The Stockholm story
Back in 2011, I was given the opportunity to spend a semester as an undergraduate exchange student at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Pretty early on, I had decided – wisely, IMO – that the point of going on exchange wasn’t really to study. You could just as well be studying at home. Rather, it was to see more of the world, and to experience life in another culture first hand. With this in mind, I enrolled for only the barest minimum of courses, leaving me plenty of free time to explore.
One limiting factor, of course, was money. There were only so many weekend trips I could afford to make, even if I limited myself to relatively inexpensive destinations nearby. I did, however, have a Stockholm public transport card. This was loaded with a student concession, allowing me unlimited trips on local transit.
And so after class each day, I would leave campus, pick a random direction, and walk. Often, I would have no particular destination in mind. Whenever I came to a fork or a junction, I picked whichever path was new to me, and took it. Eventually, after an hour, two, three, or four, I would grow tired, or run out of sunlight. I would find the nearest subway or commuter rail station and head back to my apartment.
When I eventually ran out of unwalked streets half an hour off campus, I changed strategies. I would pick a random subway or commuter rail station, head there, and explore its surroundings.
It didn’t take long for me to develop a map of the city in my head that I could rely upon to navigate through it. I started to get a real feeling for Stockholm, an intuition for its streets, its neighbourhoods, its boroughs. In my explorations, I seldom felt lost, even in parts of the city I had never been in before.
The impetus
I headed home that winter with the odd sensation that I had spent more time exploring this foreign city than I had my own land. I doubt it was true to say I really knew Stockholm better than I knew Singapore. There’s only so much familiarity with a place you can establish in only six months. And yet, it was arguably also the case that I had spent most of my life in Singapore going back and forth between the same places, over and over again. I didn’t have to try very hard to realise there were plenty of spaces to fill in my mental map of Singapore. Some of these spaces lay a mere block or two off streets I’d traversed thousands of times. I decided I had to correct this.
The mission
So I embarked on an insane mission: to walk every single street in the entire country. I didn’t set a deadline to do it. I would take as much time as I needed. The goal was also not going to be a literal one. I wouldn’t actually try to walk every single street, for a few reasons:
- There were too many streets to think about walking all of them.
- Some streets were private, or within restricted areas.
- Places changed over time. If the changes were interesting enough, I might want to explore the place again.
- No place was too boring, but some would be too unpleasant. I would never run out of interesting places to explore before I had to resort to places I knew would not be fun to visit.
It was a mission driven by curiosity. It was a mission driven by a desire to take greater ownership of this place I called home, by knowing it better.
Eleven years on, I don’t think it’s far-fetched at all to claim that I’ve probably walked more of Singapore than the vast majority of my fellow Singaporeans have. No doubt there are taxi drivers or food delivery riders who have seen more of the country than I have. They didn’t do it at a walking pace, though, on foot. And there are places in the country I will never see, because I’m not a soldier, a petrochemical engineer, or water engineer. But that can’t be helped. Regardless, there are still so many places left for me to explore.
The blog
As I’m writing this in January 2023, I’m imagining that this blog will serve as a record of some of these explorations. Through it, I will document the places I pass through. I might, perhaps, make a note of any observations that may cross my mind while I walk. I’m not going to promise any amazing photographs. I’m not a photographer, and anyway the point for me is the walking, and photography comes a distant second priority. Nor am I going to promise any exciting stories. The truth is, most of the places I pass through will be pretty mundane, and that’s okay. I plan only to trust the process, and to see what comes out of this exercise in a few years time.
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