Travel, Food, Currency

"Travel" is my new buzzword. Shopping just doesn't cut it anymore. Shoes and bags can rip, but the satisfaction of cutting a big chunk of your savings out in exchange for a few days of fobbish life in a foreign country lasts forever. Unfortunately, I hit the buzz at the wrong time and my long vacation around Western Europe (plus Belgium and Italy) will have to be postponed yet again.

Though I've been on quite a few myself back in Toronto, I can never understand those bus tours to Montreal, New York, Boston, etc organized by the Chinese travel agents. Minus the few washroom breaks, you're stuck on the bus on some highway 80% of the time, "entertained" by either an old Hong Kong film shown on the 10-inch screen overhead, or the tour guide’s idea of karaoke on his one-way radio. Lunch is but a little longer than a washroom break, at a fast-food restaurant that's so small it takes twice the allowed time to just buy food from the counter, let alone find a spot to eat. As the "value for money" factor, dinner's usually included, and more often than not you find yourself indulging in this delicacy known as the local version of that same Wong's Chinese Buffet you pass by everyday back home.

It might be a while before I could truly travel in style, but that doesn't mean I'm going to live off of leftovers wrapped in spring rolls. For me, food makes up on average 50% of traveling. What I eat must not be expensive but must be local.

From what I hear, a lot of people in Hong Kong think eating at McDonald’s is a good way to save whenever they travel outside of Southeast Asia. What’s more pathetic than people who outright refuse to adapt to the bread-and-cheese diet are people who use the price of a McDonald's meal as a country's standard of living, as if mistaking the golden arches for a currency unit. The fact that a Fillet-o-Fish meal somewhere in Europe costs five times more than it does in Hong Kong doesn't mean the standards of living there is fivefold of ours. McDonald's prices at any corner of the world have to do with so many factors, most of all the locale's demonstration of anti-Americanism.