Map

I love watching A Place In The Sun. It makes me daydream about all the dream homes that actually exist. I saw this home in a sea-side town in Italy that was too beautiful to resist talking about. Of all the episodes, that one was my favourite. It was a stone house up a hill, full of classic charm on the outside, yet with a relatively oriental design indoors. There were steps leading down the back which revealed a long private pool, overlooking the vast blue ocean. The venue is also appealing in itself. A short drive to where the main stores are, with a really old chapel in the area - very culturally rich area.

I'd totally understand why someone would want to retire there. Especially when the huge house with the great view and a private pool only cost £50,000 - which is about €59,200, or S$119,700. It's suddenly so ridiculous the price we're paying for our apartments back home. It's such an affordable dream home. Perhaps one day we might move to a place like that, far from home, if we managed to outlive most of our friends. Ahem, because there's no way I'm able to live away from my family and friends for most of my life.

So I was catching up with Shera yesterday and we were both looking at the same map. I started explaining to her how the world was broken up - not literally, with huge machineries, but in the political sense. We were discussing about how the Middle Eastern countries were considered to still be in "Asia" but people would hardly call them Asians would they? The western world might want to rethink their "classification" of Asians. Then, we talked about how amazing it is to have a country so huge like Russia halved into the Asian continent and another in Europe, just like Turkey. The distance between the most western part of Russia to the most Eastern is almost the same, if not more, than the distance between Singapore and Ireland.

Shera told me she felt much closer to me, looking at the map. We were only a few centimetres away from each other for once. Ahh. There's just so much you can talk about and learn from just looking at maps. The Baltic nations, Scandinavia, Eastern and Western Europe. Australia or Australasia? All these different terms used in different nations. The apparent proximity between one nation to the next that you never noticed before. It's like a map of truth laid out bare before you, a chance to feed your curious mind and scrutinise it any way you like. It's quite enjoyable, really.