although it was in London winter seemed dramatic

whilst winter attacked in Switzerland

autumn attacked in Helsinki

Moscow grew even more expensive

and Dubrovnik felt like summer

after many trips, Madrid began to grow on me

Bermuda provided brief but welcome rest

various trips around germany were scary

trips to Rome were frustrating too, but good weather and good food helped compensate

trips to paris proved frustrating

Egbert came to stay

i saw more of Britain than i imagined, travelling to Wales, 10 times to Scotland, and all over England

Bali was the perfect escape

singapore was a culinary paradise

Brunei was opulent, impressive, and odd

in Sandakan i met some relatives

Manila was an unexpected an pleasant surprise

i continued to hide from the northern winter in Hong Kong

2010 retrospective: the year begins in Cape Town

2010

i suppose it is fitting that 2010 ended with a last minute emergency business trip, and a psuedo passport crisis.
my last trip of the year was both last minute and action packed. i had to do a presentation for a client that should have been done last week, but wasnt because the miniscule amount of snow we had in London closed Heathrow and cancelled my flight. but the presentation urgently had to be done before the close of 2010, and so in the last gasp of the year a colleague and i headed off to Berlin to wrap everything up, but as my colleague has small children and was technically on holiday, he wanted to do everything as a day trip, which given BA's reduced (business) flying schedule over the holiday period meant a long day starting at 4 am. it also meant flying back on Sleazy Jet, from Schonefeld airport. Schonefeld seems to exist only to handle low budget flights, and it is a pretty grim place. As unimpressed as i was with it, so it seems Schonefeld's guards were equally unimpressed with me. Unlike some countries, Germany insists you go through passport control as you leave, at least on flights to the UK. I got as far as the passport booth, handed over my document and the guard stared at it for an unusually long period of time before asking me if i had another ID. i didnt. he insisted that i produce an ID card or a drivers license, but Britain doesnt have ID cards and I cant drive, so that didnt work. at this stage the guard announced that the photo in my passport was not me, and went off to fetch another guard. i spent the next while answering questions about the photo, turning my head in different directions, lifting my eyebrows and making other odd facial expressions for two guards who kept looking at me suspiciously.
they finally let me board the plane (which i delayed, to the wrath of 100 people or so) but suggested i apply for a new passport. i showed the picture to my colleague and asked if he thought it looked like me, to which i received an emphatic "no."
my passport was issued in early January of this year. has the year been so tramatic that i have become unrecognizable in 12 months?
so it hasnt been the best year. 2009 ended on a high, i had just finished my Phd, quit the job i hated, and had all sorts of plans for the future. but reality soon caught up with me. broke, i returned to work in the city, albeit for a different company. i started that job in March, and the time since has essentially been one big blur. i have travelled in over 20 countries, many several times, and the months flew by without my feeling even conscious, never mind in control, of my life.
the fact that this week, for the first time, i have been forced to close this blog to public readership, having found myself continually stalked by someone i dont even know, also indicates that this year was one full of trials. i hope that i am still the same person i was in January 2010, and hopefully next year will be better.

on cambridge

this year involves travelling until the last minute, and thus on the last week of the year i found myself up in Cambridge, which is sort of like my "home" within England, as i spent part of my childhood here, and my family has many friends in the area. it is the place i can always come to for a good chat in a nice pub, followed by a wander through the windy streets. Cambridge has improved over the years. when i lived here in the 1980s, there was practically no shopping around, and everything was closed on Sundays and bank holidays. Even when i lived here again in 2005-2006, the shopping was pretty minimal (the Gap and the French connection on the market square were the only places i think i ever bought anything). but that has really changed. there is a massive new shopping centre in the centre of town, with pretty much all the major brands in it(Ted Baker, All Saints, and Apple store, and a huge H&M and Zara across the way). I arrived on a bank holiday and the place was hopping. Two shops, Jack Wills and Hollister, had massive queues just to get inside the place, which truely amazed me, but also reflected very much the youthful/preppy Cambridge style. I marvelled that is was incredible that a town which had virtually no shopping facilities 5 years ago now has overcrowded malls and queues outside shops for crowd control purposes. My godfather, however, was no impressed, claiming it all masked what is still a persistant problem with unemployment. "Dont think everything is great just cause the centre looks sparkily" he grumbled darkly, himself unemployed. a walk through the streets outside the centre still features boarded up shops and many local people not connected with the university are on the dole, often for years at a time. equally revealing, many of the Poles who filled the city in 2005 have now gone home, attracted by increased prospects in their own country, which coincided with the devaluing of the pound and the rising unemployment as a result of the ongoing economic crisis in the UK. I remember in September 2008 going to an international banking conference and hearing the CEO of one of Europes largest investment banks say that this crisis was going to be different. He predicted there would be no real recovery until at least 2013. many people in the room looked at him like he was crazy and my boss at the time burst out laughing and said the predictions were "absurd". In January 2009, as we had our New Year Kick Off Meeting, the same boss announced that is was "clear" the crisis was pretty much over, and in 2009, things would get moving again. But walking around Cambridge this afternoon, i am not sure. Whilst there are signs of affluence, many still seem excluded.

2010 travel summary

So 2010 is rapidly drawing to a close, something I am on the whole grateful for. I spent a lot of this year in transit, covering over 20 countries over the past 12 months. As a result, and given my obsession with composing generally useless list, the below represents a summary of my best/worst of travel notes from the past year, in no particular order:

1) best new travel accessory- Bose noise cancelling earphones. After several flights trapped next to screaming toddlers (and why are toddlers allowed in business flights anyway?) I concluded that these were essential to my survival. Not only do they block the sound, they are incredibly comfortable. I still love my kindle, but I have to say the new ipads, which I haven’t indulged in yet, have increasingly caught my eye.

2) Best airport- either Hong Kong or Singapore Changi. This is a tough call- they both have great shopping, great food, and great functionality. I like the logical layout of Hong Kong’s system (if you are going to Macau or the mainland, you can go straight, with out mucking about with HK’s immigration etc) both have great staff, both are efficient. Why cant European airports produce this quality?

3) Consolation prize, Most efficient European airport- Helsinki Vantaa. For a small provincial city, Helsinki has good connections, especially to Asia. It has decent shopping, a good shopping food selection at the Stockmans, and an excellent layout. Unlike in Western Europe, planes take off in the middle of winter, regardless of the temperature and the amount of snow on the ground, because the airport is well prepared to cope. Connections can easily be made in 15 minutes, and everything is clear. The staff are multi lingual and helpful. But compared to Asia, this is indeed a consolation prize.

4) Best airport bookshop for oil and gas books- Aberdeen Dyce. Ok, this is a very specialist category, but useful to me, and no doubt a few others. The WH smiths there has an entire bay of oil and gas books, a great place to grab a book before the flight home.

5) Coolest business class lounge- Madrid Barajas terminal 4. I love the exposed concrete beams and the colour scheme, plus the BA/ Iberia lounge has a decent selection of international papers. Actually, even if they only had el Pais, I would be happy, damn good paper it is.

6) Wierdest place- the Nation of Brunei, the Abode of Peace. Run by His Majesty Paduka Seri Baginda Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu'izzaddin Waddaulah, this place is strange. Wealth is everywhere and happiness is enforced. This love of the populace for their leader is stunning. But in addition, the country has many other oddities to behold: proboscis monkeys, Mangrove snakes, sun bears, and peat swamps. Rowing down a swamp, in total quiet other than the occasional greetings when I passed some fishermen, when I suddenly passed the enormous gold roofed house of one of the Sultan’s palaces was certainly one of the years odder moments.

