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Five years after my last entry, it's funny to return to this site. Weirdly enough, it's still an appropriate resource for my life.
For some backstory, after that last entry in 2012, I went back for my last year of school. I wrote papers of little consequence, and went to classes I can barely keep straight in my mind. I performed in shows that I quite liked, and I worked an extra part time paid internship for an environmental nonprofit for the year. Then I graduated. I did the interning thing a two more times, for not a lot of money. I worked as a bartender and a freelance writer for slightly more money.
Then I landed...not an internship per se, but a temporary role covering a maternity leave for another nonprofit. Somewhere along the lines and after a great deal of panicking and fidgeting on my end and some hemming and reviewing on theirs it turned into a job. Two years later, it's turned into the kind of job that involves a lot more time on planes than I'd quite expected.
It's a little weird to sum up my professional life in a paragraph like that. But
I think perspective is part of why I'm back here in the first place, that and to marvel at the number of bad jokes that infest my old writing like termites in a house wall. A little older and a little wiser, I’m also back to make a whole bunch of bad tangents and random non sequiturs. But mostly I'm back to write about some of my travels again as an adult. We won't be going into the particulars of exactly what I've been doing in each place, but it seemed like fun to throw out some contrasts. So without further ado, let's get started.
College thinking, Adult Budget Rolling from the beginning, my first trip for work happened about a year ago. For reasons that have a bizarre amount to do with beluga whales, I was sent along with my boss to a meeting of the International Maritime Organization. Given that this trip was something of a first and I had a sister in Germany at the time, my family took it as an excuse to meet up as a family in and around London. Somewhat more impulsively, we also took a day trip up to Leeds
to see the Royal Armouries.
The IMO is one of those structures the post-war world decided was a very good idea, in this case the notion that global shipping required an equally global conversation between nations about regulating the industry. At least in the context of the odd Titanic and Exxon Valdez sized disasters, it’s easy to see the rationale from both a safety and an environmental standpoint for this business. That said, IMO is now creaking a little bit under the weight of technical change and environmental challenges heaped atop it. That’s not to say it hasn’t done some good. Without the IMO a tanker spilling its entire cargo onto some hapless coastline or whale would be less of an event, more of another Tuesday. We were there as observers, or in a maritime sense, as the barnacles on the ship of IMO.
Traveling for business is very different than traveling as a student, even if the beats are remarkably similar. There are still parties, but they’re mostly done in suits and with a completely different kind of random stranger. There’s flirting of a sort, but it’s almost professional banter ending in a ritual exchange
of two tiny slivers of paper destined to live forever in our respective filing cabinets. There’s still music, but the volume is no longer set to Thunderdome. There are still budgets to keep track of, but the wallet’s no longer just one’s own. And there are even still things to see, but they all tend to look like conference rooms.
London marked the first time I began to accept that reality. Take, for instance, the flight I booked. Thinking with my wallet, I went with Wow(!) Air. The ticket was 200 less than the alternative, but the cost savings shrank considerably when I got to the airport and discovered my "carry on" bag was more of a "checked" bag in the eyes of my awaiting, and now laughing, aviators. Case in point, suits, ties, and a stack of infographics for the IMO aren't well suited for a ticket price set to student. Similarly enough, I parked myself in a hostel pre IMO, then found myself in hotels for the rest of the time.
The contrast was strange, and I don't think I fit in either spot well. I tried to work from the hostel beds during business hours,
as some Americans four years younger than me darted in and out and skyped loudly with their significant others in the States. Then in the hotel I tried to go down to a common space, which turned out to be a dimly lit bar serving flat British beer to set of older men with permanent scowls. Great fun.
But that wasn't the point of the trip this time. I spent a week working, talking, writing, and then trying to keep ahead of the growing mound of emails and oddball projects eying me from the States. That, if anything, is the big difference between the past and the present. Work travel's work related, but that doesn't mean the rest of your life is on hold. Sometimes that means taking Skype calls at 5:30 PM or later because that's the time someone on the east coast thought was great for them.
Wow! That Leeds to London? But that's far from all there is to it. The nice part about travel is that it's still travel. Even if all conference rooms have a "samey" quality to them the scenery around them is decidedly different. Walking to the IMO from the hotel meant a stroll down the Thames, and a glance out the window was to look at the Houses of Parliament.
So are the opportunities. Before my family arrived, I opted to see a small play production called Fables About a Boy. The premise had sounded intriguing, a blending of musical, Tim Burton-esque visuals, and a Bunraku puppet standing in for the protagonist. It was all those things, mixed together in the acoustics of a construction site and set to the script of a disgruntled child. I don't regret going, but it was rare to find myself truly wondering how any production could be so top to bottom wrong when the cast and set were so well handled. I also got to the Imperial War Museum, and even to a protest against David Cameron by various lefty factions who didn’t know then what they were in for as the Brexit vote loomed.
Just as fun, but more personally was the following week spent with my family. That meant a few better meals like high tea at Harrods, and a better class of musical when we saw Les Miserables. Les Mis is one of those stories I have an almost programmed reaction to. Yes, I'm going to laugh at this song. Yes, I'm going to burst into tears at that one. But I love it all the same, it's like an adult's sing along at this point.
We also found some time to get to the British Museum, which remains easily the most attractive historical crime scene I've been to. That it happened to coincide with Shakespeare's 400th Anniversary marked an even higher point, as an open sonnet-athon was underway the entire time we were there. Something about seeing the Elgin Marbles (nicked by Lord Elgin from Greece in the 19th Century) while listening to Shakespeare lilting through the hall might be the most quintessentially British experience of my life.
The trip up to Leeds was well out of the way, but since it meant wandering around five floors of arms, armor, and displays from all ages I was pretty delighted by it. In retrospect I'm sure it wasn't the best choice for the rest of my family, but events sort of take on a momentum of their own once a suggestion's been made. Still and all, wandering through some of the more oddball history of medieval armor showcases a lot of designs that are more art than scientifically practical, unless there’s a tactical point to a metal mustache that I’m just unaware of.
Not the worst two weeks by any stretch, and my passport even managed to stay with me for the entire experience this time.
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