Travel Bits: September 2022
Travel parsimony......
After having all forms of leisure travel curtailed for the past thirty months or so, taking four overseas leisure trips was a luxury for me. And that luxury comes with a cost. Totalling up my travel spendings for these four trips, I realised that I had spent quite a lot of cash. Considering that all my travels this year were short regional trips, nothing fanciful, certainly not once-in-a-lifetime bucket list items, how did I end up spending so much?
I bought nothing expensive, fanciful or branded during any of these trips. Truth is, compared to my previous trips, pre-2020, I had actually bought nothing on my trips this year.
The question "what did I spent on?" repeatedly comes to mind again as I kept asking myself how did I spend so much for what were supposed to be low cost and low expense trips. Now, I don't have a habit of writing down everything I spent on because I am certainly no miser. Thus, the only brief records I had of my travel spendings were my credit card statements.
Besides the air tickets and hotel accommodations, the majority of my spending were on food! Or my! Food! What did I ate on my travels? Nothing fanciful to be honest, There were no fine dining at Michelin-starred restaurants. Neither were there expensive booze because I don't drink alcohol, not even wine. It was the day-to-day dining at the typical nondescript restaurants that ate up most of my travel dollars, no pun intended.
The moral of the story, of all these unnecessary spent dollars, is that a lot of restaurants meals are simply getting too expensive and not worth the money. To me, they seem to use the same ingredients and mostly taste the same, if not worse, than the good old street-side hawker food.
For my remaining two trips this year, I will practice travel parsimony and skipped restaurants for my meals. To stretch my travel dollars, I must watch those food expenses! And I won't be missing much by skipping restaurants for my meals. Street-side hawker food tastes good, reflects local culture and and is easy on the pockets and wallet.
But of course, there are also many restaurants which serve great food that were worth every dollar being paid. And also, there are many people who simply enjoy the ambience of dining at nice restaurants. However, my shallow pockets dictate that I need to be a lot more thrifty when travelling.
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