7) Biggest overrated place- Bali. It is not that I didn’t like Bali, maybe my expectations were just too high. The food was ok, the hotel was ok, the monkeys were nice, but it didn’t hold any surprises. The large numbers of drunk Russian and Australian tourists was fatiguing, and I came to feel like vomiting every time I saw a western woman approaching middle age wandering about alone, clutching her copy of Eat, Pray, Love and looking wide eyed for the love of her future.

8) Best place to have an expense account- Moscow. Hands down, this place wins on ridiculous prices. And spending money can be necessary to get quality, and even then there are no guarantees. Charging £15 pounds per bottle of water drunk in my hotel wins the ‘rip off of the year’ category. Thank god for the company card.

9) Worst place to get stranded by snow/ Icelandic ash/ BA strikes- Aberdeen. This has to be one of the most miserable cities on earth. There is nothing to do and no decent way to get around. Meetings are always held on industrial estates outside the city, and there is no transport. Even if you have loads of the company’s money to spend, there are not many decent restaurants to spend it on. The weather is horrid all year round- the warmest the air got on any my 12 trips to Aberdeen this year was 12 degrees in late July. The only saving grace is my hotel/ manor house, which is lovely.

10) Best hotel bathroom- la Griffe in Rome. Don’t ask me why, but I just love the red tiles.

11) Best find shop- Kingsley Heath, Cape Town. Like the South African Abercrombie, but with a more creative twist.

12) Work travel essential- my 2010 moleskin- I am not an organised person so I like to keep everything in one place. I put directions to hotels, maps, tickets, reservation numbers, everything, in my moleskin. I would be lost without it.

13) Best place to stock up on bribes (I mean gifts)- the caviar house & prunier in Heathrow terminal 5. this place is designed for Western people flying to Russia. Everything you ever need to smooth over Russian receptionists or PAs is there- grotesquely expensive chocolate, caviar, alcohol and everything else.

14) Best place to pretend I am a celebrity- Manila, the Philippines. Strangely, my surname makes me famous there, for no legitimate reason. People ask for my autograph and I get to travel with a private driver and my name goes to the top of the list at all top restaurants, which is why I will also add the below…

15) Best surprise- Manila. Maybe this was just the opposite of Bali. My expectations were low, and as a result I was blown away. I loved the Ayala Museum, learning fascinating details of a national history I had failed to pay sufficient attention to. Great food too.

16) Best history lesson- the Sandakan death marches, Sandakan Malaysia. We don’t study the history of the Asian front of the Second World War here in Europe. Learning about the Sandakan Death Marches and reading the testimonies of the few survivors blew me away

17) Best Meal- Rome. My only regret is that I couldn’t eat everything put in front of me. The waiter pretended (well, I hope he was pretending) to be hugely insulted. The interior is lovely, and the food was unbelievable, especially the cheese selection. The food was so fresh it seemed to melt in my mouth. The pasta (cacio e pepe) was mind blowing. The wine selection exhaustive and the service perfect. Unlike in London, there was no rush, dinner lasted 3 hours and I enjoyed every minute of it.

18) Best curry- Tiffin Room, Raffles Hotel, Singapore. I never had a bad meal in this country. i love the selection of excellent Chinese, Malay and international food. but the curry deserves special mention in my view, and the curry in the Tiffin room is probably the best i have ever had in my life. absolutely perfect.

19) Best emergency clothing buy- Thomas Pink in any of the Heathrow terminals. Whenever I get a last minute email informing me I will be gone longer than I expected, I run into Pink and grab whatever there is in my size and preferred cut. Sometimes I even go in and grab a shirt pre-emptively.

20) Worst place to do business- Rome. Conducing a meeting in Italy is like attempting to keep cats in a basket. Best not to even bother really.

new year comes early

I normally use the new year as an excuse to look for new jobs. But this year however, it seems the new year has come early.
This time I will be staying in the same company, just changing roles...exciting, but I have a lot of studying to do over the holidays...

the disposable academic

this week's economist has a fabulous article, subtitled 'why doing a PhD is often a waste of time.'

http://www.economist.com/node/17723223?story_id=17723223&CFID=151512952&CFTOKEN=68634053

it is scary how frighteningly true some of the points are. it is not an article against education or PhDs per se, but one highlighting the huge flaws in the system. life as a PhD student is hard: "one thing PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. some describe their work as slave labour. seven day weeks. ten hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread." All true. due to a technicality in Britain's nationality laws, i was declared ineligible for funding, although i have and have always had a British passport, the commission determined i had "failed to maintain a relevant connection with the United kingdom." as a result i had to work full time during my PhD to support myself living in London. I also discovered my East European MAs were useless, and as a result spent several years in service sector jobs. I worked 40 hours a week, and then came home and wrote my PhD at night and weekends, literally 16 hours a day 7 days a week, for 5 years. it was hell. Because my economic situation was dire, i got out of the institution labour abuse most PhDs suffer, as the article notes, most serve as slave labour to their own universities- getting a PhD student to teach full time for a year at Yale costs $20,000, whilst a "real" professor would get $100,000 for teaching the same courses, as part of what the article calls the long standing "implicit contract between universities and PhD students: crummy pay now for good academic jobs later." It is a promise that sustained many of my classmates through our studies, but it too proved to be a mirage. the statistics are abysmal. Only 49% of those who start PhDs in the humanities ever graduate, something i have witnessed first hand. Many of my own peers spent years slaving away at their studies, only to never quite write things up, or worse, fail their Viva. Even if you pass, the job market in academia is lethal, especially in North America (the US graduated 100,000 PhDs between 2005-2009, whilst 16,000 full time academic jobs came on the market. Again, I saw this first hand- practically none of my classmates got full time jobs upon graduating, most are hopping around, teaching 4 months here and there, waiting for something to come up. but most damning is the articles point that even when PhDs manage to get jobs in the private sector (no small feat given some of the prejudice out there against us egg heads) they often underperform compared to those with only an MA. Again, this is a lesson I have learned the hard way, desperately trying to catch up with colleagues who sometimes dont even have BAs, but have learned practical skills on the job.
I am a big fan of education and i think it should be open to all who are qualified, but the expectations around degree granting need to be carefully managed, especially in depressed economy. An education of whatever level does not guarantee you a job, and getting a job should not be your only motivating factor in choosing to continue higher education.
on the one hand it would be nice to say that i wish someone had forced me to read this article 6 years ago, but i doubt it would have made any difference. what would have made one would have been a tangible presentation of alternatives, and how i could achieve them. I was a good student, therefore I was always encouraged to keep studying, straight until i got into a doctoral programme. I continued to live in student squalour whilst many of my less successful peers went on to start earning serious money. Worse, pursuing academia caused me to rack up debt in the form of student loans which it has taken years of working two jobs to shake off. At the same time, in my company i see 23 year old telesales guys raking in 100k per year with the most minimal educational credentials. Although I intellectually enjoyed doing my PhD on many levels, I now realise i will most likely never work in academia, or use my PhD in any professional setting. there are loads of alternatives to education out there, and maybe if bright students were presented with a wider variety of choices, there wouldnt be such gap between the number of PhDs granted and the number of positions available, and there wouldnt be so many people like me, wondering where five years of our lives went.

