Peters
The Duck was posted on the day I left for Orly Airport to stay overnight for my 6am flight to Berlin.
I was going there to meet up with Yeejia and her parents, who were already there one day earlier after flying in from Venice. Thus, in some way, I was doing a Yaohui, in that I was travelling with the girlfriend's family. This, being my first time, I was naturally a bit nervous.
Anyway, a trip to Berlin is very much about the second most famous wall in the world - the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall is fascinating because over night, families and friends were separated by concrete running from north to south, dividing east and west. I tried imagining Toa Payoh being surrounded by walls, cutting it off from the rest of Singapore. The proposition wasn't very enticing because I'll be kissing goodbye to you-know-who and you-know-what but the planning my escape part should be exciting. If you hadn't heard about it, people from East Germany had tried to escape the country by jumping off top storey of buildings located right beside the wall or the most absurd one I read about was building a hot-air ballon to transport the whole family over. The absurd family succeeded. Moi, inspired toujours by Ally Mcbeal, would have built a trampoline with rubber bands and spring my way across.
The last day of the trip, we went to the East Side Gallery which has one of the longest, if not the longest, segments of the remaining Berlin Wall. There, we met the man who had apparently knocked down the most parts of the Berlin Wall since 1989. He is the owner of a souvenir shop at the East Side Gallery that sells, among other things, postcards of him sitting on the wall with a hammer in his hand.
At first, we didn't talk to him. It was Yeejia's father who sparked off the conversation when he asked the shop-owner if he was from East or West Germany. The man's reply was that he was from the 'more interesting side'. Then I asked him if he was indeed the man in the postcards and he nodded his head, with a not-too-well concealed smile which suggested that he kind of enjoyed being recognized. The conversation got rolling.
He ended up explaining to us why the East Germans were so keen to go to West Germany in his thick German accented English which I couldn't quite follow. But I did remember him saying that the people in East Germany weren't starving then. Yet, they all wanted to get to West Germany because...and he cited many examples...one of them being that if you were to have a fat wife and your neighbour has a thin one, you would want a thin one. But if you have a thin wife and your neighbour has a fat one, you would want a fat one. Yeejia concluded what he wanted to say was really that the grass is always greener on the other side.
The conversation set me thinking as we walked through the rain back to the Warschauer Station.
In Math, we are always interested to know if a unique solution to a problem exists. In life, does there exist a unique solution to all our problems? Is there a unique state of happiness, that once anyone reaches that state, he can tell himself that he is truly happy now? The answer is no because we live in a world of choices. The fact that we can't live through all possible choices mean that we are always left to imagine the 'what mights' and the 'what could have beens'. I think to be happy is to not try to be happy, to be contented and yet, not knowing that you are contented.
I think a lot of the world problems today originated from the hypotheses made in Economics. One of the basic problems in Economics is to find out how to optimize resources so that everybody can be happier. But because there is apparently no way we can determine how happy a person is with relation to what he does or what he consumes, economists make the hypothese that the richer you are, the more you consume, the happier you are. Thus, the higher a country's economic growth, the better it is supposed to be. But, are people today happier, on average (if we can even average happiness), than people fifty years ago? If we are not, then why are we still pursuing economic growth and technological advancements at the expense of our environment, when happiness can be achieved by leading a simpler life like what people 50 years ago did.
I think it is important that we do not fall victims to the hypotheses made in economics, which try to explain human behaviour, but might not necessarily explain them correctly. I believe a fundamental revamp in the way we approach economics is necessary to move global developpements in the correct directions such that everyone benefits. By that, I mean economists should find out how people should make decisions so that they can be happier (that is, to return to the fundamental question) and not how so that they can be richer.
There were a lot of random thoughts that floated around in my mind then that I couldn't quite recall all now and what I wrote above should really be written in a more coherent manner (and that will definitely take more than the 15 mins I took to type them all out) so as to disguise my crap as intellectual fodder in some academic journals.
How I felt after the conversation with the shop-owner at East Side Gallery reminded me of how I felt after talking to Peter (or so he claimed) over dinner at Mekong Delta about one year back. For the non-Jeffrys and the non-Tats, Peter was this Australian whom we met in Vietnam and who shared with us his travel experiences, one of which he travelled from Turkey, through Afgahnistan all the way back to Australia. Listening to him then was inspiring. Thinking of him now is uplifting.
It made me realise that I did not go to Berlin to look at Berlin Wall or to see the East Side Gallery. I was looking for Peters. And that's the reason why I travel.
