If this wasn’t Salvatore, the Barcelonian journalist that I’d befriended while choosing cans of pristine Spanish clams to take home with me, I might have put up a tough fight to such opinions. Yet I could not. He had a point; the seafood I knew back in Asia, whether it was Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand; India, Bangladesh, or South Korea, had all been wonderful specimens, yet I could never really taste them. Whether it’s because of differences in cooking style, or even if Salvatore was right and it came down to sheer freshness and taste, I only knew the seafood I had known so far only tasted of what it was cooked with. Black pepper, curry, garlic, herbed. It all masked the taste of seafood and you could never taste seafood on its own, only what it was cooked with.

Two weeks before I would have fought tooth and nail for my Asian pride on this one point, and yet, I could not. For I had been awed, shocked, and pleasantly bowled over by the famed seafood of the region at Rafa’s, about two hours north of Barcelona in the little Costa Brava town of Roses.

Rafa should have his TV show one day, but it’d be entirely in Spanish: gruff Catalonian man chomping on his cigarette, cooking, and singing Spanish songs at the same time. Olive oil and sea salt. That’s all he cooks with. To say he cooks simply is understating it. Everything is naked. Everything is a la plancha — just simply grilled, on that metal top. I did not expect to have yet another culinary revelation so shortly after El Bulli (the night before), but I did want to eat at Rafa’s as much as I wanted to eat at El Bulli. I’d read of how difficult it was to find the little restaurant with just five tables — it’s located in a tiny alley in the middle of Roses. I booked a hotel right opposite it (it helped that said hotel, the Hotel La Cala, was also the cheapest deal in town, a bed and breakfast at just 25 euros per person; decent digs). His opening hours seemed suspect: closed Sundays, Mondays, and most of December. Closed whenever the fish that day isn’t any good. He won’t have anything to do with seafood that isn’t of the absolute best quality, and goes everyday to his fisherman friends for the best catch from the bay of Roses.

Rafa and his wife run the eponymous Rafa’s, which in recent years has exploded in popularity as the must go restaurant if you ever find yourself in Roses, particularly together with an El Bulli meal. It’s said the El Bulli guys, including Ferran Adria, frequent the joint: in the Bourdain documentary about El Bulli, towards the end of it the unavoidable question is popped — if Ferran Adria is the hottest chef in the world, what then, does he eat? Adria took them to Rafa’s, but the script kills it with a Spanish-to-English rant about memories, and memories of seafood, the taste of the sea. When I got there, I knew what they meant.

But where do I begin?

With the appetizers, perhaps, as is usually the case. Anchovas; when one is in Spain, there’s no getting away from anchovies. I hated the very word anchovies before I went, slowly grew to like it — but here at Rafa’s, they asked if I’d like two types of anchovies, and I was glad I said yes. Anchovies with oil, anchovies with salt. That’s it. The menu, in his wife’s head. No complicated menu in Spanish or French, just anchovies with oil, and anchovies with salt. Both forms of anchovies were exactly the way I like my anchovies to be, if I like them at all: fresh. Punchy. Salty. Savoury. Perfect. Anchovies with oil came on two pieces of toasted bread. It was the right amount of warm. My friend Chermain and I were… impressed. Neither of us were fans of anchovies, but we loved this.

Neither of us were big fans of shellfish either, but Rafa’s gave me the very rare sort of feeling, the sort that said everything coming from his kitchen had to be eaten. I heeded, threw all my bias aside, and said: feed me. Feed me he did. Sea snails with vinaigrette. Were they sea snails or were they whelks? I have no idea. It tasted good. And then the Clams. My God, those clams. I still think about them — I’ve had many clams in my life, but these were by far the tastiest, and the freshest. By a long, long shot. I could not get enough of them, and went for seconds. (I described them to someone that same night, “The clams were so fresh they were still squirting in the box!” She told me I should never think about going into food writing.)

I had no way of knowing then it was only the beginning.

The squids. The squids deserve a paragraph on their own. I’m no fan of squids, generally — I grew up detesting the taste of squids. I hate food with rubbery texture, and for that reason, abhorred all sotong, and at best only had a passing tolerance for squid in its fried, calamari form. But the baby squids here. Just olive oil, and the taste of something heavenly: a little charred, a little oil. Crispy little baby squids with wonderful texture, and a taste of squid that I could not place. When we were done Chermain and I were slurping up the remnants of olive oil, a little delirious. I think one of us (probably me) called it “perfect olive oil, beautifully infused with squids”. We went for seconds, too. Next up, the prawn family. One expected nothing less of Rafa’s by this point, and did he deliver. Scampi. Langoustines. Succulent, fresh, even the… ‘brainjuice’. We lapped it all up, like hungry children. One thing you’ll notice is how Rafa’s fish are all ugly. There are no exceptions. Some serpentine, some monster-like. We picked the San Pedro, out of the possibilities that night. It was a good choice, though I think I might have preferred monkfish or turbot. Dessert: a home-made ‘black and white’ chocolate tart to close the night of perfection. It’s a meal that’ll stay with me for a long time.