on Britain

i have seen far more of the UK in my current job than i ever would have otherwise. i frequently end up going to highly random spots, simply because a client happens to have set up shop there, normally on some grim industrial park.
every time i find myself in one of these places that otherwise would have been off my radar, i have the feeling i am stepping out of the Britain i know and into the UK of my parent's imagination. My parents have spent little time here since the 1980s, and i guess their view of the place is frozen in that horrid Thatcher influenced moment in time. When we lived here back then, in Cambridge, there was one Indian take away reserved for special occasions, and even it wasnt great. The selection in the supermarkets was limited, and all other restaurants practically non existent. the food in general was uninspiring and wine could only be got in speciality shops- few pubs sold it. Many people were poor, and parts of the country struck my mother as Third worldish (the Scottish village my father grew up in didnt get indoor plumbing in most private homes until the 1980s)
Moving back to Britain in 2005, and living in London, i cant claim to have ever suffered any culinary shortage. I genuinely believe the food selection in both supermarkets and in restaurants is much better than in, say Paris, or really any other European city. My parents have staunchly refused to accept my findings, and i have spent years refuting their tales of a place that seems to exist only in their memories. but actually, they may have a point. stepping outside london reveals a country i feel foreign in, and one which does indeed seem to match their tales of 80s doom. I spent several days last week in Leeds, and several this week in Basingstoke, which is within commuting distance of London but feels like it is on a different planet. When my colleague and i headed off for Leeds, a guy from there recommended what was meant to be one of the best restaurants in the city. it was ok.....but no more than that, and certainly not given the 100 quid bill that came with the meal. that would be an ok meal by London prices, given the general price structures in the North, i would have expected a lot more than "ok" for that amount. I never had a horrid meal in Leeds (or in Manchester, Basingstoke or any of these places) but i have had a lot of over priced mediocrity, which i suppose is indeed the Britain my parents remember.

called on the spot

a Canadian company calls me in for my supposedly expert views on a variety of matters. over the course of 30 minutes or so, the man asks me a whole series of questions on Russia, and i stumble along giving my views. on the one hand it felt like having a chat down the pub, and i would have preferred a bit of whisky to loosen my tongue, but i was aware in this case that everything i said would be overanalysed in a way pub pronouncements rarely are. What will Russia look like socially and politically in 5 years? if you were an investor, in which companies would you be investing? what are the countries greatest internal and external risks?
finally, part way through one statement or another, i stopped and pointed out that if i genuinely had definitive answers to such questions, i would be a very rich person indeed. unfortunately, however, i have no crystal ball and am thus reduced to my own opinion. the whole process made me feel terribly inadequate.

Italy

for the second time in two days i find myself having a meal with an italian man desperately trying to explain to me that he is not the "typical italian." i have been sent to Italy for work, yet everyone i interview seems to want to make the same point: the country is filled with useless Berlusconi loving louts, but I am different. So what is this "typical Italian" i find myself asking everyone. there is no one answer, but rather a series of negative characteristics. "They" create the impossible layers of bureaucracy. "They" make the job market so tight there is no movement and no one can ever get anywhere or achieve anything. "They" are corrupt. "They" hold meetings and talk forever about nothing. "They" refuse to take responsibility. i talk to several people who fill my ears with their desire to escape. several people tell me they want to go to Britain for work. one guy in his 20s asks if it is true that in England people can be easily sacked from their jobs, when i confirm that it is indeed very possible, his eyes positively light up with pleasure and he pleads with me to tell him how to get a job...but when i suggest he just show up in London and give it a try, he looks horrified- he cant just move to another country without something lined up, after all.
we go through different business models aimed at contrasting how things are done in italy versus England, but they are all useless, even as points of reference, the rules are just too totally different to allow such comparisons, the entire system seems to be set up with laws aimed at encouraging competition that are paradoxically so protectionist that they stifle it. analysing them makes my head spin. every meeting lasts 3 hours and ends in no resolution, and with the person i was speaking to complaining about the dilapidated state of things. based on what people tell me, it is truly amazing the country still exists. at any given moment, everything is on the verge of collapse. when my return flight gets cancelled (then cancelled again), this is held up as evidence that nothing is working, although the cancellation had nothing to do with Italy at all, but rather was caused by the heavy snow in Britain. no matter- it still shows the end is nigh. on the first day of being stranded, i decide to go for a walk, just to get some fresh air, and accidentally wander into a riot, as angry students are lighting off flares and burning things. i grab a cab, we get stuck in traffic for ages, the driver moans that the end is clearly here. he blames Berlusconi, as does everyone else i speak to. when i point out that he was elected, not once but several times, i am assured that the votes were simply bought (they coast 20 euros in the south, i am told).
yet whilst professionally, my whole trip is a disaster, i couldnt be having a better time: it is below zero and snowy in England, and i get stranded in the 18 degrees sunny weather of Rome, the food is incredible and at no point is there any reason to get stressed. i find the whole experience extremely pleasant. but the people i work with feel they are suffering...different standards maybe? or maybe italy is simply a better place to be stranded in for some days rather than for a lifetime.....

best of.....!

so the lonely planet publishes a random book of "best ofs" every year. they used to be called the Blue Lists, but for some reason that title was dumped a few years ago in favour of the more generic "Best of Travel in 2011". I go through the book every year (or rather, i helped myself to it when i was still working in the bookshop) and have always enjoyed going through it. as readers of this blog know, i have also frequently written my own "best of" lists here, so i was quite amused to see that one of the lists the lonely planet came up with for their 2011 book was my old favourite "best bookshops in the world". i have been to just about all the bookshops on their list, and predictably, there is a fair amount of overlapping, both of us agreeing that liberia el Aq1teneo in Buenos Aires is probably the best bookshop in the world. they rated Shakespeare and company in Paris higher than i would have, and left out my favourite in Academic bookshop in Helsinki. In London, they gave the nod to Daunt books, which is really great- but out of brand loyalty i would have gone for the Waterstones at Gower Street myself.
another flip through the book highlights how much there is left to see and do in the world.- there are so many places yet to explore and discover!

on Cardiff

My job entails visiting lots of odd places. In continental Europe, I generally attend meetings in or at least near major capitals : Paris, Moscow, Madrid, etc.
For some reason however (tax cuts would be my guess) in Britain, these events inevitably seem to take place in odd places far from London, where no one would ever go unless they had, as I do, a specific meeting to attend. In such a way I have come to spend time in places I didn’t even know existed, and have accordingly seen many parts of the United Kingdom I never would have ventured to otherwise. I have to say that many of these destinations (Slough, Basingstoke, Solihull) have been rather grim industrial places filled with chavs in track suits and seemingly endless call centres. But none of the random places I have been to in England and Scotland prepared me for Wales!
If I have time, I generally google the place I am headed to before I get on the train, normally for practical reasons: taxi drivers don’t always know where places are and I like to have a map ready to show them just in case. So the weekend before I headed off to Cardiff, I typed the name of the place in to the search bar on Flickr. This brought up the excellent, albeit highly disturbing collection of photos by X X, which seems to present Cardiff as a hard living place of people vomiting into fountains and pissing in the middle of the road as cops looked on. It made my ancestral hometown of Glasgow, normally known for its alcoholism and violence, as a calm and peace loving place. I was a bit suspicious. In my ignorant mind, Wales conjured up images of sheep and harsh waves hitting jagged rocks in sheeting rain. But stereotypes can be deceiving, clearly. I innocently asked a couple of colleagues who had been there what there impressions were. One described it as “the wild West” and another said it was one of the scariest places he had ever been. I remained unimpressed and waited to see some sheep.
Upon arrival however, there was little mystery as to what led to the graphic images on Flickr. The main street in Cardiff (and there really only is one, with a lovely view of the Castle at the end) featured several pubs offering pints for 75p, which is the cheapest beer I have ever seen in Britain. For £1.99 you could even get ham and chips to go with your drink. By afternoon, people were bottling each other in the middle of the street, drunk out of their senses. This was a Wednesday, I shutter to image what Friday night must look like. My colleague and I wandered around the town centre somewhat baffled. We stopped to look at the jobs being advertised in the window of a recruitment agency (lots of call centres paying £7 per hour). We then looked at the weekend away tours on offer in a travel agency, which featured three types of holidays: 1) Eurodisney 2) all you can drink weekends away to Belgium 3) follow the Welsh rugby team around Europe!
I suppose that says a lot.

