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Sketches of a twenty-something life
I turned 30 slightly over two months ago. As time ticked towards the ‘big’ milestone, I wasn’t quite sure of what to expect. In fact, I was feeling fairly sanguine about it all. The actual day wasn’t any different, either. At the stroke of midnight, I was at a friend’s house with others after spending…
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NZ#8: Hiking the Milford (Part 1)
After almost half a year of waiting, it was finally time to start some of the multi-day hikes that I was really looking forward to. The first hike was going to be the Milford. For some context, the Milford Track is billed as “the finest walk in the world“, and bookings are extremely competitive for…
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NZ #7: Inflection Point
Its been a while since I wrote a blog post. Predictably, life gets in the way sometimes and I’ve also had a bit of inertia in putting the virtual pen to paper to jot down my thoughts. In my defense, the past three months (Sep, Oct and Nov) have kept me very busy. While I’ve…
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NZ#6: Doing it Scared
As a kid, I often had this recurring daydream about leaving everything behind to just move somewhere where nobody knew me and figure out how to survive there. I’m not sure if it was just a form of mental escapism from a challenging childhood and adolescence, but when the opportunity to do just that presented…
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NZ #5: Settling in
In my life so far, I’ve never really uprooted myself from Singapore. Sure, I spent three months in Istanbul (still the city with the best sunsets I’ve seen in my life), but that was on a summer exchange while at university. This was the first time I had to actually think about things like finding…
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NZ #4: Hobbiton
The next step in my work holiday journey was to find a job. This was one of the things that worried me the most before coming to NZ because of the uncertainty (well, I suppose the entire act of moving halfway across the world without a clear plan is a series of massive uncertainties to…
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NZ #3: Drive to Survive
I only seriously considered getting my driving license last year. I made previous half-hearted attempts, once when I turned 18, and again in 2020, but never stuck with it. Upon further research, I realised NZ was much more car-centric than I expected. In my past travels, I got around fine using public transport, or getting…
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NZ #2: Auckland
So the time finally came to head to New Zealand (NZ) and kick off my working holiday visa (WHV). The plan was to attend Jeremy’s wedding in Melbourne at the start of March, and then make my way to Auckland to start my working holiday. I figured this would be a good way to say…
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NZ #1: Tabula Rasa
When I initially told people in 2023 that I was going to move to New Zealand (NZ) for a year to do a working holiday, they would often follow up to ask me why, or what I had hoped to achieve. Was it burnout? Was I trying to discover myself? Loneliness? Escapism? It was probably…