And dare I say it — I think I preferred it to El Bulli. I would go back to Spain just to eat here. And you should, too. More photos at Flickr.

Rafa’s
C. Sant Sebastia, 56
Tel: +34 972 254003

Roses Travel Guide (Public Transport)
Access via Barcelona:
Bus Take a bus from Barcelona Nord station (metro: Arc de Triomphe), run by the SARFA company. There are two buses I think, one at about 11am gets you there by 1pm. The other bus runs in the evening. In June 2008 the one way bus fare for Barcelona-Roses was 18.10 euros. For up to date bus schedules and prices, check Movelia.

Train For departures throughout the day, buy a ticket from Barcelona Sants station to Figueres (in the direction of Girona). Get out of Figueres, and walk out of the Figueres train station to the bus station several metres away, from where there are frequent SARFA bus departures for Figueres-Roses (about 2-3 euros). Buses to Roses too from all parts of the Costa Brava and from Girona.

Access via France:
Bus and Train Trains from southern France (particularly Perpignan) run to Cerberes, from where they continue to Girona or Figueres. Check train schedules. Some Eurolines buses from France (especially Perpignan, Marseille and Aix en Provence) run through to Girona, from where you can either take the bus to Roses, or the train to Figueres and then the bus to Roses.

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Flight Search
WeGo.com
Ever since I discovered WeGo.com recently and used it to book my flight to Barcelona, it’s quickly become popular among my friends and family for their travel search needs. We all like how its quick and easy interface presents search results across hundreds of travel websites, and always gives you a good fare. After-tax prices are worked in from the moment the search results are presented, which is a nice touch. You find out all you need to know and zip through flight bookings in a quarter the time it takes at a certain incumbent. I’ve searched fares originating from most Asian countries and can attest to the good rates out of Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, which are the main airports I fly out of. I like the research section where you can filter your search for travel information by the very logical and useful categories of “travel magazines, newspaper articles, guidebooks, blogs, videos, industry news”, etc.

AirAsiaPlus
While WeGo.com’s flight search is fabulous for regional and international travel, I can’t break the habit I’ve had for a long time: lurking compulsively on AirAsia’s website looking for deals out of Kuala Lumpur, especially for domestic Malaysian flights. The AirAsia website is fast enough, but this indie search site does just one thing: power search AirAsia. I do an insane amount of power-booking at AirAsia: not long ago, I’d scrambled out of bed at 5 am in a Kuching hotel, and in the five minutes I had to wash up, get dressed, and jump into a car, I managed to book some flights to Bangkok and modify other flight bookings, and pack my bag. That’s because AirAsiaPlus.com’s simple interface lets you view flight prices for 15 days from the day you pick. Taxes aren’t worked in yet, and you can’t click through and book them directly, but you can mess around to see which dates are best for your budget. (For example, it tells me there’re a host of $7 tickets to Kuala Lumpur coming up…)

Destinations and Advice
Travelfish, for Southeast Asian travel
A long time favourite, Travelfish just keeps getting better and better. It has come to the point where I now advise friends, even those who have never travelled independently, to use Travelfish as their exclusive research resource, rather than splurging >S$40 on a guidebook. Accommodation listings are usually spot on, and I’ve found an impressive array of special places to stay, for every budget, in most Southeast Asian countries, through their pages. Just about everything I know about Southeast Asian travel has something to do with Travelfish.

Indiamike, for great India travel advice, with occasional bits on Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh too
While I learned whatever I needed to know about India through five separate amazing, long, and immersive experiences, I cannot stress how important it is to acquire some practical information before going to India, especially if one knows next to nothing about it. Indiamike’s community of experts and the great articles they’ve written there have literally saved my ass. If you’ve ever tried booking an Indian train only to come across jargon like: AVAILABLE - 0012, WL30/WL12, 3AC, 2AC, it’s articles like India Railways and the Indian Train over at the articles section (India for Beginners is especially useful), as well as forum discussions which can be immensely helpful, if you use it well (example of a GREAT thread. The hotel review section can also be very helpful; I’ve never gone to India with a guidebook, so I rely almost exclusively on the web for hotel information. It’s served me well.

