The past year left, the new year came, and I’m still here in Singapore.

For a long time, I always felt about Singapore as Paul Theroux did*:

"It seemed as if I had been in Singapore a long time ago, when I was young and didn’t know anything, and being there this second time, after two years’ absence, I had a glimpse of this other person. It is possible at a distance to maintain the fiction of former happiness – childhood or school days – and then you return to an early setting and the years fall away and you see how bitterly unhappy you were. I had felt trapped by Singapore: I felt as if I were being destroyed by the noise – the hammering, the traffic, the radios, the yelling – and I had discovered most Singaporeans to be rude, aggressive, cowardly and inhospitable, full of vague racial fears and responsive to any bullying authority. I believed it to be such a loathsome place – many of my students thought so too and they couldn’t imagine by anyone would willingly stay there… Like me – like everyone I knew in Singapore – he had just been waiting for his chance to go."

When I left, I was begging for a chance to go and continued to feel the same sentiment for years after. Singapore meant passing through, not permanence, and if I did stay, it was only to earn money to aid my consequential journey. I prided myself on hypermobility, having sliced my way through Australia up here, then onward to other continents. For a long time, seasons were associated with places: spring on the roof of my flat on K Road or strange months spent in Palmy, summers on Mount Albert, autumns by the chilly East River or Great Lakes, winters spent warming up in izakayas and cooking dinners in our drafty Muriwai bach.

Here there are no seasons, just each melting together into one exasperating summer. Now back in Singapore, the years have fallen away. Everyone I knew here waited for their chance to go and eventually they all did, now scattered from Vancouver down to Australia. I was the only one who returned; I came not quite intending to stay, I had no plan but a faint idea that by now I would be on the train going through Butterworth up to Bangkok, or the coast of Colombo, or on yet another 27 hour journey to another continent, to meet old friends and make new ones.

Yet instead of moving, I’m still here. Instead of other cities, I’ve found this: lunches in the Arab Quarter and the certainty that each day at 1.30pm the call for prayers will ring out from the Mohammed Sultan Mosque, the men and young boys in their songkoks will race in and throwing off their sandals in one graceful move.

I know that if the rate of climate change persists, I may never wear a pair of jeans again. The last time I wore a pair of jeans was on the plane coming into Singapore, and that was over a year ago.

Mango lassis and cheap food in Little India, where you can buy raw bulk chickpeas to make homemade hummus (it costs a harrowing $8 a tub at the gourmet supermarkets, ouch). It is where the bustle and smells and migrants on their weekend day offs make it feel just like India, yet the reminder that you are in Singapore is the fact that all the gold jewellery stores are run by enterprising Chinese. How odd.

Great breakfasts. As a true blue Singaporean, I wake up craving something hot – prata with curry, or noodle soup at the nearest hawker centre.

That you can avoid those typical trappings of Singapore life – the endless world of malls – and still find a café respite to sit in the evenings and sip a g&t (and the fact that the consistent weather means you can do this for all 365 days of the year if you so wish!).

Nights out with my new friends for sake/shochu and shabu shabu at a hidden away Japanese enclave in a restaurant full of Japanese businessmen expats, where someone else commented “I have never seen a group of girls order all you can drink…” If you squint, you could almost believe you were in the middle of a Tokyo izakaya.

Slurping down steaming beef hor fun (rice noodles) in Geylang amid tablefuls of old ‘uncles’ with their Tiger beers, across the street from bored-looking Chinese prostitutes.

Going shopping for cheongsams right out of Wong Kar Wai’s 'In the Mood for Love', then off to see Andrew Bird with friends and remembering that hipsters all over the world dress the same.

That some Singaporeans can see the way things are, and laugh about it.

That it’s just over an hour flight to Saigon - just about the commute time it takes others to get home from work - and under $300 to Phnom Penh next month, to the Thai countryside for a weekend in March...

Dinner by the East Coast, where the freight ships are anchored close to the island with their orange orbs cozy as streetlights. Our group, mostly a medley of producers and cameramen, included an enthralled Brit who was impressed. Cath, the newly arrived Kiwi production manager, and I almost yelled with such pride “this is our ‘hood!”

The list could go on... 2009 left, 2010 arrived, and I’m still here in the 'hood. And so here my blog comes to an end because it just doesn’t seem fitting anymore – I am no longer a stray in Singapore. As clichéd as it sounds, it feels that right here, right now, I belong.

Thanks for reading over the months. And if you’re ever this way through Asia, you know who to look up... I’m not waiting, and definitely not looking for a chance to go yet.

*Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar