We’ve all got big tears in our sides and the city salt doesn’t help.

Well, I planned to come home, type up my travel journal and share the world all the insights I gained whilst away. I have instead elected to not follow through on that plan, and it’s for the following reasons:

a) It’s actually a really long journal and I don’t have enough hours in the day to bother to type it up
b) I’m not sure anyone would really want to read it, irrespective of its brilliance or lack-thereof
c) I don’t think it actually only contains any true insights, just trite recitations of what I saw and what I ate, with the occasional mention of how I felt.

However, I did learn a few things from my trip. One of these things explains just why that journal fails to explain what I experienced – it’s too hard to try and compress something so overwhelming into words. I may pride myself on the way that I can talk incessantly and usually find a phrase to meet every occasion, but when what you want to share with people isn’t just what was happening or where you visited or what you ate, but also the smells, the way that someone smiled on the side of the road, a tiny boy trying to learn to walk but falling over in the dust, the hope that you can feel in the air at an opposition party rally but the resignation the people feel that nothing will change, the stickiness of my fingers after eating rambutan, the anger at seeing an unregistered Lexus when 50% of the population live on $1 or less, and the sense of awe at the sight of rice fields beyond the horizon, beyond what the eye could possibly see… Yes, its hard to compress the entirety of that phenomenon into words.

So, I did expand my worldview, and saw some things I’d rather have not seen (fried tarantula, land mine victims, street children gulping down restaraunt left overs before the staff could catch them), and some things that I’ll never forget (Tuol Sleng Prison, the atmosphere of Ta Prohm, and being followed by a veritable tribe of children on an unnamed mountain – the site of a massacre).

But ever notice how hard it is to maintain that air of ‘oh, wow, the world’s amazing’, when you have three assignments glaring at you and 300 pages to read in two days?

Ungrateful, I know. I apologise.

PS: Shout out to, well, myself (and Amelia): Overheard in Auckland. Intended to be a slightly closer-to-home version of Overheard In NY, except that the people who say stupid things seem to be hiding from us, and so no awesome conversations are really up there, and the only ones worthy of ridicule seem to be the ones that we ourselves have. But become our eyes and ears! Hear anything strange? Flick me an email.