Trains and Planes
Indian Railways
I spend so much time at this website for booking Indian train tickets, I can navigate it with my eyes closed. That also applied to the old website: a horrible, usability nightmare if you remember it, which just means that I (1) book too many Indian train tickets (2) go to India too much. I even have the IRCTC mobile app on my Nokia N95 so if I’m ever sitting down in a cafe and urgently wanted to check seat vacancies (and book it), I could.

Trains at a Glance
I collect the book, Trains at a Glance, available at all good Indian bookstores. I own most recent editions, and the one thing I ask of friends who visit India in the times I’m not in India, is to buy me an updated version. A girl can’t always have her train bible handy, so it’s online too. The only problem is it’s built exactly the way it’s presented in paper form, and I took a few days to figure out how it worked on paper, so go figure how hard it is to use it… but once you have, this is an impossibly useful resource. I have spent many afternoons by my window berth in sleeper class, reading Trains at A Glance from cover to cover. I do this every alternate even hour of my 37 hour train rides (odd hours: drinking tea and talking to strangers). Happy times. If you’re as obsessed with train timetables as I am.

The Man in Seat 61
Another train nerd, slightly nerdier than I, runs the godfather of all train websites. There are sections for just about every country and continent, in which he gives you spot-on advice about domestic train travel, as well as how to get to neighbouring countries by train, where available (Vietnam to China? London to Finland? It’s all there). More helpful is the breakdown of train classes in every national railway system, complete with description and photographs. I hardly spend a day without reading this site compulsively.. but that’s just me. Regular folks may find it useful from time to time, when planning for train journeys.

Spanish Buses
If you’ve ever had to plan for a trip to Spain, you might find it… quite an awful experience. I’ve had more fun and more coherence planning for journeys to Bangladesh and India than I did to Spain. Which is a pity. Buses are a great way to get around Spain. Movelia is a bus search website for all of Spain. If you’re thinking of buses to other European countries, you’d have to go to Eurolines.

Sleeping In Airports
Save a six hour wait that saw me crash flat out on the floor of Amsterdam Schipol, I’ve never… in the strictest sense of it, had to sleep in an airport. But if you absolutely have to, there are more than 5500 reviews of the sleep-ability of various airports around the world. Some useful tips, others absolutely pointless. But beggars can’t be choosers, so brush up on your airport sleeping tips.

Packing
One Bag, The Art and Science of Travelling Light
One Bag teaches you how to pack for business and leisure, how to pack stuff, how to pick a bag, and how to secure it. It’s full of useful information on all things packing, and also recommends various tools.

Universal Packing List
Very useful site where you enter your date of departure and return, max/min temperature, and other variables (”I wear glasses, I wear contact lenses, I am bringing a digital camera, etc”), then pick the size of your bag. The Universal Packing List automatically generates… a list of things for you to pack. It does one thing and does it well.

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Many people in that room seemed to have forgotten things. They forgot where they were, I pretended I forgot who I was, and together we all pretended we fit in.

The alliances were obvious.

The French enjoyed huddling together to discuss volunteer programs. At least that’s what I thought — they only ever spoke to each other, and only spoke in French. The Israelis had dreadlocks, ate only falafel, and spent most of their time trying to persuade other people not to hate them, usually to people who had no distinct feelings about Israelis. Whenever there was a sport on the television, usually football or cricket, the Americans would talk loudly and anxiously, wrongly call football ’saawwwwwwccceeeerrrrr’, needlessly proclaim their disinterest in cricket for all the world to hear, but announce their love for Asia (because India=Asia) for the yoga and cheap vegetarian food. India, dude, totally expands my mind. Ommmm.

California Chris was different. For one, he lived here. He was also a Bollywood recruiter — his job was to spend time at places like Leopold finding Western travellers to work as Bollywood extras. If you looked a certain way (cosmopolitan, meaning white), Chris could hook you up to a film and give you your only chance at being in a movie, even if it’s just to giggle and hold a martini glass behind a big Bollywood actor you’d never heard of. In turn you gave him the chance to continue overstaying his visa so that by the time he finally made enough to go home his fluent Marathi cursing could out-curse every goonda who dared leer the Ukrainian film extras he was so proud of.

Pete, the scruffy Yorkshireman and his Brazilian-Japanese girlfriend Aoki worked as a pair. He documented HIV among the hijra transvestite prostitutes; she sold his work and made it marketable with her design and writing skills. Johan was a social worker in Germany but every time he was in India, he instantly transformed into a movie star. What was tall and goofy back in Europe was big and intimidating here; he found a niche playing Russian/ Eastern European villains in many Bollywood movies, achieving considerable success in that specialized role. Proof: auto wallahs recognized him as the firang in Pepsi commercials. We all yearned to postpone our return ‘home’, wherever home was, whether it was San Francisco, London, Hamburg, Sao Paulo, or Singapore. Bombay does that to you.

