Lessons from Penelope
It’s Friday night and I don’t have anything to do. So… I went to a nearby video shop and rented Penelope. The movie stars Christina Ricci as Penelope, Reese Witherspoon and of course, James McAvoy!
Okay, I admit, I have no clue what this movie is about. I just rented it because… oh well, James McAvoy. Half the time I was watching the movie, kinikilig talaga ako. Not because of the chemistry between the lead actors, but because how James acted and the way he stares. My goodness! Ahem. Getting cheesy there. So, going back to the movie…
Personally, I don’t like Christina Ricci. This is probably the reason I did not feel the connection between the two main characters. James was better paired with Keira Knightly on Atonement or Anne Hathaway on Becoming Jane. I think classic roles are suited for James. Anyway, I did not feel too much emotion from Penelope in the movie. Reese’s character was, I think, portrayed much better. Once again, she had her natural charisma on screen although hers was just a supporting role.
The story was a little cliché. But overall, it was a good movie. I will spare too much detail but here are some lessons from the film that I want to share:
It’s not the power of the curse. It’s the power you give the curse. Well, of course, this does not literally mean a curse. In real life, the curse could be the trials, hardships, or whatever we may want to call it. Everyone experiences difficulties at one point in our life. More often than not, we feel that life is unfair and that we have nowhere to go. We feel like we are stuck in such a mess and we feel terribly low. Guess what? Everyone else does. Truth is we only feel this way because we allow ourselves to feel it. Every cloud has a silver lining, as the saying goes. The power to control our life is within us. Learn to deal with life; don’t drag yourself down even more.
The world will always move on. Making ourselves feel down will not change anything. The world will not wait for us to feel and get better. It will continue to move forward – just another ordinary day. What does it mean? Nobody really cares enough to pay too much attention. Everyone has their own life to deal with. So learn to deal with our own. Its life and we should keep moving forward.
Appreciate the good things that you have. Contentment is always a big issue. People are constantly longing for more. At some point, we think that by accomplishing something, it will finally give us satisfaction. But when we reached that point, we’ll only realize it’s not the only thing we want. We will always desire for something better. It’s human nature and there’s nothing we can do about it. I guess the key to being happy is appreciating what we have at present. We may not get everything we want, but by appreciating what we have, we’ll realize we have everything we need.
Like ourselves the way we are. Better yet, love ourselves just the way we are. And I don’t mean being a narcissist, overly confident or idolizing ourselves. In relation to the third lesson, we can start by appreciating ourselves. If we do, life will be much easier to deal with and everything else will go with it.
Off to Thailand!
We are all set and are only three weeks away from our Thailand trip. I am sooooo excited. 
This is the first trip my honey and I will be having together. We’ll celebrate our 34th monthsary on 08-08-08 so we kind of planned for a pampering, adventure and romantic getaway trip all rolled into one. We’ll spend 3 days in Jomtien Beach in Pattaya and 2 days in Bangkok. We wanted this once in a lifetime date to be celebrated memorably. I cannot wait for our trip. Suddenly, the clock is ticking slowly. 
Birthday Celebration - Hong Kong Style
I had no idea how I will be spending my first birthday in Hong Kong. I don’t have any plans; I don’t know what I’ll do for that day. I actually thought no one would know as I am barely new to the company. I was originally thinking of just having lunch with a few friends but not telling them about the occasion.
To make the long story short, my instincts were wrong because they knew it was my day. Joyce arranged for a birthday lunch and there were 12 of us who went for a traditional Yum cha meal at Asiana Restaurant. We were supposed to go to another restaurant but due to heavy rain, we went to Asiana, which is just behind our office building.
Yum cha, in Cantonese, literary means “drink tea”. Basically, people drink tea while eating small portions of meal. For an average Filipino, the serving may not be enough for one meal. There is no rice (at least for the foods I have experienced eating) which is the basic food eaten by Filipinos. There may be a lot of food varieties but the servings are usually small. For instance, a dim sum has only 3 pieces per tray. Of course, you can order 2 or more trays but as I have observed, Chinese people do not get more than 2 trays to allow everyone to taste each kind. The most they would get is around 2 or maybe 3 trays for one kind of food. The rest should be different ranging from stir fried vegetables to an assortment of glutinous desserts.
The food is ordered either at the counter or you can get it to a food servant passing by your table. For each table, there is a card given and every time you order a meal, they will put a stamp on it so they can keep track of your orders. Of course, as the most important part of this meal, everyone sips tea occasionally while eating. It is important that the cups are always full of tea. Every once in a while, my officemates would pour more tea on my cup and everyone else’s within their reach. Once the teapot is out of tea, you need to take its lead off so the food servants would know you need to have a refill.
In contrast to the Philippine tradition that the celebrant would be treating his/her friends, I was the one being treated for this meal. How cool is that?! 
The celebration continued on Friday as 5 of us went for a night out. The celebration was a bit more Western this time – something closer to what I had been used to for celebrating birthdays. We had dinner at Al Dente’s in SOHO which is an Italian Restaurant. We had the usual salad, pasta and pizza. The pizza is superb, I must say. It has a salmon for its topping and although I am not a big fan of thin crust, the one we had was really good. The place was also nice, very cozy although it has low ceilings and narrow passage (very typical in HK as space is always conserved).
After dinner, we hang out at a bar nearby. The place was a bit busy but still okay. It was embarrassing though, as when they serve the menu, they had everything but non-alcoholic beverages. See, I don’t drink so there is nothing I can choose from. It’s a good thing V knew we could order some juice so I had punch.
So there yah go. That’s pretty much everything I had for my day. Nothing really special or fancy but it’s a much better way of celebrating my day than what I had originally thought. Until next year! 
