Unfamiliarity

Activity is the best friend of a man with too much on his mind. After all, mulling over thoughts is difficult when you're too busy to do so. But take the activity away, and you create a nice stagnant pool of thought for the breeding of blood sucking frustration. And this, this is what a sleepy town (You never really know what a sleepy town REALLY looks like till you've seen this one) in a neighbouring country can do to you.

It was this sleepy (read: comatose) town that confronted our writer this Lunar New Year. Despite the countless times (much to the disapproval of) our writer has been to this settlement (I use this term loosely), he only knew it like the front of his hand. And for those of you who were wondering, no, our writer does not look at the front of his hand very much.

Imagine this.

You cross the causeway, and look back at the retreating forms of civilisation, sanitation, hygiene, santy, internet access and various other synonyms of that sort, and you groan. Rather loudly infact. You take out a book which was more for inducing sleep than anything else, and doze off for a lengthy two hours (I did mention the sleepiness of this town... It kind of rubs off). You wake up and spot a house, a house which occupies the only 3000 square meters of land you know relatively well in the whole neighbourhood, maybe even town, maybe even in the whole sodding country.

You step through a doorway into crumbling architecture, and greet relatives you're supposed to know well, but never really could. You collapse into the couch, amidst the cloud of dust that would ensue immediately after.Time passes, albeit slowly.

You go for dinner, and long awaited home cooked food gracies your palate with their wholly welcome presence. For a moment, you wonder why the food and places make an impression so much more than those partaking the food with you. Thankfully though, the complication of picking up pork bits with two wooden sticks takes up most of your mental capacity, and such thought is lost in the grey mess (yes, mess) up there once again.

You go for lunch the next day. You meet many more who you recognise, but you fail to find much connection other than by family tree. You look for someone perhaps even remotely close to your age, and you find no one. Nearby, a table explodes with shouts and yells and various bits of coloured stuff go about in all directions, staining the table a subtle shade of disgusting. Nevertheless, you await the happening of such at your very own table and examine the bowl of chilli in the meanwhile, attempting to find the fly in this one, too. The usual banter takes place in its unexciting tones, bleeding tradition. But more on tradition another time. You make acquaintance with your food. At least that is the same culinary catastrophe you're so familiar with.
At least that you knew. This realisation wafted over like the uninviting scent of your lunch, and opposing all logic, you continue to eat. Stopping is not an option, as your relatives let you know, as they push mountains of edibles (barely) your way. You take heart in knowing that you can't talk with your mouth full, and ensure that this is always the case. Time passes, in its usual leisurely manner.

You leave the next day, bidding farewell to this strange land, the unfamiliar people and the food you wish you could forget. The causeway runs by underneath you. Over the horizon you see home, but then something strikes you. How much more do you really know about things there? Granted the place is smaller, but it still has its unknown side roads and alleys. Granted the people there are much closer to you, but everyone still goes about their own lives.

For a while you think that maybe if not people, at least things you knew. At this juncture TOK rears its ugly head, but you ignore it with as much ignorance as you can muster, for that can haunt you another day, but not today. But then you realise that the people matter so much more than things do, and that even barely knowing people beats the hell out of knowing the idiosyncracies of a wooden table.

Imagine that.

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