Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot

Travelling with work has to be the best way to go abroad - it immediately removes two of the biggest bummers:

1. Having to pay for it, and
2. Being expected to enjoy yourself

Once these two factors are irradicated you are immediately free to have the time of your life. Particularly, being expected to enjoy yourself - there is nothing worse than paying for a holiday and then feeling obligated to enjoy it because "wa-hay, you're on holiday - you have to have a good time", usually by spending more money and hence being more miserable when you return. Being not expected to enjoy yourself has the opposite effect, like when you were in class and ordered to work in silence - it was an immediate cue to start a sniggering fit with your friend.

So I've spent the last week in Boston, which I always thought was a suburb of New York, but it seems it's some two hundred miles North of the Big Apple. It boasts the claim that it was where the spark that ignited the American War of Independence occurred, apparently over a shipment of tea?? And it’s where the ridiculously over-popular Cheers was set. Now I'm not usually one for getting all giddy about tv shows and their locations but I have to say, when you come across a place that is apparently so familiar, you kinda get excited - it's almost like seeing your old house or school - shows you how much these things implant themselves in your psyche. There I was standing by the Cheers sign grinning like a fool, having my photo taken and pretending I was Norm at the bar.

For all its faults, there really isn't a better place to come than the US if you're on expenses - money is king, and they have an infinite number of ways of extracting it from you. Saying that, the quality they offer is so much better than what you're used to, it easily loosens up the purse strings and coupled with the freedom of an expense budget, the greenbacks soon start flying. You start to gain a perspective on why the Americans think so much of themselves - walking about among these awesome skyscrapers cannot fail to impress, whereas munching your way thru a five course meal at the top the tallest in the city, is a pretty God-like experience.

I think it is this kind of inward-looking, self-congratulatory attitude that makes most Americans so deplorable to the rest of the world, but while you are within their bubble, you can see why they think they've carved themselves their own sweet materialistic piece of paradise.