i hate it when the clocks change

so once again we have gone through this ridiculous clock changing business in Britain, with the result that eternal night has set in for the next five months. i really hate this time of year, and the light just makes it worse. it is meant to be lighter earlier, but that does me no good as i still end up going to work/ Heathrow in the dark. and the night setting in around 4 just makes the day seem to disappear. at least during the work week it doesnt seem to matter so much (i leave work as i arrive- in the dark) but at the weekend it is lethal. On Saturday i headed to the West End to meet some friends for a drink in Soho followed by a meal in Chinatown. by the time we got to the bar, it was pitch black. we had a couple of drinks and everyone seemed to be tired and yawning. it was 6pm. by the time we left the restaurant, it felt like the middle of the night, but it wasnt. time seemed to be evaporating in front of us...and yet it was still dark again when i got up the next day.
i get up, log on to british airways's web site, and book tickets to the Caribbean. i can feel that winter urge to escape Europe approaching.

on zurich and berlin

some months ago i wrote about the horrors of germany, having spent an absolutely terrifying trip to Dusseldorf, surrounded by people who obey traffic lights, designer offices and disturbingly automated coffee machines. i have now been forced to spend time in a place even more horrifying: Zurich. it is like Dusseldorf, but somehow even worse, even more automated and efficient. after some hours, i start to twitch with a burning desire to do something "bad" like ask for a diet coke at breakfast or something, spurning the absurd "nespresso" machines in the my room and the breakfast area. my room is of course, immaculate. it has a huge working area, with a massive granite desk, so that i can even have my colleagues down to finish our presentation. the shower is disgustingly well ventilated. it really annoys me. i have a very expensive tailored Thomas Pink white blouse with me, and the problem with these expensive shirts is that they are impossible to iron and really need dry cleaning. i didnt have time to run to the dry cleaner before the trip, and the hotel doesnt have one. the shirt is clean of course, but it needs ironing, and the hotel iron just doesnt manage it. so i try my old trick of blasting hot water in the shower, hanging the shirt on a nearby rack and closing the door for some minutes. but to my utter disappointment, after nearly 10 minutes, i open the bathroom door to find not a drop of steam in sight. the bloody thing was so well ventilated that my shirt was still dry!
the rest of the trip was suitably well planned and well organised. drivers arrived on time, meetings started and ended according to schedule and everyone was polite and attentive, leaving me feeling vaguely ill and desperate to get back to the comparative civilisation of east london.
shortly after my return however, i found myself headed with the same team to Berlin. whilst my general dislike for the German lands has been well vented on these pages, i have to confess that Berlin is at least somewhat tolerable. unusually for a German city, it has just enough moments of poor urban planning to make it somewhat human. Tegel, the airport we arrived in, is actually one of the most underdeveloped airports i think you can find in Western Europe, and it is run worse than many third world ones. the city itself is quite mixed. no doubt partly-but only partly- due to the artificial divisions of the cold war, the city lacks architectural coherence. By all accounts, Unter den Linden is meant to be the main historic avenue of the city, and it certainly ends nice and dramatically with the Brandenburg gates, but it is a far cry from the Champs Elysees, Andrassy Ut, or even Tverskaia. the buildings dont seem aligned, and it is unclear why many of them are even there. Similarly, the Reichstag is a magnificent structure with its ultra modern dome, but it too seems to be at a weird angle facing nothing. yet these features seem to be what ultimately saves Berlin from being as stylised and soulless as Dusseldorf or Frankfurt. its lack of order means you can wander the streets and still potentially be surprised as you turn a corner. plus, the locals are suitably sinful to be able to construct and operate at least tolerable bars and night spots...the food is atrocious, but then it is still in Germany after all and one should not be too demanding. and unlike other German cities, Berlin does at least seem somehow liveable- it has an excellent standard of living at a low cost, and endless amounts of seemingly underinhabited spaces. and herein no doubt lies the secret to its tolerable feel, as well as its problems. Berlin is broke. it is a city of cool students and the unemployed. it would be a great place to live if you had a well paid job, but there are almost none to be found. so it thrives on its own bohemian poverty, catering to its student culture, combined with tolerable art and endless fascinating history for the tourists and generally curious. it is no doubt this poverty as well which prevents the inhabitants from developing the smarmy self satisfaction of other German cities. which makes me wonder- if Berlin ever does recover economically and prosper- will it still be a decent place to visit?

transient

i wake up in another hotel room and struggle to remember which country i am in, although i remember perfectly the project i am working on and what i need to do. i grab a diet coke out of the mini bar and open my computer. some minutes later, i trot down to another hotel breakfast and find myself again picking through the same food you get in every hotel in the western world. i lament that european hotels dont have the nice variety of australian and asian ones at breakfast. i would prefer some rice and vegetables, but in Europe i always end up settling for the eggs (they are always there, waiting for me in a metal trough). i will then pack my stuff, check out, go discuss fossil fuels, return to an airport and fly somewhere, check into another hotel and repeat the process.
i have left england at least once a week since August, and there have been several weeks i have only made it back to london at the weekends. i end up in the oddest of places, ones you would struggle to find on maps in peculiar corners of europe: Leeds, Tampere, Bilbao. it is a rather peculiar existence, but at least not a monotonous one....or is it?

On School Fees

Despite the predictions of many, until now I haven’t felt that the new government in the UK was a total disaster. I didn’t vote for them, casting my ballot instead rather unenthusiastically for Gordan Brown, but I didn’t think it was a huge crisis that the Tories went on to form the (minority) government. Cameroon didn’t strike me as having the harsh evil streak of Thatcher, and as they were forced into a coalition with the libdems, I figured they wouldn’t be able to do too much damage that would hurt the country in the long term. But it seems I was wrong. Of course it was obvious times of austerity were on the way, and the first of the announced cuts I could stomach. Higher taxes have not yet been purposed, but if they were, I would be fine with that. I am not, however, at all happy about the plans to allow universities to charge any fees they like. Having quality state universities accessible to all is, along with the NHS, one of the best features about England (and I say England, not Britain, as these laws do not yet apply in Scotland, thankfully). The universities here are not free, but by coming in under the £4,000 mark, they are just about manageable for all. I know- I took out a bank loan to pay for my own studies in a prestigious UK university. Even as it was, I didn’t bother applying to Oxford or Cambridge (although I was encouraged too) because I knew that the £4,000 fees + the “collage fees” that those two universities are allowed to charge would simply add up to too much for my budget. By the time I approached graduation, I owed so much money that I was essentially unable to look for jobs in academia, which had been my chosen career path. I would not have been able to accept an academic job and still pay back the money I owed to the bank. And that was when fees (+charges) came to about £4,000 a year. If they had been higher, such as some of the ridiculous £12,000 per year figures being floated, I simply wouldn’t have bothered at all, certainly not with a PhD. The price would have just been too high to justify. As it is, I worked two jobs, seven days a week for over two years to help pull down my loans. My family helped as much as they could. I have a job that pays over double the national average wage. Even so, I cannot at the moment, approaching my mid-30s- imagine getting a mortgage, the deposits in the current market are just too restrictive. So if I find myself in this position, I cant imagine how a graduate finishing 3, 4 years in the future will feel. They will be burdened with even more debt than I ever thought possible, stuck with a no-doubt still tight job market, destined to spend years grasping at straws to rise above the miseries of student-style life in the UK. Unless, of course, they happen to come from nice wealthy families, like David Cameron’s or George Osborne’s, who can pay their ridiculously high fees, and help them with that first-time buyer deposit on their house. As it was, I was always acutely aware at UCL of being a bit less well off than my peers: my parents earned less than most of my classmates, and I had been to mediocre state schools, not refined public ones, or even comprehensives. Someone like myself finishing school today would feel no doubt like a total outcast, if they made it to a top university at all. More likely, they will not. the imaginative will go abroad to more hospitable places, like Holland, Canada or Australia, or they will accept a place beneath their capabilities in England, or they might just decide that the supposed benefits of university don’t justify the grotesque costs, and if they did choose that, I certainly would not be able to blame them.

