Confessions of a Corporate Shopaholic

I was totally stressed out the other night – but in a good way.  I was relaxing at home after midnight when a good friend of mine informed me of some unbelievably good deals on Cathay Pacific Airways that are only valid for a week.  Seeing that this is a fantastic opportunity to see the world, I jumped on the chance and booked a trip to Paris this May. 

The story doesn’t end here.  There are still so many other attractive destinations that I would like to go or revisit, namely Seoul, Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Moscow, Phuket, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Johannesburg, Shanghai, London and New York.  I had been flipping through my calendar, browsing hotel deals, texting my friends, checking seat availability, for a good 3 hours.  I haven’t yet made any confirmed decisions yet, and that planning will continue tomorrow and the few days ahead, provided, of course, that there are still seats available for the dates I am picking.

So this afternoon I was visiting a friend on Kowloon side.  Walking on the busy Nathan Road I could actually hear two separate conversations of people passing by chatting about the exact same online promotion.  Talk about Hong Kong people’s obsessive compulsion to get out of the territory, with every chance we get.  Why is that the case?

• the fact that we work 14 hour days and still finding it hard to sleep at nights due to immense stress from work
• we are living in shoebox-sized apartments that we can hardly see the sky
• we have forgotten about how clean air smells like
• we find ourselves pressed like sardines in shopping mall elevators even on supposedly relaxing Sundays
• we cannot get our foot into any electronics stores because every one of the 38 available sales reps were mobbed by our mainland Chinese neighbors
• tons of rude, impolite, inconsiderate and selfish pedestrians on the streets and on practically all forms of transportation, and most of them are locals
• news programs are flooded by retarded policies and tactics of the government, and increasingly violent protests spearheaded by our post-80s and 90s
• another excuse to take 15,000 digital pictures of yourself with exactly the same pose and gesture, in front of landmarks of the world but with hardly any real appreciation of its history or importance
• one more excuse to take 3,000 more pictures of all the foreign food you are going to eat beginning with the in-flight meals
• way cooler to check-in at impressive foreign landmarks on FaceBook rather than Central MTR station in Hong Kong
• experience how checking work e-mails, twittering, and FaceBooking abroad is like
• witness how devalued the Hong Kong dollar is
• feel the victory and accomplishment of successfully grabbing the few Hong Kong Chinese newspapers on return flights from abroad
• another chance to wear NorthFace down jackets together with oddly colored crocs and huge alien-like sunglasses
• read as many Hong Kong tabloid magazines as possible while laying by the hotel pools
• a chance to continue being selfish and rude to unsuspecting service people overseas

Alright this may be way too much ranting in one post, but what’s the point of repeating the same old routine or even bad habits when you have a week of vacation time to unwind?  Let’s relax, let our guards down, take a few steps backwards, and be positive and appreciative in our travel adventures.  Take a deep breath, soak in the nature and culture, and teach your children a lesson or two about civility and consideration.  Amen.