teardrops on windows

rainy nights

tear-glazed car windows

blurred bulbs

trip to the centre of the city

keep on moving

in the flurry of end of year papers
it's supposed to be the most stressful period but
i'm slacking so much and it feels even more like a holiday
compared to normal school days
is it because i have become numb and immune to the stress
and not care any more?
or can i say that i have learnt to take things leisurely and not
let anything disturb my inner peace?

Anyway, looking forward to post-exam days!

of course I want to sleep early

Would anyone be crazy enough to want to stay up, bleary-eyed, struggling to move the cranks of their brains, fighting to force the sinking eyelids from fully closing? To resist the sweet temptation of sleep, just to complete something they have to finish doing?

Of course I want to go to bed earlier. How many times have I had the urge to just impulsively throw whatever I was working on down and just call it a day. How I wish I could do that.

But thanks to my inner sense of duty and responsibility fighting dominance (and winning) against my personal welfare, that is just not possible. I can't just put down my books and go to sleep, just like that. No matter how many times the thought of giving up flew past my head, I just can't get myself to do it.

It may be useful sometimes but this is an ultimately unfortunate characteristic of mine that becomes the bane of my (lack of) sleep problems. The strong sense of duty and responsibility for things I find important, not letting it go until I get it done.

Even if for some reason I had to drop my work uncompleted, I won't be able to sleep well. My brain turns into hyperactive mode, suddenly being ultra-concerned about the uncompleted tasks and imagining the possible scenarios of the consequences of not completing said work.

This, paired with a habit of unproductivity and needing some break after getting home from school, is the reason for my lack of sleep since starting school.

3am

Hey.

It's almost 3am.

Where are you?

We've not had our 3am talks for a long, long time.

I stay up to wait every night, you know? At our usual spot.

But you never appear.

I've seen many night skies I wished you were to enjoy with me.
Snowflakes in the clear, cold night. Millions of twinkling nights on a warm summer night. The mild scent of night-blooming flowers in the spring evening. And the autumn nights filled with crisp leaves on the ground at my feet.

Imagine you beside me, here with me.

I think of the talks we would have, all the jokes and horrible puns we would make, all the songs we'd hum together.

When I had setbacks, I'd imagine the advice you would give me. When I was emotionally down, I'd feel your arms around my shoulders. When I had a success in the day, I'd imagine excitedly telling you and you'd already have brought drinks to celebrate because you already knew earlier.

Sometimes I come here forgetting to bring a jacket, because the evenings are so warm and stuffy it's so easy to forget the 3ams are cold even in summer, and then you weren't here to say "stupid" and put your extra jacket on me because you already forseen that I wouldn't remember.

Too many times because of that, and also due to lack of sleep, I fall ill and miss a few days of going there. Maybe I missed meeting you at our usual spot at 3am. Perhaps on the nights that you did wait there for me, I was at home, sick. Our telepathy is horrible now, isn't it.

I have never told a single soul of our spot, nor how important 3am is to me. But I really do miss you. I msis our conversations, you know?

Where are you? I'm still waiting. When you come back, you'll see the magnificent stars and- ooh, if you're lucky, you might catch a shooting star, like just now. I made a wish on it. It's for us to resume our 3am conversations, because that is what keeps me going.

See you tomorrow, at the edge of night and day, early morning late at night, at 3am.

starting to bore of this routine life

life seems to feel it's getting very routine-based and I'm finding it suffocating

wake up at 6am, travel to school and reach before 7am, start lessons at 8am and ending in the late afternoon.

travel back home, slack for awhile, have dinner and start on homework.

Sleep at 12am. Wake up, repeat.

the most exciting that happens comes up only once in awhile

I can start to feel myself operating like a robot

nothing much really happens

sure, there's events at school once in awhile and the stress of tests

friends definitely make the grind more bearable

and here's the thing, I am barely putting up with school but I want to make this the best time of my life so far

but things are so predictable and sometimes I want to break away from this regime

do something exciting, have something every day that makes me look forward to the next moment

a school life with anticipation of the unexpected

full of changes that no one foresaw

something that I can take control of

Instead of seeing glaze past me

Danshui // Taiwan 2016

I had plans to blog about my travels, but I kept putting it off because the trip was almost three weeks long and there was so much to write about, I didn't know where to start. It's almost the June, and since my exams are pretty much over I figured I would take this time to put it all up before my next trip in the June holidays. I'll be sharing about my trip in segments (days or places), so it's easier to tackle.

And because I'm not good at recalling things and I also happened to take a lot of photos, I'll let the photos tell the story, and interject along the way. (The bulk of it is unedited, but please do not download these photos and use them without explicit permission from me :))

Danshui, 淡水, or Tamsui as it is called in English, is a popular destination located at the northern tip of Taiwan. It is also very accessible from the city, with it's own metro station.

What I really liked about the station was that it looked colonial, like a train station from the oldern days. There's something about red bricks that gets me every time, be it walls or the whole building. It just gave a classic feel.

Ice cream despite it being late morning. My family loves to try ice cream when we travel, so even if it was currently 17℃, if we were in the mood for ice cream, ice cream it will be!

 

The first (or second) food in Danshui - red bean cake 红豆饼. It's made up of fluffy waffle-like batter filled with red bean paste. But my dad had over-estimated out appetite and bought two of those each, and these are humongous, so I gave some to my still-in-puberty-with-a-huge-appetite-brother.

We had stopped to admire some T-shirt souvenirs at a stall. Somehow the design had caught my parents' eye and they started chatting with the stall owner, who, like many locals, are extremely friendly and approachable. We ended up not buying any T-shirts and this lady above was still smiling at us as we left. It's one of the many reasons I love this country- the people are warm and friendly.

The Old Street is made up of many rows of shops, cafes and restaurants, both old and new.

One thing I find interesting while travelling is the alleys and small walkways each country has, and some of them are really unique or different from the dull and dark alleys we have.

A street artist when he's not 'activated'. After I took this photo, someone dropped a coin into the pot in front of hm, and he started playing the harmonica. It was a really cool thing to witness. (You can hear the very strong winds in the video due to it being taken at the riverbank.)

Somewhere about this time, I had let my brother use my camera. It's quite fun to let someone use your camera (provided you trust your precious camera with them), because you can later get a preview of their perspective, plus you might get some candids of yourself.

Interesting doodles on the surfaces (I'm not sure what you call that)

A breathtaking half-painting half doodle on a wall. At first I thought it was advertising for a cafe, but the Chinese words didn't make sense (last year at Ma Lun Bar?). The watercolour effect was nice nonetheless.

A pink lifebuoy - usually we see orange-white ones around but pink ones were quite unique to me.

Freshly squeezed orange juice.

This piece of art was also quite cool. At first glance I thought it was a cartoon elephant 'climbing up' the stairs with a backpack and sweating, but not that I look clearly it's from some cartoon or something. I like how the art is allowed to stay on the walls and not covered up by more white paint.

I had read about the 'lightbulb milk tea' found in night markets in Taiwan and was really excited when I saw this stall in Tamshui! It was around 75 NTD (around $2.50 USD) and around two times more expensive than the usual pearl milk teas which cost from 20 - 40 NTD, but it was worth it because we got to keep the lightbulb glass bottle!

A young child looking curiously at the dog. The kid was probably not used to walking on it's own two feet, because he was tottering towards the dog. But it was quite an amusing sight.

The second street artist

Another street artist.

Danshui was a really nice place to visit despite being a popular tourist attraction. I had wanted to stay longer to see the sunset, but my family wanted to visit another place.