At the beginning of 2014, I tried to convince myself that I would do less traveling this year, that I would try and stay put and quell my wanderlust with something a bit more regular and mundane, maybe put my travel budget to a more local use.
I tried, and for a whole month, I was sucessful. Yet here I find myself at the start of February, staring down at least three international trips already booked for the year, and the threat of more to come. I start the year off with Malaysia this week, having scored a free trip from Air Asia a couple of months back (Thanks, Air Asia!).
I'll be in Kuala Lumpur for the weekend (Feb 7-11), and hope to be able to see its local art scene. Due to a rather tight schedule I'll be unable to do the usual 1-3 week immersion, but I'll definitely be going back for seconds around the end of the year. This time around, I'm definitely bringing my camera (my last attempt at going on a camera-less vacation ended up in horrible regret), but will eschew my laptop and clunky gear and just bring a single lens and body. Still a bit on the fence whether it should be a prime or the wide-angle zoom, but I won't worry too much about it.
One thing I'm particularly excited to do is to shoot a bit of video. When I travel, one frustration I've been having is that a lot of my memories involve sounds and the motion of certain elements - the gentle swaying of reeds along a river I watch the sunset from, the droning put-put-put of a tuktuk that I've hired to take me around town, or even the mesmerizing blinking of neon lights along the street I'm lodged in. While motion is to a certain extent capturable in a photo, sound most definitely is not, hence the video.
So that's Malaysia. This June, I'll be heading over to Osaka and Tokyo for a week, and come August it's Beijing for some dumplings with an extra order of smog. Hopefully by then, my Mandarin skills will have progressed sufficiently for me to at least haggle well enough to make the Chinese blood in me bubble with pride.
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