Jetsam

Its almost a week now, since I stepped out of Melbourne and wandered into the vast western settlements of the empire.
I think I left, more as an exile than an adventurer. It felt like I was walking away from Melbourne, more than I was walking to Vancouver.
I backed my way out of the office, out of my apartment, out of the gala annual dinner, with my eyes still fixed on what I was leaving behind – with little thought of what I would be entering into.

In a surreal, backward kind of way, the past 6 days swirl around me in an empty, random haze. Powerful, purposeful Kingdom explorer? Or simply a starstruck, stumbling pilgrim?
All the random, silly, curious events of the journey stain the whole excursion like the spots on a dog running aimlessly around the proverbial backyard of my mind.

• Falling asleep on the couch instead of packing diligently for my future.
• Having the wheels break off my 25kg suitcase halfway up Broadway st., with another 2km of walking ahead of me.
• The air stewardess who brought me an entire box of Kleenex because I wouldn’t stop sobbing in the middle of the in - flight movie.
• My beautiful and delightful flying companion up to Sydney, the distant and disinterested and disdaining companions up to Los Angeles, my egoistic, boastful, embarrassingly confident companion up to Vancouver.
• The flattering feeling of being earmarked a ‘suspicious’ traveller at the Los Angeles airport, requiring comprehensive searching, questioning, chemical testing, internal verification – simply due to the combination of my late ticket booking, my transit status, my aloneness, my good looks?.
• Being detained at the Los Angeles customs because of the apple that I should have eaten instead of carrying off the plane.
• The old chinese man who came and personally reprimanded me for sneezing to the side instead of fully covering my mouth.
• Running up and back the nooks and corridors of Sydney’s labyrinth looking for the Gate 53 which the officer had told me was always the L.A. terminal – only to check my boarding pass to realize that this time, they were waiting for me at Gate 9.
• All the 40 gaudy, gum – chewing, self – confident Florida teenagers overwhelming our seating compartment with their drawling whining, groaning into the dark oppressiveness of 13th hour in the air.
• The frustrating, unbending duty free saleslady who, on principle, would not sell me the OAKLEY sunglasses she had spent half an hour trying to sell me, because there was less than 2 hours until my flight departed.
• The panic in Canadian customs when I couldn’t find my passport in the appropriate compartment of my bag – only to find, many millilitres of adrenaline later, that it had slipped under the loose flap of the cool bag that my father had innovatively reinforced for maximum laptop protection.
• The remarkable salvation of being able to talk with another trusted human – and the remarkable coincidence of finding a UK trained, Malaysian Indian interventional echocardiologist from Melbourne, once worked under The T.H. Goh from the Children’s Hospital – on the bus from Vancouver airport.
• The difference that it makes having pretty air stewardesses
• How good the airport duty free shopping is in Melbourne, Malaysia, Singapore compared to LA and Vancouver!
• The super friendly gay lovers who gave me a guided tour of Vancouver all the way to UBC. And the look on their faces when they learned that I was there to study theology at Regent College.
• The relief of being able to soak in a bathtub after travelling for the last 30 hours

And then, after backing my way through all these spots, I suddenly found myself in the high – brow academic environment of Regent and the deserted summer environment of the University of British Columbia!

After the past 5 days, I think I’m only just starting to find my feet, my focus, my food, my friends…
But more about that another time.

For now, it is enough to know that there are other people on the other side of the world who do still love me.
And that there is also another world that we still have the opportunity to build for them.