Something that has fascinated me for awhile is how merchants choose to display or sell their goods. Talking about a recent trip to Melaka, I was wondering why our shops always have to look chock-a-full of stuff. When in our history did it happen that our shops need to be full of things? Was it meant to convey a successful business? Wouldn’t it have just shown many things remained unsold? Was there a point in the psyche of selling and buying where we realised no one would ever walk into an empty shop?

Pick a shopping district in your town or city, and you’ll see what I mean. This need to fill a shop means we had to get the goods from somewhere, the cheaper the better, for a fatter profit margin. But rather than waxing about economics, I’m probably much better placed to talk about craft, or maybe just about jewellery.

In my travels, it has become obvious to me there’s no longer such a thing as “ethnic jewellery”. If you’re looking for something locally handmade, firstly, be prepared to be lied to about the origin of what’s in the shop, Secondly, expect to only be able to find things similar to what you’ve already seen elsewhere. Most jewellery on the market seem to come from around Tibet, India, Pakistan, China and South America, and on rare occasions, Eastern Europe. Note that this doesn’t necessarily dictate the quality of what you can buy — I’ve seen stuff that has obviously been made cheaply, but also very high quality work. Looking carefully though, it’s not easy to tell the origin of the piece by its design. What then, is authentic, if “authentic” local handmade craft is apparently imported? Is tourism to be blamed for the market for “authentic” souvenirs to bring home?

The real consequence in this is not just whether we find value in authentic experience or not, but in our bid to seem authentic but commercially competitive, we have sacrificed regional identities and uniqueness through giving in to cheaper production costs of goods.

Still, it surprises me that people around me think I travel more than I actually do. I can think of too many places I want to see and that I haven’t yet been to, and I do end up in the same few cities more frequently than I’d like. I’ve never undertaken the Australian tradition of travelling around the world for a year between high school and university, nor backpacking around Europe for a summer. To me, that arrangement seems too greedy somehow, like trying to gorge the world in one mouthful. My preferred way of doing it has been to move to a continent and poke around there for a little while.

Perhaps all it is, is that “travelling” means something different to me than to my friends. Travel is a way to see the world, and I’ve learned to do that even between the 30-minute metro ride between my home and the office. The scale of the journey is all about perspective. You can learn a lot about a city’s people by getting into the public transport at different times of day. You can learn all about the lay of its neighbourhoods — who has it tough, who has it easy — just by who gets on at which stop, who gets off where, and who are the ones driving the cars. I am a perpetual wanderer, a traveller in the city I live, because I know I won’t be here forever — whether I be eventually displaced geographically, or by the arrow of time.

And so, even if I feel myself almost native to Paris because I end up passing through almost every year, I have never been to the top of the Eiffel Tower. However, I have been to the bottom — just once. There was a famous French writer (whose name now escapes me) who ate breakfast at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower every morning when it was built, precisely because he loathed it and it was the only place in Paris where you couldn’t see it. I just wanted to know what kind of view he might have had.