One Snap at a Time

I’ve been working here in the Middle East for more than 2 years now. It has quite a few perks like say a higher income, low volume of work, and a more laid back lifestyle. It’s not all that good though, as you’ll have drawbacks like being away from home, working with challenging people and adapting to a foreign culture, the latter being the topic of this blog.

Quite frankly, I’m beginning to forget how it feels to celebrate Christmas in the Philippines. Yes, we have shows on TV showing the festivities and depicting that Christmas feel to it, but it doesn’t seem to come close to the real thing, at least not enough for me to remember the feeling again. What it does is inject some feeling of loneliness, misery and who knows what other terrible feelings I have deep inside me longing to break loose.

I missed Christmas back home, but somehow I’m starting to get used to it. Like any other thing, which we allow to be absent in our lives for a long time, we get all too familiar with the absence that we tend to forget the feeling of its presence. Where once we felt we can’t live without, now were just as fine without it in our lives.

It’s terrible enough to have Christmas away from home, its even worse when you spend it in the Middle East. There just isn’t enough manifestation of the coming yuletide season. For guys in the States or in any other western country, I think it is much bearable, with the Christmas spirit being felt everywhere, not to count the snow which spices up the yuletide season.

I hope that the Christmas spirit doesn’t depart from me. I hope that before completely loosing the feeling, I may have the chance to renew it again. I hope, one of these years I’d be able to spend the Christmas back home. Hope, hope, hope, isn’t that one of the messages of Christmas? Hmmmm….I guess I still have it in me after all.

Ciao!