The Road to 40 Day 186/365: A Growing Love For Walking

I’ve grown to love long walks.

At this day and age of on-demand entertainment and powerful handheld phones, it’s easy to just sit idly and be absorbed in doomscrolling and whatnot.

As a stay-at-home dad, it helps entertain me in a quiet house. However, it also makes me lazy and unproductive.

Back in the Philippines, I would always choose routes I didn’t know just to see where the roads lead to. Since I don’t drive here in Singapore, I explored by taking public transport. But of course, that also entailed a lot of walking.

When we were in Vietnam, I knew we had limited time, so I tried to explore the city by walking. I didn’t drive, and while Grab was affordable and accessible, you had to have an exact pin to get where you wanted to go.

It unlocked a new hobby for me – when others ran or biked, I walked. I want to eventually run, but there’s a certain charm about walking.

While I could burn a lot more calories by running, it’s very goal-driven. It’s a workout. I don’t get to think too much, but I sweat a lot.

Meanwhile, walking allows me to dissect podcasts, check out details of posters, and even see interesting insects or birds while walking in a park.

On this day, I briefly met up with Mosh, an old friend. He asked me to buy a shirt in Korea because it was out of stock in SG.

After catching up about life, I walked home via the running/biking path near his office. The path goes all the way to the city, and I thought it would be nice to check out how far it actually goes.

Unfortunately, the path had some construction going on. I had to take a detour, and ended up in our old neighborhood. I found a path to Mt. Faber, which was near our current house, so I took that.

It took an hour and a half to complete the 7km journey. It helped me destress and reflect on the things that went on the day before.

I didn’t really have a lot of energy to do anything at home. I just stuffed clothes in the washing machine and left to pick up Vino.

Vino and I went to the supermarket to buy ingredients. For dinner, we had a nostalgic college favorite, breaded pork chop.

I’ve tested several types of breading for this one to replicate the taste that we’ve become accustomed to, and I think I have it down a bit. Getting the right kind of meat is another thing, but I can’t go wrong with belly. Che likes a little bit of fat in her pork chop, so she doesn’t really like the lean ones even if it would visually look close to what we had before.

With these kinds of dishes, I’m trying to open Vino up to the world of sauces. For this particular one, it’s Mang Tomas. On my side, I like using the gojuchang paste for dry dishes.

We turned in early again, as Che and I caught up with the latest episodes of Physical Asia. I was drifting in and out of sleep but Che was invested with what was going on.

We decided to call it a night after seeing the ending of the latest episode. Maybe we can get back to our K-Drama tomorrow now that we’ve got that one done.