The Perfect Life

One thing that slaps you in the face when you walk out of Changi Airport after a trip abroad is the humidity. It weighs you down. Immediately you recall the nice pleasant stroll in the park or the cool expanse of open country just a day or two ago. Unpacking with the fan in full blast and sweat under your brows you will yell "this country is simply inhabitable".

One lasting enjoyment about travelling is the sense of objectivity when settling back into home routine. After the futile attempts to sleep from various positions in an economy class seat your beautiful bed and pillow is the first thing you appreciate about home  albeit in an air-con room. Yes, blessed are the ones who can enjoy nights of sound sleep. The routine evening swim takes on a fresh perspective too. You wonder why you never ever notice that the waters is that blue and soothing. Swimming is a tropical luxury. Bathing is now back to being more relaxed and thorough instead of the struggle to drab your body with towel and clothing to ward off the cold.

The following day you devour your favourite local bee-hoon breakfast and the chicken rice lunch. When the stomach is filled with pleasure you can feel it in your body how unwholesome our hawker food is. Just 2 weeks of eating tons of fresh green salads and absence of oily Chinese cooking, you can tell the effect of healthy and unhealthy eating. You decide you have to search for new recipes.

But most of all you also think about life recipes and not just food recipes. Overhearing the conversation between an elderly local couple throughout the coach trip from Oxford to London, you hear a glimpse of their life. Watching an old lady with a bent back dressed in swimming costume slowly descending a flight of steps with a walking stick towards a thermal swimming pool in Budapest lends an inspiration. Trying to reach someone shortly after 5pm in an office in London, you recalled that no one works as hard as Singaporeans. Witnessing some joggers in a park confronting a woman whose dog chased after a little duckling in a lake, you observe absence of antipathy. All these little observations knock into you that there are different ways of living life and some of your own life recipe can be tweeted.

The best may be to take the good of each country's delicacy. It will be ideal if one can afford to stay briefly in different parts of the world and then come home to the comfort of one's bed. That would be The perfect life.