Vietnam!

Over the weekend and into the Tuesday I found myself in Vietnam on holiday with my mum and dad, and my mum's two friends as well as their partners. As the holiday wore on I noticed many things, mainly about myself. 

The first thing I noticed was that I didn't learn very much. Vietnam is very well known in the westernised world for the Vietnam war and the failure of America in stomping out communism. What intrigued me was that I was in no particular mood to understand or learn any of the information that was being fed to me. I was not interested in learning about the people who died or what the war was even for! How sad it was for me who usually likes looking into the history of the place that I take holidays in. I didn't learn anything much in terms of the language except how to say 'thank you' and 'hello'! I didn't even learn how to say 'goodbye'! This was a strange phenomenon but I blamed it on the fact that I finished my intensive online coding course, leaving me feeling burnt out. I hope that the feeling to learn does come back eventually, or I would feel very depressed and without motivation in life at all!

The second thing I noticed was that I was the only single individual within my group. Being with this travelling group thus left me feeling very lonely most of the time, although they made an effort to talk to me as well. In other times I was given the second-rate status of being a 'son', and thus I had to make an extra effort to give way to the 'older' people. There were also conversations that made the assumption I knew nothing of the female sex since I am without a partner at the moment. Thus any advice I gave was disregarded. However, I pride myself in knowing everything about the female sex which is why I choose to be single. I may be slightly wrong in my assessment though... slightly. I digress. In hindsight, I thought that perhaps I would be treated on a better standing had I decided to take with me a significant other. Of course, this is hard to find considering the standards that I have of my partner of which are hard to come by. 

The last thing I noticed was that, as perfectly quoted by Judy Garland in "The Wizard of Oz", is that there really is "no place like home!".  At the end of my trip I found myself tired of doing completely nothing physical, and suffering from a lack of video games. For the past two days after I found myself perfectly at home, playing video games with my old friends from school. I do hope to get out of this wonderful period of my life though, as society starts to call me to do something productive again, this time through the vessel of my parents. So far though, I have had a wonderful time just staying at home and existing.

The following photo is a picture of a portion of Elephant Falls in Da Lat. How I wish my life would be ever carefree as the ones taken in this photo!

Cheers,

Matthew Tan