For Academic Purpose

As a kid, there were a lot of things that excite us. Cars, balls, trucks, airplanes, outer space, aliens, dinosaurs, guns, swords, or whatever you and your neighbours liked. What a nerd freak.

Anyway.

It is also said that boys, at some point, will pick their interest and keep it as their personality for the rest of their life. Car, ball, or dinosaur. Then it would expand from there. Car to airplane to spaceship to Gundam. Ball to sport to sport team to EAFC or 2K. Dinosaur to prehistory to history to Useful Charts subscriber.

Dinosaur was the pick. Tiny little me was so fascinated by the fact that there was a dragon-like creatures, as big and as scary, roamed the Earth. The very Earth that I'm living. And they came in different flavours, maybe different powers too! Whoa. Okay maybe the gateway was not dinosaurs but rather dragon. Anyway, be it dragon or dinosaur, they are the true gateway to nerdiness. Also super cool.

My favourite is triceratops, by the way. And no, I don't like Jurassic Park.

As I read more about dinosaurs, turns out there were people who actively hunted the fossils. There were race, or wars even, on who could get more new, shiny fossils and reconstructed them, the so called Bone Wars. Those people who were waging wars against each other called palaeontologist. People who study preserved (or stoned, hehe) remains of living things. Technically speaking, they are people who, willingly and passionately, date bones. Get it?

Now, I thought, what if there are people who, instead of studying living things from the long past, studying human's life from the past? Enter the ARCHAEOLOGIST. Both loves dirt, both does digging. But instead of only bones, archaeologist discovers sword, shield, armour, crown, jewellery, coin, and plethora of other stuff once worn, held, used, or made in ancient civilisations. For me, personally, sword and bow are far cooler than ancient chicken bones. Plus the name! My Lord, ARCHaeologist, the archest of all ologist. Like archangel or archdemon or archnemesis.

At that time, the access to the internet was scarce, none even. The only widely available source of information were, maybe shocking for a lot of newer generations, printed materials. Books, magazines, you name it. From random picture books about armours, weapons, ancient city exploration, to that Gakken historical manga series. Then I got introduced to NatGo magazine and oh my lord was that eye-opening, inspiring, exhilarating. I want to travel the world like the Explorers, take photos like the Explorers, write stories like the Explorers. I want to walk through the alleys of Malta, sit on a thousand years old stone bench, smelling the battlefield from the Hundred Years' War. I want to see where the WWI "started", where King Tut once lived, where Mataram was split, where Goethe hiked, where people traded silk and spices and shinies, where people traded blows.

I want to see the world I once read. I want to hear the rustling and bustling I once imagined. I want to smell the food I once tasted in my head.

And I was, am, lucky enough to see all of that, and more. And to learn that sometimes, most of the times even, things were not what it seemed. Not as written. Not as told. Not as shown.

There are more, far more than what was written, told, or shown, as every nooks and crannies, every alleys, every crevices, every cracks on the wall, every block of stone on the road could tell different stories from different perspectives. Wonder how many war, assassination, festivity, bazaar, coronation, country change, revolution, coup d'etat a window had seen throughout its existence. How thick the smell of gunpowder, tears, sweat, blood, tea, apple pie, tobacco, roast chicken a wall had enjoyed.

When I travelled, I like to think that I am a journalist, or a travel writer. I am not, and I don't think I'll ever be but hey, playing one is fun. So I started to collect and comprehend all the stories I could from every alleys, bars, parks. From every abuela, mima, nanna, ahjumma who invited me for a dinner. I wish I was a competent writer, so I can tell all the stories they told me. At the moment, after all these years, those stories still sit somewhere in my head or in my journal. Waiting to be discovered by my hands over the keyboard, giving their voices a fair and just physical form. For now, everything is collected and dissected for academic purpose.