Every Ending is a New Beginning

Walking down the mall, a place so comfortable but with different faces, I can't help but feel...urm, foreign. Sometimes I long to feel the familiarity of The Curve or One Utama where people never really study me. I now know how it feels to be those white expats in Malaysia, being stared at constantly. I remember having a French teacher and I was so star-struck that I wanted to know everything about her as if she was the last French in the world.

Months later, I moved to the South of France and stayed for six months where I even argued with the locals. That place will always remains special to me as it was my first home abroad. France...simply romantic. And Paris is indeed la ville de l'amour. It's like Edith Piaf's La Vie En Rose keeps playing in the background there. 

Next was the North of England. People think highly of the kingdom and some of my friends who studied in the UK act like they're up in the hierarchy just because they used to live there (even though the truth is they only hung out with fellow Malaysians). On the first day, I excitedly greeted a couple of Malaysians but they didn't even ask my name. On the second  day, I knew why. There are so many Malaysians in the UK that if you were to have a meaningful conversation with every Malaysian you meet on the way to school, you may not get to school at all.

 
Everywhere I go, I get more smiles from the Chinese for obvious reasons. One time there was a huge Chinese tour group and one of them was calling me as if to say "Come back inside the group you lost girl, you're going to miss the flight back to Beijing!". But yeah, I personally want to see Yunan one day where a part of my family started.

And when most of my classmates were thrilled to go home for the summer, I was packing to Denmark for an internship. We were living in an old town in Nice, a dodgy students' neighbourhood in Newcastle and a lovely village with mostly old people who said hi to us all the time in Fredensborg. While I'm definitely grateful for the opportunities given, I can do without the yearning for home.

Now we're in Budapest in Central Europe where prostitution is legal. I think there's less than 10 Malaysians in Hungary so when the Malaysian Embassy people found us, it was like dicovering unexpected survivors in a midst of zombie infection. The downside is, the homesickness easily creeps in.

Perhaps this is due to our nomadic lifestyle. We have never stayed in one place for more than six months. Even after we got married, we lived together in a lovely apartment close to my parents only for five months before we had to leave for France. In a lot of ways, we're still newlyweds. We haven't actually settled down and developed a routine.

In eight months, we'll be back in Malaysia which is both delightful and confusing. We could be staying in Kuala Lumpur for a couple of years before embarking on another adventure abroad, or we could be moving immediately to another country for a few years. People will ask how have the years been and we will be speechless because there's nothing we can say that could capture exactly what we've been through.

In eight months, Rafiee and I could be at a mamak stall having fried char kuew teow talking about the many places we've been together, the interesting people we've encountered and how we have changed in ways people may not notice. We'll probably talk about chillblains once in a while.

But that's life. I couldn't have picked a better motto for my blog to remind me over the years that every ending is yet another beginning.