it's pretty strange when you get pooped out of jc right after your A's, and within a few months you find your friends exiting the country for studies like flocks of migrating geese- except now they're all going somewhere colder. and then halfway thru uni a new wave hits and sends people traipsing off to all corners of the earth for a semester or two. and then you wonder what you're doing still sitting here sweltering in the humidity of this island nation. a stomachfull of terrible french and no one to hurl it at. all the pastries and crepes and flans and wild boar ragouts and tiramisu and ratatouille out there and none for you to eat. all the autumn mushrooms sprouting& nbsp;buoyantly and not one will you pick.

tv travel programmes are indeed such agonising modern-day willow-apricot dreams. they transport you to worlds so alien and yet so warmly appealing. xenophobia has no place where drool-worthy heart-stopping cuisine dwells, and yelling children and snorting boars have never been as attractive (especially when they've been trussed, marinated and made into winey tomtoey pasta sauce by jamie oliver! - the boar not the children, haha).

and this wanderlust is in no way quenched by the recent discovery that my grandma, veritable globetrotter that she is, has been to far more places than i have, and most within the last ten years. which led me to think: what's with this obsession with all things foreign? exotica, in minute amounts or contained in its homeground, holds in thrall westerners and easterners alike. yet, when they come pouring into one's country they suddenly morph into illegal immigrants, dirty slum-dwellers, drunk construction workers and husband-stealers. whence this metamorphosis? (i know: whence?? i'm starting to sound like a translated ancient chinese play)

on the bus today a chinese national was commenting that singaporeans are really gripped by japanfever: all things jap seem cool and modern and kawaii *cue sailormoon airbounce*. sometimes racism just blindsides and ambushes me; despite my best intentions i can't help an instinctual distinction between different 'classes' of foreigners. by what do i judge? by what right do i judge? gdp? the success of the country's exported soft power? stereotypes are the coward's and the lazy bum's way of managing the world - and i am both, surely. it is easier not to think of them as thinking-feeling humans with families to feed and social needs, so we can chuck them beside a cemetery, 'self-contained' and out of sight like the oarsmen crammed and beaten beneath the decks of a luxurious battlecruiseship. easier to shrug, to not think about it until the time comes. but can we really?