on French strikers and Chilean miners

France is my new Iceland- a country continually wreaking havoc on my travel plans. At least the Icelanders could blame nature, the French are making a mess of everything by themselves. Over the past several weeks, their air traffic controllers have been continually going on strike, causing a massive decrease in the number of planes allowed to fly over French airspace, and thus obviously causing massive delays around Europe. It was due to this that I found myself with a 6 hour delay this past week in Heathrow, as my flight to Madrid got caught up by the French mess. I was well annoyed, as I got to Madrid around 4am, when I had to be up again at 5:30 for an early meeting outside the city. I had dozed off a bit on the plane, once we had been finally allowed to board it, although I had heard the announcement that our flight was a code share with Lan Chile, and that the connecting Lan flight would be held in Madrid, as 40 passengers on our flight were connecting to it. but I was still amazed by what I saw as I disembarked my plane in Barajas: Chilean flags everywhere and people sobbing and shouting CHI CHI CHI, LE LE LE at the top of there lungs. In my tired state, and rather perpetual state of geographic confusion, I wondered for a moment if I might have got off in the wrong country. But no, our plane had parked next to the Lan one, and we disembarked just in time to see Florencio Avalos, the first miner to be rescues, emerge in the rocket like capsule from the bowels of the earth. It was an amazing moment, and as tired as I was, I was glad I could witness Chile’s tremendous accomplishment.

on Helsinki

Helsinki must be one of the most respectable cities on earth. Other than the occasional drunk, it seems nothing ever goes wrong in the place. Everyone appears in control of their destiny, safe in the security that comes with one of the world’s most efficient welfare states. The education system is routinely classed as the world’s finest, and the health care system is in the same league.
That said, many of my earlier comments about Dusseldorf apply here too. I could simply never live in such a civilised place. I am too much of a savage to handle this degree of tranquillity. Yet I will always have a soft spot for Helsinki, certainly more than for other equally civilised places (Dusseldorf, Stockholm). I came here quite a lot as a child and teen, first with my father and then, in my late teens, alone of with mates. In those days it was a pleasant break from some of the chaos in Russia, and it was very close to St. Petersburg where I lived at the time. Things in Russia were very complicated at the time, and Helsinki always represented a welcome combination of calm and material comfort. That said, although I know Helsinki well, I have never been comfortable in it, I don’t understand its rules, or the way the people think and function. A Finnish friend has tried to explain and give suggestions, but her suggestions I found puzzling, and they served mainly to highlight how little in know about this nation. For example, she stressed the fact that my presentations must be impeccable, well- rehearsed and structured, but then even if they are, I should not expect much feedback from the audience. In fact, the most probable reaction is that they all cross their arms and stare at their feet- but supposedly that doesn’t mean they didn’t like it. She also stressed the importance of demonstrating imperfection, especially inn front of other women. This cannot be displayed in any presentation or work- related context, but should take some personal form, such as complaining that the zipper on my purse or jumper has broken! I blinked incredulously as she showed me how to demonstrate this in a “discretely obvious” way which I found totally bizarre. But then I freely acknowledge my techniques don’t work, so I suppose I have nothing to loose by trying out her moves the next time I am there. I wonder if at some point the Finns will get suspicious is suddenly a whole host of foreign people start showing up with zipper trouble?

about a bear

In 1980, the Soviet union held the summer Olympic games. The games have gone down in history for generally all the wrong reasons, such as the US boycotting, but in general they were something of a success for the Soviet Union. Huge stadiums and hotels were built around the country, including the monstrous hotel Rossia, which at the time was the biggest in the world. Interestingly for games set in the heartland of Socialist austerity, the 1980 Olympics was also the first sporting event to launch a mascot that achieved large-scale commercial success as merchandise. Designed by childrens’ book illustrator, Victor Chizhikov, Misha the cuddly bear cub became the hero of the games, presenting a warm fluffy image counter image to that being broadcast in the (boycotting) West. Misha was used extensively during the opening and closing ceremonies, had a TV animated cartoon version of himself and appeared on several merchandise products. Despite his international fame, Misha for me was always personal. My father attended the games, whilst I stayed home with my mother, as I was only about 18 months old and unlikely to appreciate the significance of the event. In Moscow, however, family friends knew of my existence (I am sure my father presented them with all kinds of photos) and the mother of one of my dad’s friends wanted to give me a present, to remember the historic moment by. Inspired by the games, but unable to afford one of the official Misha bears being sold to the tourists, this Soviet babushka made me my very own misha bear. The outside of the bear she knit herself, and then stuffed it with cotton balls. She then knit bit warm eyes and a smiling face, as well as a little red heart over the bear’s chest. The result was a humble looking beast, and one just the perfect size for a small child to slobber on and drag around. And drag misha around I did. The bear made many trips to and from the Soviet Union and later Russia. I took him all over the place for over 30 years, stuffed in a variety of suitcases. His head got a bit wobbly over time, and I chewed off the heart at some early moment in our relationship, but until this past weekend when he was savaged by my kitten, Misha was a reliable companion. Although I realise a stuffed toy is just a bundle of fabric, I was still upset to find him on the floor, his stomach torn open and stuffing spread all over the place. Given the care and attention that went into making him, Misha deserved a more dignified ending. He will be missed.

on madrid

Madrid is growing on me. Until this year, it wasn’t a city I had much experience in, it was mainly just a stopping off point to change planes on my way to South America. I suppose Madrid isn’t the first, or second, place in Spain foreigners would head to. It doesn’t have the striking architecture and excitement of Barcelona, or the beaches offered by more southern destinations. At first glance, it is not even that pretty, and lacks the impressive monuments of even many provincial Spanish towns. Yet, it is somehow an extremely pleasant business destination. It has well developed infrastructure: the airport is extremely well connected to the centre by an excellent metro system, cabs are readily available and not ridiculously overpriced. The hotels and restaurants are equally of good value, so I can stay in a top hotel in the centre and eat in top restaurants without giving my company card abuse. Of course, that technically doesn’t matter- I could eat or sleep wherever I wanted in any city on company expense, but I still like the fact that a good meal in Madrid costs me €40, instead of €150 in Moscow. Actually, it is not even the meal itself, what I particularly like here is that it is somehow comfortable. Unlike in Moscow, there is no pretension and people are laid back and cool; unlike in Rome, things here actually work. In meetings in various companies it is the same: the people are polite, honest and friendly. They don’t spend ages attempting to calculate the cost of your suit (as in Moscow), pretend to be happy and friendly when they are not (Houston) or leave you with the feeling that you are attempting to keep a litter of cats in a basket (Rome, Milan). So, all in all, there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about Madrid, it is just a pleasant place.

