Home away from home

Home away from home

Having a Hong Kong flag hung in my house makes all the difference when I feel homesick. Just recently discovered my housemate took this photo when we first moved in a year and a half ago. Brilliant.

Chinese New Year is one of the times of the year I feel the most homesick. For the food, the fireworks, the environment and most importantly, my family. Thankfully I don’t live far from China Town and was able to eat dimsum with some friends!

I wish you all a prosperous and healthy year of the snake!

Brilliant. I think of this more often than I probably should. Through traveling, I have noticed that it is a very western thing to say “I’m good” as soon as someone asks “how are you?” When I lived in Cambodia for a year, all the local Cambodians I met would simply respond with “fine.” If you think about that, that would be a more appropriate response then good because fine doesn’t represent neither good or bad.

Cultural norms are always interesting when it comes to human behaviors.

ONE out of 16

What a brilliant opportunity for 16 lucky people around the world to travel and write. It’s a dream come true. I’ve always been interested in travel, but have never looked in depth and kept up to date with news in regards to the travel industry but I have recently followed quite a few twitter accounts that allows me to read articles after articles of interesting news.

The last few weeks I have been envisioning a new dream for my future. If you had asked me two months ago, I would’ve said I wanted to be a personal trainer and work in the fitness industry but today, I have a totally different vision, and to make that come true, I have to dive into the travel industry a lot more.

I am really looking forward to March 1st when Big Blog Exchange launches their website and competition. I do not have any expectations at all that I will be a lucky one out of 16 people but I am damn well going to try for it. In the end, things happen in our lives that you would never in a million years dream of.

I sure hope this is one of those surprises.

The desire to get back on track

It’s beginning to get to the point where every time I open my blog to write a new post, I surprise myself at how long it has been since my last post. It’s time to start posting regularly again. It’s the only way I can keep up with my writing skills open top of facebook status’ and twitter posts. 

I was thrown a lot of curve balls this break and it wasn’t easy to handle but thankfully, being along side my family and relatives, we were able to get through it together. It probably had been one of the scariest times of my life as of yet. Though it was very taxing, it gave me a different perception for my future. It almost made me grow up a lot faster than I wanted to. 

As my semester starts to get rolling with classes and internship, there has been two things constantly lingering on my mind. One, some would say shallow and the other, well, a lot of us are on the same boat. 

I’ll start with the shallow thought. Due to the hectic-ness of my holiday, I didn’t get a chance to exercise for a few weeks and to top that off, I ate pretty much whatever I wanted. To be fair, I didn’t have a choice most of the time when we went out to family gatherings with 30 people. Anyhow, I came back to Boston and I’ve been trying to get back into a fitness routine and diet. It’s been semi-successful but it has been a bit discouraging when I’m not getting the results I want as quickly as I want. It kind of blows my mind how easily you can gain back the weight and how obvious it becomes to yourself when you know you have looked and felt better in the past. Like I said, not the deepest thoughts but important for my personal mental and physical health. 

Secondly, a thought I’m sure every graduating senior in college has, is the worry, anxiety, fear of the future. Where should I live? Where do I go? What’s my 5 year plan? Questions after questions that are constantly on my mind. With that being said, my mind wandered again towards those questions. I guess all I can do is take a deep breath and be thankful I have a good family support system to be with me no matter what happens. 

This felt a bit like a pop corn post, thoughts randomly here and there. Like I said, I will post more regularly (let’s aim for one a week) and perhaps my writing will get better once again. 

Cheers,