I have started to become more and more claustrophobic in Singapore. You can never get a seat on the train but you’re always assured of an elbow in your face. Most weekends I would rather stay home away from the crowds. You can’t even eat in peace. There’s always someone hovering over you, their body language insisting you gobble up your food and leave.
There is just not enough space here and the government still yearns for more babies. The citizens become ruder and more aggressive like more guppies added into a small fishbowl. If you’ve lived here your whole life, you will just start to yearn for more space all the time.
My first experience of space was Perth when I was eighteen. It was my first time in a sparsely populated country. It felt unreal, but in a good way. I felt like I was in a beautiful postcard. The roads, the shops, everything were spaced wide apart. Even the sky seemed bluer and higher somehow. There were hardly any people around. It was pure heaven to me.
Besides the overcrowding the biggest gripe I have is the weather. I see expats sprawled out in the noon sun at the condo pool. It looks painful – the ritual of cooking in the sun. Locals are obsessed with pale skin so you’ll never see them out there. At noon it can easily get to 35 degrees and it’s bad with the saturated air. I long to replace recycled air-conditioned air for the naturally cool air away from the equator.
I relish days when the rain pours. The sound of the splashing rain is music to my ears. I am also thankful for the green trees planted everywhere.