on travel, again

When I was about 7 or 8, I sat down very seriously and composed a list of the places I wanted to visit. After some hours of concentration and a few consultations of my father’s massive atlas, I came up with about 200 spots around the globe, mainly cities. Over the next several years, I seriously ticked off places on the list as I got to them. Alas, the list came to a fitting end- disappearing along with the rest of my luggage on a Delta flight- but I remember the top 5 destinations being Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Mexico City and Bombay. I don’t remember the other 195 or so, but I think it was a relatively complete list.
I have now managed to make it to all those places that captured my 7 year old imagination, and yet there are still so many undiscovered places out there, which makes me think that, 25 years on, it is time to come up with a new version, albeit in a much abbreviated form…so here it goes:

1. Tokyo
2. Machiu picchu (Peru)
3. Seoul
4. Victoria Falls (Zim/Zam)
5. Shanghai
6. Iguazu Falls (Brazil, Argentina)
7. Addis Ababa
8. Beirut
9. Rajasthan
10. Cartegena de Indias

Lets see how long it takes me to get there….

aberdeen

The moment the taxi pulled up to the building, something felt familiar, but I figured it just had to do with being back in Aberdeen, which is indeed a familiar place. But inside my nose told me it was more than that. I find my sense of smell is greater than my other senses. Last February I found myself in a temple in China, where I had certainly never been before, but my nose was telling me I had. A wall plaque explained to me why- the temple’s refurbishing had been funded by Chinese in Canada, and the whole structure had been built in one particular type of Canadian Cedar from Algonquin, the same kind of Cedar as had been used to built the camp lodge I had spent four summers living in as a child, in Algonquin park. I knew that smell. The same weird feeling hit me in this lodge in Scotland, but it took my mother to explain it this time: I had stayed at that particular hotel as a child. After she pointed it out, it all fell into place and I could vaguely remember it all, but of course my memories are the fragmented memories of a child- I remember the big fat ginger cat I played with in the garden and skipping stones into the Dee…but I have no recollections at all of the building or surroundings. I stayed in so many places regularly as a child that now I can only just recall. I think it is the result of a highly mobile life that sees me in a different country nearly every week. I think this is why, even as a child I became obsessed with photography. When we were living in Cambridge (when I was about 8), my parents tried to get me to keep a diary, which I resented and hated, not least as every entry had to be written separately on notepaper and then submitted for their approval before being written in The Book. I quickly managed to get out of that duty, reassigning myself as chief family photographer. I have never managed to describe in words the sights and smells around me, and I am constantly terrified of loosing memory of places I have lived in or worked in. I photograph everything- flats, cities, people- as part of a desperate effort not to forget them. In the book The Beach, the main character goes on holiday deliberately without his camera, arguing that the obsession of some people with photography prevents them from living and thus remembering the actual experience in the moment. Maybe that fictional character has a point, and in many ways I agree with the theory. In university, I rarely took notes in class, because I felt I understood things better listening attentively without the additional distraction of writing everything down. Yet, especially on a geographic and visual level, I fear my memory is too fragile and abused to contain the amount thrown at it, so I try to capture everything on camera, hoping that when I look at it some years later, it will at least remind me of some earlier moment of my life.

a sunny place for shady people

Money and "correct" behaviour can hide a multitude of sins.
Tax havens, sunshine and flexible laws attract the wealthy and correct appearing shadys of this world. Somerset Maugham once famously described Monaco as a sunny place for shady people. the same phrase can easily be applied to Bermuda. But, even less than in Monaco, you wouldnt necessarily know that on the surface.
The surface seen by north american visitors on a 3 day cruise shop over is incredibly civilised. The people are all well dressed, in a formal and conservative way. in fact you can easily spot the tourists, as they stand out in their cheap, un-ironed clothes. yes, the men really do wear those shorts, but not in the same way people abroad do. Bermuda shorts in Bermuda are part of a whole ritual of dress. you cant just wear the shorts, you have to have the well pressed button up shirt, normally a tie and jacket as well, and ABSOLUTELY the socks. the socks come in a variety of colours- they are frequently navy or black, but other colours can be seen too, especially if they match the shirt or tie. the shoes are always formal, quality leather shoes, never sandals or trainers. all in all, it is intended to be a formal look, and it is worn in all occasions, although i have to say that seeing a squad of HSBC bankers going on their lunch break looked rather like a group of colonial school boys from, say, South Africa, than the men they actually were. the women are equally formally dressed, although never in those shorts. there is little obvious poverty. housing prices are absurdly high even by London standards, yet people can afford it as average salaries are among the highest in the world and there is no income tax. the people are exceptionally polite, greeting you in stores and even wishing you a pleasant day randomly on the street. I could go on: the beaches are pristine, the restaurants excellent, albeit expensive....but that is not of course the whole picture. dodgy people abound as well, discreetly hidden by the civilised exterior that covers the very serious underworld. For tourists, Bermuda is one of the safest travel destinations in the world. but the day i arrive there is a drive by underworld shooting. some days later, a suspected murdered is busted by secret police, just as the british airways jet he was on was taxing on the runway, preparing for take off. someone i know tells seriously dodgy stories of drugs, prostitution and rape in some of Hamilton's most exclusive properties. someone else describes being confined to a well-known 5 star resort under police protection ahead of a court case.
despite pristine appearances, colonial school boys, it seems, sometimes run amuck.

travel disasters

My dear friend H has recently started a new section to his mammoth travel blog/ web page on travel disasters.
my little blog here is no where near to being as comprehensive as H's, but i was inspired by his idea to add a few dodgy memories of my own. so reviving my old passion for lists, here we go:

1. Srpsko Sarajevo, 2003
it all happened in broad daylight, just outside the bus station where you get the buses to Serbia. i was talking to C on the phone and was preoccupied by the story she was telling me, so that i didnt see the fist flying into my face. by the time my head was upright again, there was already a knife at my neck. blood was everywhere, but fortunately i later realised it was coming from my nose. in the end it was a simple robbery- they took my phone, my money, and whatever else the could grab. fortunately i was paranoid enough that my passport and bus ticket out of the country were in a secret pouch near my ankle. so i got on the bus back to belgrade, shaking and covered in blood. no one sat near me, although it was pretty crowded. back in Belgrade i had no money to get to Novi Sad, no phone to call my friends. so i walked to the Russian embassy where i knew people who knew people. they gave me some money, and the officer shook his head "it is those damn Muslims" he moaned. I, somewhat surprised, pointed out i had been in SRPSKO Sarajevo. the illustrious diplomat answered: "yes, i know, but you see those Muslims, they dress up like Serbs and beat up people to make our Serbian brothers look bad in front of foreigners." i am not sure which part of this anecdote is the worst.