I was going there to meet up with Yeejia and her parents, who were already there one day earlier after flying in from Venice. Thus, in some way, I was doing a Yaohui, in that I was travelling with the girlfriend's family. This, being my first time, I was naturally a bit nervous.
Anyway, a trip to Berlin is very much about the second most famous wall in the world - the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall is fascinating because over night, families and friends were separated by concrete running from north to south, dividing east and west. I tried imagining Toa Payoh being surrounded by walls, cutting it off from the rest of Singapore. The proposition wasn't very enticing because I'll be kissing goodbye to you-know-who and you-know-what but the planning my escape part should be exciting. If you hadn't heard about it, people from East Germany had tried to escape the country by jumping off top storey of buildings located right beside the wall or the most absurd one I read about was building a hot-air ballon to transport the whole family over. The absurd family succeeded. Moi, inspired toujours by Ally Mcbeal, would have built a trampoline with rubber bands and spring my way across.
The last day of the trip, we went to the East Side Gallery which has one of the longest, if not the longest, segments of the remaining Berlin Wall. There, we met the man who had apparently knocked down the most parts of the Berlin Wall since 1989. He is the owner of a souvenir shop at the East Side Gallery that sells, among other things, postcards of him sitting on the wall with a hammer in his hand.
At first, we didn't talk to him. It was Yeejia's father who sparked off the conversation when he asked the shop-owner if he was from East or West Germany. The man's reply was that he was from the 'more interesting side'. Then I asked him if he was indeed the man in the postcards and he nodded his head, with a not-too-well concealed smile which suggested that he kind of enjoyed being recognized. The conversation got rolling.
He ended up explaining to us why the East Germans were so keen to go to West Germany in his thick German accented English which I couldn't quite follow. But I did remember him saying that the people in East Germany weren't starving then. Yet, they all wanted to get to West Germany because...and he cited many examples...one of them being that if you were to have a fat wife and your neighbour has a thin one, you would want a thin one. But if you have a thin wife and your neighbour has a fat one, you would want a fat one. Yeejia concluded what he wanted to say was really that the grass is always greener on the other side.
The conversation set me thinking as we walked through the rain back to the Warschauer Station.
In Math, we are always interested to know if a unique solution to a problem exists. In life, does there exist a unique solution to all our problems? Is there a unique state of happiness, that once anyone reaches that state, he can tell himself that he is truly happy now? The answer is no because we live in a world of choices. The fact that we can't live through all possible choices mean that we are always left to imagine the 'what mights' and the 'what could have beens'. I think to be happy is to not try to be happy, to be contented and yet, not knowing that you are contented.
I think a lot of the world problems today originated from the hypotheses made in Economics. One of the basic problems in Economics is to find out how to optimize resources so that everybody can be happier. But because there is apparently no way we can determine how happy a person is with relation to what he does or what he consumes, economists make the hypothese that the richer you are, the more you consume, the happier you are. Thus, the higher a country's economic growth, the better it is supposed to be. But, are people today happier, on average (if we can even average happiness), than people fifty years ago? If we are not, then why are we still pursuing economic growth and technological advancements at the expense of our environment, when happiness can be achieved by leading a simpler life like what people 50 years ago did.
I think it is important that we do not fall victims to the hypotheses made in economics, which try to explain human behaviour, but might not necessarily explain them correctly. I believe a fundamental revamp in the way we approach economics is necessary to move global developpements in the correct directions such that everyone benefits. By that, I mean economists should find out how people should make decisions so that they can be happier (that is, to return to the fundamental question) and not how so that they can be richer.
There were a lot of random thoughts that floated around in my mind then that I couldn't quite recall all now and what I wrote above should really be written in a more coherent manner (and that will definitely take more than the 15 mins I took to type them all out) so as to disguise my crap as intellectual fodder in some academic journals.
How I felt after the conversation with the shop-owner at East Side Gallery reminded me of how I felt after talking to Peter (or so he claimed) over dinner at Mekong Delta about one year back. For the non-Jeffrys and the non-Tats, Peter was this Australian whom we met in Vietnam and who shared with us his travel experiences, one of which he travelled from Turkey, through Afgahnistan all the way back to Australia. Listening to him then was inspiring. Thinking of him now is uplifting.
It made me realise that I did not go to Berlin to look at Berlin Wall or to see the East Side Gallery. I was looking for Peters. And that's the reason why I travel.
posted by le chye at
5:34 AM
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