Such a trite statement, but very accurate in its succint dictation.

Everyone I know back home wants to travel. They wish to immerse themselves in a new culture. See more of the world. Get out of small, square Singapore, even for a bit. Enjoy the varied perspectives they know they will receive.

Paradoxically, the more I see of the world, the more I wish I could shut myself away. Be the metaphorical frog in the well. To view the simplistic round cut-out of sky and think the well the greatest place in the world. After 5 years in a foreign country, I have ineluctably grown homesick and shed any pretence to wanderlust.

Often, I find myself literally dreaming of Singapore. Its narrow people and their narrow little lives. Leading their successive days, sunrise to sundown. There is comfort in predictability.

I have grown jaded. Because I have thrown off my idealistic ways and realised that people are the same everywhere. The same beings with all their propensities to the uglier side of nature. I laugh humourlessly when I read glowing accounts in a local forum about "better societies" where people do not have "narrow asian mindsets". Or the pride in wholly "asian values and culture", which implies the lack in other societies.

I see the same transgressions everywhere. Likewise, the same dreams, hopes and desires are ubiquitously present, in spite of location and language.

Different aspects of human nature are magnified in certain cultures, but ultimately, it is the individual rather than the vulgar multitude that makes each relationship worthwhile. Perhaps you might find a larger number of certain groups of individuals within a certain place, but that is in itself no guarantee that you have to endure such iniquitious behaviour if you do not wish to.

Which is why I am hungry for home right now. It is not because Australia is not beautiful, its people small and ugly, its lifestyle dull. It is because home is ultimately more beautiful when juxtaposed to the other. 5 years is a long time, enough to forget the ugliness of one society and remember only its beauty. 5 years is a long time to be homesick; thereby to begin focusing only on the ugliness of one society and forget its beauty.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. And perhaps after the homesickness is slaked, I shall wander again.