Holidays … Chicago, Austin and Miami
Sep 6th, 2008 by shihjern
Holidays – the Americans use the term “vacations” instead. I love them and it is unfortunate that the capitalist Wall Street is not as generous with them as the socialist British or Europeans. Particularly as I now embrace the working life, leisure and free time is ever so precious.
I believe in the necessity of quarterly vacations. As I get four weeks off a year, I take a one-week vacation roughly every three months. In February this year, I spent Chinese New Year back home in Malaysia. In May, I visited Chicago for a friend’s wedding (my friend, a lawyer, is now married to a doctor – the perfect match for an Asian family!) and spent time at my flatmate’s family home in Austin, Texas.
Chicago was charming – a splendid forest of magnificent skyscrapers, towering over each other, creating a delightful display of architectural brilliance. It was a very clean city, bordered by the lovely Lake Michigan. I could not miss the Art Institute of Chicago (immortalized by the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), which had a very impressive collection. I was captivated in particular by one piece – The Captive Slave, by British painter John Philip Simpson. It was on loan from a gallery in England at that time, so I was not allowed to photograph it. It was striking because it depicted a sorrowful-looking African man in red-orange overalls, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the outfit worn by U.S. enemy combatants held in Guantanamo Bay. This was in 1827, and the artist must have took a huge risk in expressing such anti-slavery views during Britain’s mighty empire days. How uncreative we must be – after 180 years, the United States is still clinging on to the red-orange outfits!
Austin was memorable for the huge portions of food, especially the awe-inspiring Salt Lick BBQ! Of course, the unforgetable experience for me was the opportunity to fire a gun at a shooting range. Seriously, that is an awful lot harder than it looks. They make it seem so easy on TV. The pressure, energy and force that the gun expels upon fire is indescribable. I cannot even begin to imagine how people use that on other living beings.
That brings me to my most recent pseudo-vacation. I had planned to go to Miami for a few days, then move onward to The Bahamas for a lovely beach holiday. Of course, growing up in Malaysia (with all its frequent textbook reminders about how fortunate we are because our country is free from natural disasters or severe weather), I checked everything (currency, visa requirements, best hotel, cheapest flight, different ways to get to the hotel from the airport and even which restaurants are good) EXCEPT the fact that mid-August till mid-September is the PEAK of the hurricane season in the Caribbean. And of course, after worrying and scrutinizing the Hurricane Center website every few hours for weeks (watching Tropical Storm Fay and Hurricane Gustav whiz by) and learning more about hurricanes and tropical storms than I care to know, I fly right in to Miami at the time that Tropical Storm Hanna is projected to hit The Bahamas. So my vacation is interrupted, for the first time ever, and I return home to New York. Sigh, at least I had a good time in Miami. It is sad when you pay $5 for a beer at a beach resort and think it’s good value (only happens to New Yorkers!).
A friend (an economics student, of course) once told me that students should take out loans to travel extensively and go on adventures during their student days because the only cost was the money. I scorned him, as a good calculating and ambitious Asian scholar should. Now I see the wisdom of his words. I long for a few months to just go travelling slowly through France and Italy, stopping in little villages to try wine and cakes. I want to take the Trans-Siberian Railway across Russia, visit towns in Eastern Europe, see the pyramids in Egypt and the Taj Mahal in India. But alas, the opportunity cost of me not working for those few months would far outweigh the cost of such trips.
So here I am, on a gloomy Saturday afternoon, marking up legal documents in my office. Sigh.