(wander)lusting.

I have always been struck with wanderlust, and it is nerdily exciting to plan itineraries for places I've never been to before, whether it be for a short weekend getaway to a neighboring country or a longer 8-day romp to say, Thailand. I've never been too big of a fan of big organized tours; I would rather explore places at my own pace rather than having a pack of strangers constantly breathing down my neck and crowding my view of panaromic sights. For this purpose, Lonely Planet is now one of my favorite links, which provides general travel information for pretty much any country in the world.

While I visited this website today with the original intention of looking up more information for Melaka (a historical port city of Malaysia that I plan on exploring this weekend with two other lady friends), I was amused to find that Lonely Planet even includes travel information on Antarctica. Apparently, tours to Antarctica are actually possible for the general public, albeit a wealthier segment of the public--whether from the tip of Argentina or via domestic sight-seeing planes from Australia. Asides from bearded, one-eyed explorers and polar bears, I am surprised that there are actually people who would want to take the time and money to take a trek down to the southernmost continent of what is essentially an icelandic wasteland. I suppose if one day I am very rich and very bored, I would maybe consider meandering way down south for kicks--that is, if it hasn't entirely melted away by then.

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Coming to Singapore makes me appreciate Los Angeles from an outsider's perspective because it makes me realize just how little I still know about the city I've been living in for the last three years. Reading Lonely Planet's blurb on Los Angeles (and the greater United States) from a tourist's perspective is interesting, not only because of what they recommend but moreso because of what is not included.

Certainly they are going to include the easy tourist draws like Universal Studios, the Getty Museum and the Viper Room, but it takes a good few years and maybe even more to really know and appreciate a place by your own terms. It's one thing to have a whirlwind flash-bang tour of all the big and exciting places that everyone goes to, but it's another thing to really fall in love with the living, breathing rhythm of a particular place, warts and all, minus the rose-tinted glasses of a wanderstruck tourist.

It makes me feel nostalgic for the lesser known gems of Los Angeles that I've come to love for my own personal reasons. Here, I send my overseas valentine to: Museum of Jurassic Technology, Meltdown Comics, Crepes to Go and the Mountain Bar, to name a very few.

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One of the little things I like about the Lonely Planet website is that as a heading for every locale, they provide a one-sentence blurb at the top of the page that supposedly sums up the general feeling of the place. This is an impossible task, of course, but fun to read because they range from the wonderfully lyrical to the downright dumb. I imagine that it must have been frustratingly difficult for the anonymous writer to come up with these one-liners for so many places. New Zealand: "From the peaks of adrenalin to the laps of luxury." Cairo: "Where the ancient and modern mix furiously." Singapore: "From the opium-dens of the past to the hi-tech wizardry of today." Um, what?

So far, I like LA's one-liner the best, which is actually in the form of a question: "Is LA a figment of its own imagination?"

I wonder.