Tianni on Eat: Jiak Hong (Eating Air)

One would think that to live abroad would be akin to waking up each morning to find oneself on extended vacation in an exotic foreign locale.

Going by that definition, I would have taken the equivalent of three reeeeaaally long vacations in some pretty happenin' cities over the past six years.

But that's just what I like to tell myself. In truth, I've hardly gone away on a trip during this period -- a travesty considering that I've insisted on getting out of my geographical and cultural comfort zone at least twice every year for the past 8 years before that, something I've used before as a sort of slap in the face to shake me from the drudgery of living, so to speak. I have a long-running phobia of having the customary and the routine lull me into complacency, and there was nothing like having my perceptions altered by the foreignness of a people's customs or having my palate dance from a variety of strange tastes to remind me how very much alive I was, and how wondrous the world remained.

I remember when it was still such a sensory indulgence in the mornings walking out of the gates of my apartment in Bangkok right smack into a fog of odoriferous Thai spices and street food that reminded me I wasn't home. Or being packed into a peak-hour subway crush home with tired office workers that would have be familiar if not for the constant nasal and high-pitched chatter in a very alien tongue.

Perhaps the world does get smaller and the borders dissolve the more one finds one's way around. Or perhaps it's going through the banal daily cycle of work-home-childcare-sleep-work, day in and day out, that had drained whatever curiosity and wonder I used to possess, foreign country notwithstanding.

But that sense of 'strangeness' I used to get hit by and which is one of the things I relish most about being in a foreign land has become more and more elusive in the past years. Unusual odors, unfamiliar accents, toilets without doors, hell, even gone-mad drivers ploughing through pedestrian crossings, they barely raised my eyebrows a millimeter these days.

Which is why the alarm bells rang and I thought the time was really nigh to go and 'jiak hong.' Eat Air. Singapore parlance for take a trip. One that will involve me navigating a strange world in which I do not speak the language nor understand the cultural undertones nor have a comfort home zone where I could retreat into when the unknown became too disconcerting.

And where better than the world of pachinko, anime and drunk salary men, where one can never quite take for granted if a smile is one of approval or if a yes is actually a no, to wake me up from my culture-stupor?

It has been a while since I've turned a corner not knowing what to expect. But today, we got ourselves lost in a quiet seaside town about an hour southwest of Tokyo, getting by with hand signals and ended up watching albatrosses search for fish in a brilliant blue harbor. And then we stumbled into a sushi restaurant serving the most amazing melt-the mouth Japanese moshi I've ever tasted.

The unknown has not tasted so sweet in a long while.