Difficult Decision

Currently we’re in Hong Kong now, (sorry will update my blog with our Tokyo trip later. Thought that this was more exciting news to tell first) and have been here for a little over a month. We have reached the 7 month point in our trip, and the realization that we only have a few cities left to visit have triggered mixed emotions. On the one hand, we are now exhausted by the endless journeying and dying to return home to family, friends and our own bed. And plus, our fountain of wealth is drying up fast. On the other hand, we are aware of how lucky we are to be here at all, how much there is still to see, and how much we will miss being on the road when we are back behind a desk in an office. These two conflicting emotions had been pulling us in different directions.... "Now we are in Hong Kong, should we work and settle down in Hong Kong for another 6 months or should we head up to Taiwan to teach English for a year or should we head on home to our own comfy surroundings??

Well, on the second week of arrival in Hong Kong, we started to look for work. We madly sent in our CV’s and cover letters to job agencies and to the companies. Before we knew it, we were going to interviews back to back with the biggest investment companies that we have dreamed of working for, such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Merrill Lynch. Going to these interviews, we soon learnt what the HK work culture is like. At all interviews, they warned us of the long working hours. You are at least expected to work from 9am – 7pm, that is if it is a good day. On a bad day, the hours can be from 9am-9pm or worse till midnight. The next most common asked question at the interview is, “How do you expect to balance your work life and personal life?” I think to myself, “is there even time for a personal life with work hours such as this.” All you do is get up, go to work, go home, eat dinner and then go to sleep. There seems to be no time for personal or family life in HK. I still remember the time while I was waiting for Kenny to finish his interview with UBS at around 7:30pm, I saw a lot of couples meet up at the lobby holding only their wallets for dinner. After that, they would head back up to the office. It seems sad to me that work consumes so much of their life.

I guess having been exposed to the Western work culture, which definitely makes the Westerners seem like major slackers in comparison to HK people, it’s hard to work in HK, when you know its easier back home. In Canada, there are better hours, less demand of the workers, not expected to work through lunch or dinner and most of all, there is personal time after work. It makes it even harder for us to want to work in HK, when we know it’s only for a temporary time. We feel bad on our part if we leave the company within 6 months as when they interview you, they have the whole team question you because they only want to recruit people that can get along with the team. Since you will be working with them for at least 10-12 hours a day, they don’t want to recruit any person, they want to recruit a “family member”. So we felt it wasn’t fair to the company as well.

So, YES, HK does offer better work prospects and pay, but the question is, is it worth aging through the long slave hours for just the name of the company on your CV? To us, the answer is NO. We are not here long enough to gain much valued experience to make a difference when we go back to Canada. Nor do we think that the pay makes a huge difference since the living standards in HK is high, after our rent payments, we will have little to save. Further, if you work out the extra hours you put in, the wages in HK end up to be equally the same or less than in Canada. So after considering all of these factors, we knew that working in HK would not suit us.

Now come the decision of whether we want to pursue teaching English in Taiwan. This decision was not an easy one to make. First of all, getting the Alien Residency from the Taiwan government would be difficult, as it requires an actual diploma as proof of your degree. Since the Convocation at UT was uncooperative and unwilling to help us in this aspect, we knew it was going to be troublesome. Secondly, is the timing right? Are we just trying to prolong our trip so that we don’t have to go home to face reality. It’s so hard to go home after having been away for so long, but it’s even harder to continue traveling when your funds are running out. So after weighing out our future goals, we realized that it wasn’t in our best interest to continue to be away from home for another year. (As if we got a contract in Taiwan, it would be for 1 year). Time is one thing you cannot buy back and that is what we are running out of. We need time to go home to save up some funds so that we can start thinking of expanding our family and pick up where we left off in our careers.

So what does this all boil down to, yes you are correct, we have decided its time to go home. Our arrival date to TO will be May 2, 2006. But until then, we still have some traveling to do. We will be visiting Taiwan and several cities in China. Our trip adventure is coming to an end and it’s sad but happy to know that we’ll finally be back home with friends and family. See you all soon!!!!