And it was all a dream...

The return home is often a strange experience. On one hand, there is the feeling that you have never left. Everything feels just as it always did. Give yourself a good night's sleep, recover from the jetlag, and you may wonder if you were ever gone at all. Did you not, perhaps, simply dream it all up?

On the other hand, if your time away was in a place very different to your home, there may be some degree of confusion over things that were only recently very familiar to you. You may, for instance, be surprised at which side of the road you drive on, even though prior to going it seemed the most natural thing in the world to drive that way.

People drive on the same side of the road in Malaysia, so I do not have to adjust to that. And, all things considered, I was only away for two weeks, so it shouldn't be all that strange to be returning. Then again, having lived in Malaysia previously, I found myself adjusting very quickly to life there, which makes the experience of returning so soon perhaps that bit more confusing. Confronted this morning with a knife and fork for eating breakfast, I caught myself thinking, ever so briefly, what do I do with these? Faced with crossing a peaceful Brunswick street, I instinctively thought, quick - run across while it's clear. Looking at our front door - just a door, no gate or padlock - I thought, how simple these doors are to open. Even a sea of white faces seems a little odd. And I was only gone for two weeks.

Give me a night of sleeping in Australia and I'm sure I'll be back in the swing of things. But for now I'm happy enough to be where I am - half home in Australia, half still in Malaysia.

(More travel stories will appear here once the jetlag has passed and I've uploaded my remaining pictures - for those who are interested...)

A whiter shade of fake

Back in Kota Kinabalu for a few days, I find myself confronted more - though only a little bit more - with western tourism. In Tawau, you can imagine that you aren't actually a tourist, and in a sense I'm not a tourist when I go there, being there more to visit friends and volunteer at the school. Now, in KK, it's different. I'm here on holiday, and for much of my first two days here I did not see anyone I knew and was left to my own devices, wandering around with my back-pack on my pack and the streams of sweat pouring from my pasty-white brow showing that I was very much "not from around here".

There are other westerners in KK - not many, but more than you'll find in Tawau. Granted, that isn't saying much. But if you go to certain key tourist spots - Jesselton Point, for instance, or the overly expensive bars on the waterfront - you'll see them. They probably won't want to look you in the eye, because they will want to pretend that they are the only white people there (see this post on Stuff White People Like for an authoritative confirmation of this theory). Most of us are quite good at deluding ourselves about how others see us; when white, travelling in a sea of non-white faces, we can imagine that we blend in; that, because we can use chopsticks and feel authentic because of how much we are sweating, we must surely look like locals by now. Only, there's one problem - the whiteness of our faces. Seeing other white people exposes this for us; it shows us what everyone around us can already see: that we are white, not Asian.

Of course, I can think cynically about these things, and I have lived here, so from time to time I can fancy that I am somehow superior, that while they are tourists, I am somehow something higher. The only problem here? Almost everyone thinks that. If you're white, you are either determined not to be a tourist (while still going on frequent overseas holidays) or you are completely comfortable being a tourist because you didn't even realise there was an alternative. I find the latter group offensive because they draw attention to themselves and blunder ignorantly into situations they do not understand. I find the former group offensive because they show me up for what I am.

Is there another option? A third way, perhaps?

I think that, so long as we are looking solely at ourselves, trying to modify our own actions, trying to ensure that we are different, that our actions make us purer and higher than those around us, then we will fail. We will remain wannabes who redeem themselves by their own tolerance and by how much chilli they can eat. If instead we do everything with the love of God in our hearts, seeking to honour Him and to love His people, then I think a better way will open itself up without our even noticing - a way that is better than all the rest, because it is inspired by and rooted in love.

Tawau's Got Talent

I remember reading what the Lonely Planet guide to Borneo has to say about Tawau. I bought it just before moving here, and was a little disappointed to find this description of my prospective home:

Despite the progress, desolate pockets remain after dark. Particularly around the local bus terminus, dog packs are big and loud enough to cause distress, and street lighting could use an upgrade. But what's really missing there at night are people.