The mob outside never remembers you, and keeps pouncing even if you walk by them several times a day.

“Slum tours, sirrrrrr. 450 rupees. Dharavi slum. Biggest slum in Asia. This month National Geographic cover story.”

“Madam buy map. Balloon? Pen? Comb? Trumpet? CD? Bollywood movie? Sponge?”

“Madam — buy a chick? Small and furry.”

“You want scissors didi? Very cheap.”

I never stayed long enough to suddenly need to buy a pair of scissors from the poor man. Never long enough to be socialized into the ranks of the foreigners’ only caste; I was always on the move, using Bombay as my base as I leaped off into the west, the east, the south, the northeast, always returning for a bottle of Cobra but never more. And when I did the map-selling, slum-tour operating sellers of furry little chicks in Colaba drove me crazy enough to prefer the hour long ride in the famously packed suburban trains of Bombay. Rush hour Bombay: I sprint across monsoon-soaked Bombay into Churchgate and jump into trains by shoving the rest of myself into a sea of people, while my hands gripped the sides of train doors. We chugged by Marine Lines, Charni Road, Grant Road, Bandra, Dadar, Jogeshwari, Malad; thousands more fling themselves in and out of train carriages and back into their chawls, finding the time to buy vegetables and nail polish from the noisy hawkers onboard.

A world away and ‘home’, finally, rush hour Singapore is quiet (everyone’s asleep or staring into space), soul-sucking (all those ties and high heels can’t be good for blood circulation), disheartening — even quietly sinister. I join the ranks of rush hour Singapore for one morning by rushing to meet a friend for breakfast on the other end of my island. My phone beeps with an email as I try to fit in and pretend to nod off. “Come back quick? There’s work to be done here!”

I try to ignore it but my mind has already been turned to this time last year, the year before last, and the years before that. I start feeling miserable immediately, miserable that my country is too clean, too efficient, too strangely lacking in chaos. I bury my face into my mobile phone so I fit in with the crowd that’s rushing to work. Instead of texting to say I’ll be late I end up checking Facebook. “California Chris’ status, updated yesterday: Chris is going back where he belongs tomorrow“.

I get the sense I know where he’s going back to; that we could even be thinking about the same place. I send a desperate message from where I am, somewhere in the Central Business District, Singapore. If there is one place in the world that can induce me into snoring while awake, this is it.

“Bombay?!”

California Chris, probably at the airport by now, replies immediately with a tinge of gleeful gloating. “Where else. When are you coming home?”

It starts to pour and not with regular rain — it rains a special Mumbai monsoon blend today. The special clammy feeling returns as I skirt around waterlogged pavements. I make myself a pot of chai to make myself less miserable.

As I step into the air-conditioning Singapore is famous for, I can’t stop wanting to cry. I’m not clammy, I’m too cold. I can’t shake off the feeling that if I don’t run soon I will fall asleep standing up against a handrail in the MRT and I won’t even notice it until I’m dead.

I bury my head into my mobile phone one last time and reply. “SOON.”

Note: Those of you reading through your feedreaders, click through! This site looks different now.

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May, June and July were big months. I spent most of it in places I had no clue about, and literally, at some point, got to a new country and went: I don’t know where I’m going, who I’m meeting, where I’m staying, how much this is all going to cost. Some of it because I chose to leave them open-ended — the rest of it were those places where you could not arrange for these things until you got there and met the right people. The only phone number for the village we went to, given by the Penghulu’s relative, was the number of the one and only public phone which predictably stopped working years ago (or worked once every year). There was no mobile coverage within a four hour radius. The closest hotel was about five hours away. I didn’t speak either of their languages — neither Iban nor Malay, but got by listening to random words I knew (chicken! pig! drink! alchol! she’s drunk! I kid: it was having the best translator in the world that helped). Someone emailed in the midst of all this to say, travel… is life distilled. Indeed. It’s also eight shots of tuak and five shots of langkau, distilled. Also known as my threshold for homebrewed, tribal alcohol.

Being alone makes you think. Being alone for much of it, there were no big epiphanies this time, but plenty of small, quiet ones.

I suddenly started writing again. It just picked up like that, without warning. Running along La Ramblas towards a subway stop and it struck me: I need to write. It was a new-old feeling, a state of mind; the happy kind that makes you want to whistle as you do, like eating Mamee again after an involuntary separation: it’s so close to your skin you never realize it’s gone, but discovering it again gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling anyway.

