enjoyment of travelling prematurely could experience severe repurcussions later in life. the mind is unable to process the novelty of each new experience. it begins to assimilate new experiences and equate them as staples, and the individual begins to live on a diet of change. barely past my first birthday, i had acquired the [un]fortunate taste for airplanes, foreign lands and unfamiliar encounters. this is perhaps a good excuse for my incurable wanderlust.

the night before actually leaving a current location is usually, for me, fraught with last-minute packing, and an odd pang of yearning for a place i have not actually left. even an eagerly anticipated trip is no exception: i can't put a finger on the exact reason for feeling like i don't want to leave.

it must be a punishment for not being able to stay put. the need to move is overcompensated by a wistful tug at the heartstrings to stay. not content to live with a mere memory of a place, i crave a constant [tangible] connection with a space i have gradually become comfortable with.

perhaps the constant in the equation is, simply, the travelling.