The lure for travellers is the border: Tawau is the only crossing point with Kalimantan where foreigners can get a visa to enter Indonesia.

The last part isn't true. I tried to get into Kalimantan twice and failed. You need a Visa, and they're not easy to get. Or maybe that was just me. But I certainly remember feeling somewhat disappointed by what I found when I arrived. Up to this point, I had been familiar with Malaysia's tourist hotspots. The most provincial experience I had had of Malaysia had been Kuching, Sarawak, and I had loved that so much that I thought living in Sabah would be a cinch.

I suppose I can admit now that it really wasn't. While I loved much about it, and still do love it, Tawau was a difficult place for a foreigner to live. The chief reason is that there are simply no other foreigners here. I can distinctly remember the few times that I have seen any other orang putih (that means "white men", rather than a type of monkey) here. I saw a few the other day at Taman Bukit Tawau. It was a novelty. While you might find that in the bigger cities, even in Kota Kinabalu, you can live a relatively western life just with spicy food and exotic, tropical surrounds, Tawau does not afford these luxuries. Here, you are thrown into life with few of your protective mechanisms. You may not realise on the surface how different this place will be to live in, but you'll learn quickly enough once you are here long enough to need routine and familiarity.

One issue, I think, in a place like this is the attitude of the locals towards their own town. Some love it, some view it with contempt and can't wait to get out. Others simply don't know any different. For someone who has lived in many different places and now lives in one of the more cosmopolitan and advanced cities of the world, I view complacency a little critically. I don't think this is necessarily a good thing, since it brings with it much that is unreasonably judgmental. Still, there is much to be said for knowing other ways of living. I have come, for instance, to love the upbringing I have had because, knowing of lives other than my own, I have learnt to see the value of what I have. Many of the people I see daily in Tawau are teenagers, and many of them, by virtue of youth, long for another life. I remember being much the same as a teenager busting to get out of Drouin.

The real challenge for Tawau, and for Malaysia in general, is for people who leave for education and broadening of experience to return, to come back to their home with love and the kind of civic-mindedness which governments can promote but only the heart can produce.

When I think of how I should pray for this country when I return to Australia in less than a week, I suspect this is a very good prayer to pray: that there would be more and more Malaysians who love their home, not because they don't know any different, but because they see the value of home, and see the good that they can do for their people.

It's also a prayer that can be prayed for every cosmopolitan city, where travel and self-development are valued much more highly than staying put and working for the good of your home. We can all learn, I think, what it is to seek to bless not yourself but your home, to hold in tension the problems you see and the love you have for the place. It is a tension, I suspect, best achieved by the grace of a God in whom we always have a higher calling, a higher Home.

Jet Planes and Setting Suns

Well, there hasn't been an awful lot of activity here at Ideas From the North of late, primarily because I've been quite frantically trying to finish up the somewhat implausible amount of marking that I've had piling up throughout the term. The deadline? Flying back to Malaysia tomorrow morning for a two week return to the place I called home for half of last year.

Apart from being flat out tying up loose ends in Melbourne (I haven't succeeded; many ends are still loose), there's naturally a lot of conflicting emotions in me in the lead up to my return. Now, I'm not going to go into the details here as to why exactly I feel mixed about it, but suffice to say that my experience of life in Malaysia involved some of the greatest joy and some of the greatest pain of my short life so far. Returning to the place where it all coalesced bizarrely and indescribably - well, you can imagine that I'm not exactly sure what to feel.

Fortunately, unlike John Denver, I'm fairly sure of when I will be back again, but have less idea what to expect when I get there. I may have a chance to report some of it here, but make no promises. I remember once hearing something along the lines that, when you've been overseas for a week, you think you can write a novel about the experience, after six months you think you can write a short story, and after a year you think you can manage a sentence. I wasn't there for the full year, but I think enough got crammed into that year to have a similar effect. I may have coherent thoughts about it all. I may not. But I suspect it will be worthwhile.