And so we’re here, approaching August, with the end of the year drawing near. The month and beyond poised to get even bigger, in bigger ways I feel like I’ve been waiting a long time for. I’m going to be published in more places (in print), at a greater frequency, in a variety of different areas and topics, beginning August. This means I am working harder. This also means I am taking this more seriously, and that I now have to think about things like savings plans, medical insurance, buying property eventually and how a freelance life is ever going to take care of all those essentials. I’ll kick off August by reading at ContraDiction IV (I read at the first one), that showcase of queer Singaporean writing. I’m about ready to finally start talking to agents and publishers and all that, being partway through my debut novel. Writing a television documentary, teaching writing skills, building my internet empire, working. Living, and doing it quite well, quite happily. You know those days when you feel like you’re The Luckiest? I’ve had plenty of those of late.

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Looking slightly unimpressed about graduating — the gown was HOT, the speeches were long, I was sleepy

1. I’m home after a whirlwind tour of Kuching, Betong, Entalau; Barcelona, Roses, Aix en Provence, Marseille, Perpignan, London, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok. Only so I could officially graduate. Or commence, as they like to say.
2. The people in the photo? They’re the reason I attended commencement (was going to skip it).
3. The gown and ceremony made me feel about 800 years old; my friends are planning a Harry Potter theme party with our gowns before we return them.
4. Europe made me so broke I can’t even renew my Flickr Pro account (buy me one — I will love you forever; or the next best thing, write you a thank you email). Thank you all for making sure my Flickr Pro will only expire again in 2010!
5. What’s next? Lots! And lots! And lots! I’m very excited about what’s next and you should too!

SMU graduates are consistently in high demand in the job market, as shown by the findings of a recent Graduate Employment Survey released in May 2008. For four straight years, 100% found jobs either before graduation or within six months after graduation. Two-thirds received multiple job offers and one in eight land jobs with high starting salaries of between S$4,000 to S$10,000 a month. Monthly salaries for the top 20% wage earners who achieved Cum Laude or better in their degrees average at about S$5,600. — SMU Press Release

The end of an era, that of higher education. I wasn’t valedictorian, far from it, with my shit grades, but instead of telling you how great my alma mater these are my not-so-famous last words. I’ve had some good times there. Some funny ones, some violently angry times, and when I wasn’t being amused or upset I spent my time hovering between being unimpressed and uninterested. I had my reasons; reasons I still believe justified, at least in my experience as a Bachelor of Social Science student within a management-oriented university (I wish this was satire but it’s such a true picture of what ‘university life’ was for me).

It was all about the people. Where my education failed to stimulate me intellectually, passed off mind-numbing banter for participation and speaking-up-ness, rewarded the tyranny of mediocre majorities (group projects for every single course?), and pretended GPA numbers, salary scales and the prestige of multi-nationals was the success to aspire towards, in running away from it I also got to meet a stunning number of amazing people who are now friends for life.

First, the memories: the long nights overnighting in Group Study Rooms (SMU=endless projects, endless mugging), skipping classes and meetings with my fellow slackers-turned-good-friends at Pick and Bite, going to class deliberately late to skip the ERP, walking groggily from Prinsep student residences to the School of Social Science, being a clueless freshie at the Bukit Timah campus… I found love and friendship, inspiration and delightful company. Somewhere between sleeping on a couch at the Red Door Gallery and my first morning trudging from a certain Evans Building GSR to brush my teeth, while students were streaming into Plural Perspectives, running off for nasi lemak breakfasts at Armenian Street and camping at the city campus library to start 3000-word essays 3 hours before they were due, I met talented musicians, would-be aviation experts, a best friend, lots of lovely ballsy-ness, outstanding humanitarian aid workers, brilliant Indian classical dancers, would-be chefs, writers, photographers, developers, comrades in the huge South Asian contingent, and other restless young upstarts who were, beyond their credentials, good and humble people. Even as the demographics of the student population moved towards absorbing increasing amounts of academically outstanding but rather… different (in the worst way possible)… students, there were the people I knew and loved: people who cared for the world and/or did well at school while ascending ladders, corporate or otherwise. Because in the end it wasn’t about how much I hated the school (a lot), how much I reviled the overwhelming institutionalized corporate culture of slavish overachieving for the sake of your CV. It was about meeting people there who, ultimately, changed me. Who, beyond the glossy Russell Wong photographs in our posters, beyond the clichÃ?© about how ‘different’ we are, touched my life in some way — by how different they turned out to be. Without ever having to proclaim it.

