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in his Ubi et Orbi, the Pope issued a familiar message: don’t let this Christmas be another one symbolised by the commercialism. i have defied him. in my defense, it’s been nearly 1.5 years since i did major shopping and Boxing Day Sale was too tempting to miss.

prior, i had a great Christmas lunch in St Francis with over 50 people around. You would expect Turkey to be served but instead you have familiar asian dishes like rendang, fried beehoon, steam rice and alike. after all, it’s dedicated for international students who can’t celebrate with their families.

back to my Boxing Day experience, we started the day with a compulsory brekky and rushed immediately to the City Center. I have never woken up so early before to do shopping, only to be beaten by over-enthusiastic buyers who seem to be grabbing everything within sights.

the funniest thing happened when we made our way to Chadstone (parking is just unbelievable!). In one of the stores, person A who is part of our group (i shall refer to him as such to avoid embarassing him and the code of silent will hopefully still be intact!), was interested in getting a nice shirt. He discovered that the shirt is the odd one out coz there was no sale tag on it, whereas everything else in the store were on sale. So he asked the sale attendant, and she confirmed that it was not on sale. Dissapointed, he then made a 15 minutes effort to scratch a sale price tag from other items (it was one of those sticky one written by pen) to put it on the shirt he wanted. So there he was, a $179 shirt became a discounted $80. Luckily for him, 5 minutes later, he found the same clothing article hanging with the sale tag on it. And the sale price was $69!! We couldn’t stop laughing. Good thing he didnt pay for it first. He enquired the same sales attendant, and the only thing she could offer was a shrug and told him that omission might have occurred and $69 was the correct price. Besides, it would have been on the computer…..

I nearly blew off my credit card limit when i overspent than what i budgeted for. But i guess, it’s all worth it now even though i still have a little bit sense of regret. Indomie for the next one month is a real possibility!

And only today we did The Queen. It was a crossover between Doco and Movie. Quite slow but good insight to the HRH reaction in the drama unfolding after the Princess of Wales’ death. 4 out of 5.

p/s The recent earthquake in Taiwan has cut off the internet’s international connection in Indonesia. My aunt just told me that it will be a month before it will be restored to normal. She can now only surf the local sites. No MSN, no Hotmail, no Yahoo…. It seems that websites hosted in Indonesia cannot be access from outside too. My indo news sites are giving me the unreachable error messages.

Update: apparently, the problem is more widespread to most Asian countries…banks and financial markets are also affected.