2/a. Vukovar, June 2002
nothing bad happened to me here, as ever horror had already struck. the buildings were shattered. every street was destroyed. H and I wandered into an empty house, and on the shot out wall across from us, totally riddled with bullet holes, was a half blown up picture of Jason Donovan, the last sign of humanity left.
2/b Abhazia, July 1999
Russia might claim to have fought a war for this in 2008, but it was already functioning as a russian puppet state in the 1990s. I bribed my way across the boarder and wandered what had once been a beautiful resort town...but war had cleansed it of 80% of the original population. by 1999, it was full of the elderly, combined with Russian soldiers and prostitutes.

3. Dorval Airport, US side, December 1999
Flying from Canada to the US, you have to cross the boarder whilst still in the Canadian airport. it was thus fortunate that i was still sort of inside Canada, when the pile of Cuban stamps were found in my passport, and it somehow surfaced i had been giving, um....interviews, on Cuban TV. my right to do so, but the guards disagreed.....after several hours of questioning, i bolted back to the civilised side of the airport...enough said on that one.......

4. Rio de Janeiro, April, 2008
one of the ladies my dad was travelling with dies on the trip. unfortunately she died on a Saturday morning and hours are spent trying to navigate the Brazilian bureaucracy- at the weekend. A doctor had to come to certify she was dead, then a coroner had to show up, then embassy staff and so on, with the hotel staff fluttering about incessantly and complicating things further. Some one had to sit with the body the whole time, as we were constantly afraid one of the officials would try to steal her jewelry or cash (she had a lot of both)
i think my lasting memory of Rio will be trying to maintain a straight face, whilst attempting to speak portuguese and corpse sitting.

5. some autoroute in Western Europe, Easter Break, 1992
I am famous for my week bladder. but the time i was on a school trip, on a bus with no toilets, stands out. i really had to go, and ended up doing so on the side of the road, with my entire class watching and taking photos. this incident has repeated itself in other geographies, and i am sure most people who know me will have some similar story, but happening in the company of cruel teenagers was the worst.

6.Cambridge, June, 1999
on a walk with my parents in nearby Granchester, we are forced surreally to make polite conversation with Jeffrey Archer and Margaret Thatcher. it doesnt get worse than that.


7. Aberdeen, April 2010
Icelandic volcanic ash leaves me stranded in Aberdeen, where it SNOWS. i try desperately to get tickets on the overnight train, bu there are none. i end up eventually taking the scenic route back via edinburgh, but not before i get force fed enough deep fried pizza and fried mars bars to make me feel like death. mainly i was alone and bored...for days.

8. Paris- Cambridge, September 2005
I made this trip with my unhappy cat. the key low moment was trying to clean vomit off her fur in Dover's port, with English louts wandering past shouting "nice pussy." she had been sea sick.

9. Glavna Bolnitsa Novog Sada, July 2004
my appendix explodes and i end up having emergency surgery in provincial Serbia. everyone has heard this story already, but it still ranks up there!

10. The Ice Storm, Montreal, January 1998
ice freezes everything and all of Montreal looses electricity, running water and heat. temperatures fall subzero and we all are forced to sleep with each other in the hallway of our building, wearing all our clothes. we cant go to the toilet, but then there is nothing for us to eat either. eventually the Canadian army shows up and brings us blankets and portions of poutine, Quebec's contribution to the world of culinary horror. the situation lasts for over a week.

11. Algonquin park, July, 1987
I am on an off-base 5 day excursion from summer camp meant to teach us wilderness survival skills when a bear steals all our food supplies. the "guides" meant to be leading us (who were about 17 or so) dont want to go back to the main camp and admit that it had been their foolishness that caused the problem. so we canoe over to a campsite where lots of tourists go to set up camp, and the guides send me to beg for food, because i am the youngest and smallest and they think i will get the most. for the next several days i feed everyone else on bread and peanut butter i get given by strangers. possibly the most humiliating moment of my life.

Gulliver's travels in Madrid

My trip to Madrid was logistics nightmare. For some reason, flights from London to Madrid are always overbooked and outrageously expensive. When I tried to book last week, in order to get to a meeting, the cheapest ticket on British Airways or Iberia was over 1500 pounds- I could have gone anywhere else in Europe for less. Or, the company travel agent said with reservation….i could go on Easyjet, for £400. the choice was mine.
I am not a huge Easyjet fan, but I used to travel it a lot as a student, and I hate wasting money stupidly. Furthermore, service on Iberia is never great, and lately it has been pretty mediocre on BA too, so I accepted the Easyjet ticket.
The moment I arrived at Gatwick I started to regret my decision. There was one queue for all Easyjet flights, and it was immense. It took over an hour to get through it, and it was filled with predictably scary people, mainly headed for the south of Spain. The girl in front of me was loudly munching crisps, whilst the girl behind me pondered whether she could get a real tan on top of her spray tan. I cringed and put on my ipod. Then I got to the front of the queue, with the same hand baggage I use for every overnight business trip- a small carry on bag and my computer briefcase. No airline- Iberia, BA, Lufthansa, Norwegian Air- has ever objected to this….but Easyjet insisted that I had too much luggage and would have to check the computer bag. I complained that I did not feel comfortable checking a computer. So eventually it was decided that I could carry the computer- but I still had to check the empty computer bag, for an extra cost of £10 pounds, which I did.
and the flight was 1.5 hours delayed, and when I arrived in Madrid, well after midnight, the briefcase was missing. So I went to the hotel, and later went to my meetings carrying my computer in my carry on luggage, feeling slightly ridiculous. I got a call in the middle of the day saying my bag had been found, and decided just to pick it up back at the airport on my way home.
So I got back to Barajas, picked up my bag, and was of course then informed that I would still have to pay another £10 pounds to check it empty again on the way back to London. And as the guy was checking me in, he noticed the flight was almost 2 hours delayed. At this point, even the Easyjet staff seemed a bit embarrassed for their horrible service, and decided to make a kind gesture. “we would like to give you a bear” the man told me. Since no one had said anything similar to me since I was about 10, I imagine I must have looked rather puzzled. But sure enough- they handed me a little brown bear, dressed in an Easyjet shirt, telling me his name was Gulliver, and that he would bring me luck on the trip back. At this point, I was just hoping to make it home in one piece, but I thanked the guy and accepted the bear.
It was, it seems, an excellent gift.
I got back to London Wednesday and told my colleagues, who seemed incredulous that an airline would offer a teddy bear as compensation to a grown woman in a suit.
So on Thursday, just to prove I was not crazy, I brought in the bear and put him on my desk. Within an hour, a deal I had been working on for over 6 weeks was accepted. The next day another came through and the bear was becoming an office celebrity.
He is now seated on my desk, and it has been concluded that he will now go everywhere with me. Thank you Easyjet, it seems Gulliver is indeed a lucky bear!