At some point, years ago, while munching on a bad lunch in the Botanic Gardens and/or hitting on girls, I still remembered why I chose to come here, over many other excellent options here and abroad. These reasons are no longer clear, but one thing is: the place was, at one time, a gathering ground for a disproportionate number of dreamers and achievers before we lost the plot. It let me meet young people who dreamed, dreamers who dared put their money where their mouths were, and their lives where their convictions laid. Whether it was running off to Jakarta between semesters to pursue elusive success in Indonesian rock, building communities in remote Sumatran islands, going to Nepal to do something about changing the types of stoves in a Himalayan village, pursuing dreams in public policy or chasing their loves halfway across the world, the friends I met there — whether or not they were successful in conventional ways, or successful at all — taught me how to live, and how to live it well; with plenty of teh breaks in between everything. Whether it was because I was exceedingly lucky or because I lurked about in the nether regions of the GPA scale, I’m not sure but these people inspired me, loved me, and taught me to dream. They were individuals selfless and brave, talented and humble.

It was my good luck to have enjoyed many drinks at Ice Cold Beer with you (the only perk at SMU: 30% off all beers at Ice Cold Beer if you show your matriculation card), and mid day excursions to Little India. And that, I will never regret: you were individuals beyond the numbers, beyond the $5600 expected salaries and 100% expected employment rates. I can only hope I was for you, even a fraction of what you did for me.

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We were in a restaurant on Sukhumvit a few days ago, with a cosmopolitan Indian family next to us. They had posh accents and a young boy in a Dhoni jersey. Expats, obviously. Eavesdropping was inevitable: it was a quiet restaurant, and they spoke of living in Brazil and Australia, having just moved to Bangkok.

“Papa, I don’t want to live here.”

He might grow up to be yet another displaced soul of South Asian origin.

His mother, looking amused, asked, “So where do you want to live, then?”

Without any hesitation, he shouted, punching the air with his arms, “INDIA!!!!!!”

“We played Hong Kong the other day, and you know who won? INDIA!!!! We won by 256 runs! 256! I want to live in my India. Dhoni lives there also.”

My inner desi was so proud, jai hind and all that; I miss my India so much I could have wept and hugged the boy. I want to go home. This time every year has always been about my India in the monsoon, loving (and getting wet) in Mumbai, Kolkata, and in my Meghalaya. Except this one. And I miss it like crazy.

To celebrate our bharat mata: art is Indian, especially the Sistine tandoori.

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For years I’ve found myself finding sites like Kayak.com and Sidestep.com incredibly cool, but as they had a US-focus, they didn’t work for a traveller from this side of the world. The prices were in USD or EUR, the sites they searched were mostly US-based, so routes not originating from North America weren’t competitively priced. I wanted a smart travel search engine that wasn’t bent on selling me tickets or hotels, like so many ‘travel sites’ from my part of the world tended to be, but one that could help speed up my frequent wanderlust by being smart enough, and extensive enough, for even a well-worn internet roadwarrior like myself and the people I know. At a price point competitive enough with that of a regular travel agent, or even better.

In planning for my vacation to Europe (a delayed ‘grad trip’, if you will) the single issue of the air ticket was a constant preoccupation. I’m based out of Singapore, mostly, but wasn’t entirely sure where I would fly out of — you see I call Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok ‘home’, too, and flying out of either city is always a possibility, sometimes even a necessity. This time it was a necessity. I was facing what I call a delicious dilemma: I had to be in a small town on the Costa Brava, Spain, on 4 June because six months ago I secured a reservation to dine at the world famous El Bulli. The dilemma: I had to be in a jungle in Borneo until 2 June for an assignment. Obviously, a Kuching-Singapore-Barcelona flight wasn’t going to work, with connections to East Malaysia being so stupidly priced. Besides, I already had a ticket back to Kuala Lumpur. Flip flopping between flying out of Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, I was flipping from the Singaporean, Malaysian and Thai editions of British Airways, Air France, KLM, Malaysian Airlines, working out impossible flight connections and being discouraged by the prices first, and the tedium second.

A traveller better tuned to the travel and Web industry than I (yes, there are such people..) showed me a new website and I’m now convinced I have found the tool I’ve wanted for ages, and then some. Wego.com is a new service operating out of Singapore that lets you search airfares and hotels and compare prices across thousands of booking sites, with phenomenal ease-of-use. They really ‘grok’ the web, which is a breath of fresh air. Clean, and works the way it should: atypical of a travel website from this part of the world (airfares.com.sg and your terrible flights ‘menu’, I’m looking at you…). Not surprising — Cheah Chu Yeow is the Chief Software Architect there. Great.