One of the biggest challenges that I face right now is entrusting the whole situation to God. I'm not sure why. I know He can be trusted with everything, and has been trustworthy so far. But for some reason I feel that nutting things out on my own, in my own incompetent style, is better by far than being humble enough to accept that God's plans might be better than my own. Yes, the humbling part of the process seems to be the hardest.

The good news is that God is still likely to look after me, however immature and untrusting I am. The Bible makes it quite clear that God provides for His creation constantly, regardless of what it does or does not deserve. This morning, for instance, I read Psalm 50, which begins with these wonderful words:

"The Mighty One, God, the Lord,

speaks and summons the earth

from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets."

The rising and setting of the sun each day should serve as reminders of God's sustaining goodness. I can trust in Him because He is powerful, and because He is good. Those are two things that I am certainly not, and this is a very good reason to trust Him and not me.

Tomorrow I will leave as the sun rises. I will return when the sun has set. In the middle - the goodness and faithfulness of God.

The world's most liveable cities

Well, the posts here have been few and far between, I must admit, but no rarer I suppose than they usually are. Only, this time it's harder to find a computer to sit in front of and procrastinate about whether or not to write a post.

Here, also, there's so much going on that it is quite hard to know what to post about. While some of what I am experiencing here is quite familiar, and prompts the sort of thoughts I could have in Melbourne as much as here, there are some key differences that take a little longer to process but are certainly there.

One thing that has struck me about the trip so far is the key similarities between each of the major cities I have been to - all cities, in fact, with much in common with my home town. They are all cultured, not-too-densely-populated cities, all on the water, all with a strong indie/hipster subculture, all Western...Vancouver, Portland and Melbourne also all rate in those lists of the most liveable cities in the world. And you can see why. All have much to offer their residents, making them interesting cities to visit, because what is most wonderful about them is not necessarily most visible.

Yet the three cities I have been to - Vancouver, Seattle and Portland - all, at a glance, seem to have a greater emphasis on preserving natural beauty than Melbourne. Perhaps they just automatically have much more to start off with than we do, yet what they have they do an amazing job of maintaining - something that we could certainly learn from. And, it may just be an illusion, but I got the real impression that people came together a lot more in Seattle and Portland. They sat together in parks, they shared open-air music, art and culture, something that we have, at best, at Queen Vic Markets, and even then on nothing resembling the scale you see in these places.

I wonder what makes a city agree on having that kind of culture and community. I wonder what it takes to change a city to think and act that way.

You may case the ground from the Cascades to Puget Sound...

Well, it's now the second un-jetlagged day of my trip to the Pacific North-West - something I never got around to announcing at "Ideas From the North". Oh well - here I am now, and ready to blog away.

Only, I'm not exactly sure what to say. I don't think I've ever blogged from another country before, and have always had trouble knowing what to write when I return. Hence, I think, the one fairly uninformative post I wrote after getting back from China this time last year, despite promising more. The floods of tear-filled complaints I received from all my readers were quite chastening and I swore to give you more on this trip, but travel fills your mind with so many complex and wordless impressions that it can be very difficult to distill them into a post on a blog.

I could talk, I suppose, about how travelling by myself for the first time in my life has been a challenge. I could talk about the highs (heading as far as I could from the beaten track of Bainbridge Island, and finding the magnificent, unspoilt part of the waterfront before they threaten to develop it; the incredible beauty of Northern Washington viewed from the Amtrak coach), the lows (being quietly told off for forgetting to tip in a Chinese restaurant in Vancouver's Chinatown - my first meal in the country); the quirky moments (seeing a man talking to his parrot Venus at the rummage table of Pike Place Markets - "That's what I think too, Venus. Just what I was about to say myself"). I could also talk about the cultural differences, the similarities, the ideas it all gives me about culture, and inclusion and exclusion...

But that would be too much to talk about here, and I haven't had enough time to think it through. I'll do my best to say more as it comes to me, but for now I think I'll just say that, highs, lows and quirks all considered, I'm happy to be here.