That lonely, quiet country...

My good friend Emma, who is now back in NZ, was with me in Secondary 2 and 3 in Brunei. It was a very small school, and there were lots of other girls named Emma. Right Emma? It's nice to hear from her after all this time because it reminds me of a time when life was so simple. Things were very sort of easy and simple in Brunei, without every really being easy. Because you had to throw out your own trash at the landfill (there were no garbage collectors), there was limited Internet access, new phone lines took months and months to set up, there was no McDonalds, 2 major supermarkets, maybe 3... What other amenities were missing? Well, I can't remember, but for a time, there was no public transport either, but then they began to introduce the buses and taxis that would take you anywhere for $1.00 or $3.00, respectively.

There was Jerudong Park, which we kids went to like 2-3 times a month. All our birthdays were celebrated there, except for mine, because I always threw pool parties at home. And do you remember the time when that kid, I forgot his name, jumped off my roof to dive into my pool? That was so weird. And we weren't even high or drunk! Imagine if we were... but we were so young back then...

Now that we're older, sometimes I wonder how our time in Brunei helped to shape us into the adults that we've become now? Did it contribute a lot to our present character and personality, or not at all? Sometimes I think the time we spent in that quiet country was so traumatic (due to its isolative factors) that it contributed a whole chunk to how we are now. Isolation makes us into either creative or destructive creatures, or both. Which one have I become?