“Wait a minute,” I interrupted, “You get to go to London? The one that’s in England? And the company pays for it? Airfare AND hotel? Food, too?” That’s how naïve I was at the time.

Hey, I’m back. Did you miss me? Did you even notice I was gone? I’m sorry. But believe it or not, I have a real job and sometimes it gets in the way of important things, like sharing my little opinions and jokes with you. In this case, I was on a business trip. Around the world in three weeks, most of the time being exceedingly miserable and wishing I was home.

This was my third time going around the world. It seems so natural now, so humdrum, but ’twas not always thus. I came from a place where people didn’t travel much. As a matter of fact, they seemed to be born, smoke their first joint, get arrested, get married, have kids
and die all without ever leaving the same street. I always knew that wasn’t for me.

I grew up in a place of fantasy and magic and burnt-out tenement buildings called Da Bronx. The New York Yankees, the Bronx Zoo, birthplace of hip hop and J-Lo. Going to Manhattan (“the city”) was a big event. Vacation destinations were all within 100 miles or so. I knew I had to get out, but I didn’t know how to do it. Unlike local HK parents who send their kids to universities all over the world, when I wanted to go to school in California, my parents declared it was too far away. I spent the first half of my life in Da Bronx thinking Europe and Asia were dreams that would never come true.

Things started to change after I took my first big corporate job. I had been working for the New York branch of a British bank for a few weeks when I heard someone talking about going to London. It was like I had been struck by a thunderbolt. “Wait a minute,” I interrupted, “You get to go to London? The one that’s in England? And the company pays for it? Airfare AND hotel? Food, too?” That’s how naïve I was at the time. I couldn’t imagine that you could travel around the world and someone else would pay for it. That became my goal – to get important enough at the bank to get sent on business trips. It took about a year, but soon I was flying back and forth to London and staying for up to a month at a time (which, by the way, led to my first divorce). I couldn’t imagine life getting any better than that.

Well, that is, until my next job, when they sent me on my first trip to Asia, to Tokyo. I had no idea what to expect, got off the plane and thought, “Oh, look, they have trees just like us!” I fell in love with Tokyo and didn’t want to leave. After I’d finished my assignment, I moved to a cheaper hotel and started using up all my saved vacation time. Every day I’d check my bank balance and estimate how much longer I could stay. After a few weeks, vacation time used up, money spent, I had to return to New York, this time determined not just to make a return trip but to find some way to actually live in Asia. Six months later, the planets aligned in some bizarre manner that led to my moving to Hong Kong.

Most Americans don’t know anything about geography. Many of the people I knew thought Hong Kong was in Japan: when I told them I wast moving to Hong Kong, most said, “Wow, you must really love sushi.” (As it happens I do, and I’m not thrilled that it costs the gross national product of Peru to have a decent sushi dinner here.) Not that I was any better. My first business trip from here was to Kuala Lumpur. I’d never heard of it. They told me it was in Malaysia. I’d kind of heard of that, but I had no idea where it was. I had to look it up on the internet. (So it probably serves me right that I ended up marrying someone from there.)

Well, to cut a long story short, no, I didn’t lose my mind, but travel has become routine for me. Almost every week I board a plane, usually heading to some place I’ve been to 50 times or more. Like most people here, I’ve become extremely blasé about going to places that once seemed distant and exotic. Oh sure, it’s still better than a job I once had that forced me to go to Denver every month. And this recent trip wasn’t all misery – I had two good days (out of 21) when I took a weekend break and went to Paris for the first time. That could be an entire column (or even a book) right there – contrasting the pros and cons, the basic livability of Paris versus Hong Kong. And the food. Two days of classic bistro cuisine and amazing patisseries, stuff Parisians probably take for granted that’s just to die for when you live here. (Not that I had bad food on the other stops along the way – the tandoori lamb shank I had one night in Bombay will be etched in my memory forever.)

At any rate, one thing that happens when I get bogged down in business trips like this is that I stop listening to new music. When I’m working 12-hour days and sleeping in strange hotels or airplanes, once I slap the headphones on, I don’t want to work. I simply relax better with stuff I already know. Listening to new stuff takes more of an effort than a playlist of some Miles, Neil Young, Derek & the Dominos, the Stones, Bowie and so on.

But worse than that, during these tired downtimes, I find myself becoming hypercritical of every new thing I listen to. I hated
almost every new album I’d put on the iPod, only to get home, relax and discover some of that stuff is quite wonderful after all. And there’s been a ton of new digital stuff to check out – so next time out, more on that. Until then, a word to the wise – if you haven’t heard Neon Bible by Arcade Fire, you haven’t heard the best album so far this year.