With one week to go before my departure, no airticket in sight, mostly fussing over my other trip to Borneo, I plugged in a preliminary search for a flight that most Kuala Lumpur travel agents quoted me at least 5500 Malaysian ringgit for: Kuala Lumpur to Barcelona. The search immediately gave me a fare on KLM for 4373 Malaysian ringgit, with taxes in. It’s refreshing to see that there actually are ‘travel outfits’ out there who give you the before-tax and all-in prices in a single screen. With three tabs open in Safari, searching side by side for Singapore-Barcelona and KL-Barcelona and Bangkok-Barcelona, I found (1) I don’t actually save that much flying out of either Singapore or Barcelona and (2) the KLM flight out of Kuala Lumpur gets me to Barcelona quickest, at 9 am in the morning with just a 1h 15 min layover, leaving me plenty of time to get to the small town I need to appear in on a certain date in June. As a travel search engine, not a booking site, instead of being bent on selling you tickets, WeGo.com seems more concerned with transparency in prices, ease of use, and usefulness. What I like especially is how they clearly highlight the layover time (which means I know I’m spending 3h 35min at Schipol tomorrow morning… sigh). I like.

If this service is in beta — I think flight and hotel search, and maybe even bookings, from our part of the world has a clear winner. As a geeky, penny-pinching, know-it-all traveller, I’m rarely convinced. I’m usually of the opinion I can find it cheaper on my own: except in this case, I’m no longer travelling to Cambodia or Laos where I can quite reasonably expect to jump into a flight to Bangkok and make it to these countries by road (cost savings: about $20, seeing a lot more: priceless). But in planning for a trip to Europe, I was stuck, and in the process shed enough geek tears being upset about the terrible usability at several airlines’ online booking sites — all of them are terrible to use, with terrible prices to match. So for the first time, I surprised myself and bought a long-haul ticket through a travel search engine… and I may be a fan. Give it a shot.

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Barcelona takes to the streets celebrating the Spanish victory, effectively un-jinxing itself — finally.

I was watching it in the neighbourhood of El Raval, and every shop with a TV set had the match on; tonight alone, you could have walked into any bar to gawk at the screen and it didn’t matter you weren’t ordering anything: nobody was. The only thing that mattered was football; whether they’d win. And they did. They went crazy, obviously.

My favourite bit of the whole thing was while riding the red line metro home. The announcement went “Proxima Estacio: EspaÃ?±a” (next station: EspaÃ?±a), and the train erupted into cheers.. for the metro station named after their nation. Janitors singing and cleaning in back alleys, alone, and hopping around with their mops. Everyone is driving around with a flag sticking out of their cars, vans, trucks, bikes, convertibles, and honking indiscriminately (who knew there was a victory honk?). It wasn’t the most exciting match in the world, I wasn’t supporting any team in particular (well, Turkey, sort of), but I’m glad to be here. I’m not going to get much sleep tonight with the din in this city, but I don’t mind — that the goal was scored by a Liverpool player makes all this even better!

(What would I do without my Nokia N95 and the Sandisk 8GB microSDHC card?)

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Boy, what fun. (And what good food!) The man in that psychedelic Moritz beer jacket is the bouncer/announcer at Inopia. He goes to the corner of the stairs and shouts messages from the kitchen, like… we’ve run out of aubergines! People usually clap after every announcement. No idea why either, but it’s all good fun.

I moved to a new place today and — joy! — realized Bar Inopia was a few blocks down the road. For a bunch of reasons I went there stark raving hungry and thought I was going to die, standing in line for forty minutes. Be prepared to queue, though if your stomach hasn’t tuned itself to Spanish dinner times yet it could work in your favour this time: go before the crowd builds, at the unearthly hours between 7pm and 10pm, and you should be alright.

Once I got in I was still convinced I might die if I didn’t start eating immediately (first meal of the day, at 11pm), so I told the waiter to bring me whatever he felt like feeding me… and not to stop until I said so. Pork scratchings (always good!), croquetas (much tastier than the crap croquetas I’d been getting everywhere), cod and tomato salad (EXCELLENT), Russian salad (house specialty; really quite a standout), fried little fish (I like this, but there were enough to feed a flock of birds so that got tiring after a while). A seared tuna thing with some sauce; I was ambivalent about it, I come from the school of thought that believes tuna should preferably always be raw or seared for a maximum of… 2 seconds? An excellent chicken brochette. And other things I can’t remember; I was eating so quickly I can’t remember them all — I just remember being very, very happy. At every point the waiter kept asking if I wanted to stop, as though he thought I might topple over and die from eating. But I ate enough for several people.

