Ay dear all! It’s been
a month since I last posted. No I haven’t given up on blogging. I have been
just suffering from a bout of acute laziness. I should really get my muscles
working and fill up a schedule or something. Anyways, here’s what I typed a few
days ago but failed to complete, hence the lack of updates…:
There’s something about
typing a blog post that requires me to get my marbles intact before I can write
anything coherent, meaningful or expressive (in the sense that it captures my
thoughts and feelings accurately) enough, that manages to put me off posting
about things for a while…
But yeah I’m back, back
from the HMP Europe trip that I went on like a week or two ago! I really went
on the trip without really expecting much, not to say that there wasn’t
anything to expect, but that I just didn’t want to burden myself by thinking of
what I would experience there. So I went, with a kind of feeling that you
sometimes get when you walk into the exam room for a language paper – it’s a
fairly big thing you’re getting yourself into but you didn’t really prepare all
that much and you don’t know how exactly you could’ve made yourself feel any
more assured unless you had started preparing a much longer time before…
Essentially my brain wasn’t adequately attuned to the idea of travelling so
many many miles away (about 6374) for 10 days, but heck, I was excited. Not
jumping-the-couch excited, but just excited that I could finally see this place
I’ve always read about, the exact same spots and buildings many ‘legendary’ people
have lived in and stayed at. So, off we go.
The flight: I’ve never
felt so much distaste for plane rides ever in my life. This is definitely not
to criticize the airline or airport or anyone. It’s just that I’ve never have
to sit in a plane for such a long time, starting from 1am, only to land in a
place where the sun is only just barely rising, and you still feel like you
haven’t slept a wink when that was all you were trying to do in the plane, and
about 2 hours later you are whisked off onto another plane for another long few
hours, yet manage to land at lunchtime, your body feels like it is midnight
because you still haven’t slept properly but the sun tells you it’s clearly
midday but your stomach tells you “What, lunchtime?! I ate like 5 meals since
midnight!! Stop stuffing me~~~” Oh that sensation, everything you knew about ‘TIME’
just falls apart and it doesn’t really matter what time it is back in your home
country anymore because the more you think about it the more you think you’re
entitled to just conk out. Well, welcome to the rookie’s experience of what
they call ‘jetlag’.
The first glimpse of
Germany, Munich, was just like a dream. Partly because it was unbelievable,
partly because I was certainly weary from the quality-less-sleep-ful flight. I
was seeing autumn colours of yellow, orange, red, brown blanketing the earth,
everywhere! The land was vast, trees were abundant… Our first stop after lunch was
a concentration camp in Dachau. I think the coldness of winter served the mood
of this place really well. It was cold, beautiful and sad all at the same time.
Seeing the extremely poor conditions the prisoners would have lived in, hearing
the stories of how they were tortured, sends a pang down my heart. People
mostly feel pity, indignation, anger, for these people who died discriminately.
But instead of grieving over those who died so many years ago, I didn’t really
know how to feel. It makes me think now that perhaps life can be seen as a
privilege and not a right. What am I going to do with this gift? It was
bittersweet to hear how some prisoners, in their captivity and suffering, still
enjoyed music and songs. How amazing it is that music should be such a universal
type of comfort to people.
The next day was spent
on the way to Salzburg, where we visited a salt mine and had a city tour. The
salt mine was quite cool as we had to cover up in these oversized white coats
and pants reminiscent of lab coats, and to enter the mines we sat on these long
tram-like vehicles (what exactly do you call that? Hmm.) that travelled on rail
tracks, and in the mines where there were deep dips underground there would be
a slope down where we could slide down.
[to be continued, or
not.]
Snore.