The way it’s been written about in the international press you would expect the Adria-owned Bar Inopia to be one of those chi-chi tapas places… like Carles Abellan’s ComerÃ?§ 24. But it’s not. Prices are cheap(ish), and the items listed on the menu are regular fare, just done very well. It looks like a regular local place, but for the queue. Fluorescent lights, loud Spaniards, untidy scribbles and Polaroids on the wall (but look closely and you find the Polaroids are of Pierre Gagnaire, Arzak, Heston Blumenthal and other culinary royalty). Excellent classic fare at prices that won’t hurt your pocket, and good fun (even for the solo diner!).

Bar Inopia
c/ Tamarit 104, Eixample Esquerra
Barcelona
Tel: 93 424 52 31
Open Tues-Fri, 19:00-23:00
Saturday 13:00-15:30 and 19:00-23:00

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Two weeks from now I’ll go on a stage praying I don’t stumble over my gown or forget to shake the hands of whoever will be handing me my scroll, hoping I remember to stop at the right place and smile at the right time with my scroll at the correct angle. I won’t be receiving any prizes, or giving any speeches, my academic career ended when I sat for my A levels without owning any textbooks or notes for any of my subjects, didn’t flunk out, and thought, not bad, let’s move on to something else. For most of my life I thought writing was going to get me out of anything.

Some people seem to think the answer to all their problems will be found when they figure out what they want to do, if they suddenly and unexpectedly fell into some passion they were unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge from fear. I’m here to tell you even if you know what you want to do it’s no guarantee you will know how to do it, when you actually have to do it — even if that thing is the single enduring passion of your life. Because passion won’t feed you, they say. The other camp says, don’t let money cloud your dreams. But if you think both sides are rubbish, where do you go?

It’s hard enough to be the only person believing you know what you’re doing, that there’s method in the madness, that soon enough this will make sense. I’ve lived most of my young life ignoring what people think of me (if I listened to all of it I’d probably lose my mind) but it gets harder. Suddenly you’re this adult and you have responsibilities. Suddenly the weekly incantations coming from well-meaning relations in my living room are getting harder and harder to ignore: “Why don’t you have a real job? Have you thought about teaching? (HELL NO!) What about CPF? How are you going to buy a flat?” And the worst: “You wrote that? But writing is so easy. I could do that. It’s just putting a bunch of words together and adding dots at the right places.” (True story.) It’s harder to ignore these things when they come from people you can’t just say fuck off to.

I think I’m doing okay. I’ve been out of school for six months but I’ve been writing seriously for half my life. When kids were going out on dates with the rugby boys next door, I was having the elements of rhythm and rhyme knocked into my thick skull by various poet laureates and Sanskrit scholars (why? I don’t know) for years — in between going out on dates with the rugby/ canoeing/ soccer boys next door (my heterosexual phase!). They didn’t do anything for the contents of my writing (you can’t really, at age 15) but I know they tried their best to beat and drag my writing voice out of the brash, hotheaded but still ultimately painful adolescent writing, for which I will be eternally grateful. But I don’t just want to do okay. Whatever your poison, striving for greatness is always hard but usually the only thing worth doing.

I came on this trip because I needed to find out there’s nothing else I’d rather do. Sometimes that isn’t enough, but I think I want to be one of the crazy ones to find out if living off that rumbling feeling in your gut is going to work. As the realities of adulthood and the shit that comes with it sets in, even the things that have been clear for more than a decade tend to start fogging up. So I spend a lot of time pretending I know what I’m doing. Sometimes, I even give talks pretending I know what I’m doing. It’s an automatic self-defense mechanism that turns on just so I can tune out from the naysayers, but it’s become hard to switch that off. I pretend I know what I’m doing so that every time I’m told I should get a real job I put on a smile that says fuck you, the one that hides the desire to say you’ll regret ever saying this when I make it. Like I even know what making it means. I pretend I know what I’m doing so that every time someone tells me I’m their inspiration, especially someone older than me, I don’t have to get into the details of how actually, I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s never cool to say you don’t know what you’re doing, but I write this here because I now think it’s perfectly normal to be anxious, and so that if I ever stop writing because it’s easier to do something else, all three thousand of you will remember to slap me. Please.

(I met a very old friend in London, someone I have immense respect for — plenty of you reading this probably know him and feel the same way too. He’d tattooed the title of the book he spent some time writing, on his chest, Memento-style. To remind him to finish his book. Maybe that’s what I’m lacking — as if I have a title for mine, the work in progress for the past 2 years. But. I’m almost. There.)

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