in defense of BP- sort of

Over the past two months, BP has turned into everybody’s favourite whipping boy. They stand accused of negligence, eleven direct deaths, the destruction of an entire ecosystem, and the loss of a way of life for thousands of Americans. People in the fishing and restaurant industries have lost their jobs. Birds and fish are dying by the thousands or showing up on the shores of Louisiana coated in oil.
Is BP guilty of all of this? Yes, absolutely. But it is hypocritical and wrong for people and the Obama administration to single BP out for blame. It is even more ridiculous to paint them as some British neo-colonial force acting in American territory. BP is a massive multi national organisation, with 40% of its shareholders based in the US. It has no real nationality and is about as British today as Shell is Dutch. Furthermore ALL oil companies I know have blood on their hands. BP was simply unlucky it got caught on camera.
Contrary to what you might imagine reading the papers at the moment, oil spills are not uncommon, and this one is not the largest. Thousands of barrels are dropped into the ocean every year by container ships with faulty stabilizers alone. Whole cultures and peoples can be wiped out in the interest of western oil companies in places like the Nigerian Delta without anyone in the United States objecting or even hearing about it. safety standards in rigs offshore in Asia and Africa are abysmal and people die- but the lives of Pilipino or Malaysian offshore roughnecks are cheap and their deaths go unreported. In the name of oil, in reality if not in technical terms, The US has gone to war (Iraq being the prime example) and Western mercenaries have staged and/or attempted coup d’etats aimed at overthrowing third world governments sitting on oil reserves (such as in Equatorial Guinea, whose conspirators included an assortment of South African mercenaries, British aristocrats and even Mark Thatcher). But again, these things tend to happen in places like West Africa where journalists are few and lives are cheap. Shell, Chevron, Conocophillips, BP- they are all guilty at some moment or another of atrocities somewhere and until now, the US government has never objected- remember Sarah Palin in the last election shouting “drill baby drill”? they are only objecting now as the results of that drilling is washing up, literally, in their back yards.
Regardless of the agonized hand-wringing taking place at the moment in the US congress, these sorts of accidents are going to become more frequent. We are slowly running out of oil. What is left out there is going to be further offshore, and greater depths, and in increasingly hostile environments. Such reserves will be more expensive to recover, and these companies with both need to raise prices and cut costs in order to get them. And yes, more people will die for oil. And the die for oil because of our collective western greed, but American greed above all. The US consumes more oil than any other country by an enormous margin. It is predominantly to feed US demand that villages in Nigeria get exterminated, and it was to feed US consumption that the Deepwater Horizon was drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. If Americans are truly upset about the oil washing up on their shores, they should start petitioning now for massive tax increases to fund the creation of effective public transport networks that could help reduce their dependence on cars as well as to research alternative energy sources for the future. I don’t, however, see that happening.

on business travel

Many of my friends, especially those who went on in academia, assure me I have a glamorous life. I suppose they get this impression as frequently when they call me I am somewhere abroad, or when they they meet me in the pub and ask me what I did that day, I say I went to Rome or Aberdeen or something similar. One of my flatmates is the same, every time she hears I am off somewhere she gets excited (“oh, rome, how romantic, you must go to the Vatican…”) when I get back and tell her that I didn’t see a single place of cultural interest, she looks at me as though I were some sort of philistine or Neanderthal, always with the implication that SHE would have managed to see such places if SHE had been there. But the truth about it all is that corporate travel is mainly just boring. Most of my time is spent killing time away in airports, most of which look the same (I am sitting now in Dusseldorf, terminal A, with a stunning view of the sun slowly setting over an Iberia 737 that is parked in the gate opposite- really romantic scenery that) when I am alone I read and write, which isn’t that bad, but is certainly far from being romantic or glamorous. When I am with colleagues or my boss, we normally end up in the airport bar, generally talking rubbish or watching the football/rugby/whatever-is-on. What my flatmate fails to grasp no matter how many times I try to explain it is that travelling for work is fundamentally different than travelling for pleasure. My company books me a tight schedule so as not to waste my time and consequently their money. Yes, I have a nice fat expense account, but it is not for pleasure. Don’t get me wrong- I would much rather be travelling than in the office, not for the travel itself, but because I like to meet people in their native setting and have negotiations on their terms. And…..well, anyway, enough for now, it is boarding time.

germany

I have never much liked Germany. It is hard to pin down the reasons as to why. Maybe it is for the same reasons I never liked learning German at school- it is close enough to my own language to be recognizable, but then just when I am nearly tricked into some sense of affinity, I realise it is actually rather different, get annoyed and cant be asked anymore. Or maybe it is just embedded in my DNA, I am not sure. I am certain however that if I spent more time here I would probably be arrested. I manage to break every rule, and I do it without thinking- like crossing the street when there are absolutely no cars coming in either direction, but the light just happens to be red. Some concerned citizens pointed out my error today in best pedantic German fashion. They seemed as puzzled that I would actually be breaking such an obvious rule as I was that they should actually be dressing me down for it. pedantic, concerned citizens annoy me (I mean surely I should be allowed to risk my life crossing the street where I feel like it, and in any case THERE WERE NO CARS) I am reminded here of a story a former professor once told me. Just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, she was offered a visiting professor position in Edmonton, which she described convincingly as the Siberia of Canada. So off she went. At the end of the year, she was offered a contract to stay on as a permanent member of staff, with a decent Canadian salary, at a time when academics in Moscow had essentially been reduced to dire poverty and were often dependant on taking bribes from students to get by. Despite the generosity of the offer, she declined and returned to Russia. When I asked why she said “kanada, eto strana kak apteka”- Canada is like a pharmacy: so clean and sterilised that you could eat your dinner safely off the floor of any public toilet, and my poor professor returned to Moscow with the desire to kiss the first stinking, drunk homeless bum she could find. In one of my favourite stories of the Russian experience in Canada, she was leaving the office late one night (still working Russian-style hours clearly) when a police officer approached her. Like a good Soviet citizen, she immediately gave him her passport, no doubt to his great confusion. He then told her it was very late for a woman to be walking alone- could he escort her to her car? She was too scared to object, and was convinced he would rob her as soon as she got to the car. But when they made it to the car, he just opened the door and wished her a pleasant evening and went off on his way. She naturally became convinced he was a spy sent to monitor her activities.
A slightly absurd example, but I understand that professor’s logic, hopefully without the unnecessary paranoia, as it is basically how I feel everytime I am in germany. The various rules, written and unwritten, are so numerous and so rigid that I feel inclined to rebel, or at least to start questioning them. In its obsession with tradition and ritual masquerading as genuine rules, Germany is actually far closer to France than it is to Britain. But it is somehow even scarier, as the Germans are more efficient than the French at following their national written and unwritten codes.
Walking around Dusseldorf, it is clear to see that all the international studies indicating that this is one of the most affluent cities in Germany, with one of the highest living standards in the world, are no doubt correct. The transport is efficient. The streets are spotlessly clean and the offices immaculate. Walking along the Rhine and coming in from the airport, I can see endless blocks of flats of the quality you hardly ever find in England, and when you do, they are reserved for the ultra-rich. In Dusseldorf, it seems such structures are the norm. everyone looks prosperous and healthy. It drives me insane. Give me Moscow any day over this!

on black bread

Unlike me, my father is a proper Scot. He claims bargain hunting is simply engrained in his DNA. Once in Manila we walked by a Diesel shop and my father said “lets go in and see what is on sale” although there was no obvious sign of any sale. Some 30 minutes later, after intense negotiations, we left with several leather belts which had been 40% off, and which my father talked down further until they became 60% off. I am wearing one now. He can haggle anyone vendor down by some margin: even if he doesn’t speak their language, he uses facial expressions to mysteriously push down the price.
At home where he lives he is something of a known quantity. He can tell you the price of anything in any local supermarket, and he knows every offer on at any moment. When he travels with me, we end up in random conversations, and sometimes even going for drinks with people he has met whilst discussing prices. I once left him alone in Punta Arenas, Chile for about 10 minutes, and when I came back he was drinking a coffee with some Chilean pensioners, discuss the price of salmon. My friend Conar noted that discussing prices is the Scottish generic conversation equivalent to the English standard comments on the weather. He might be right, but I maintain my father is an extreme case.
Yet what baffles me is his blind spot when it comes to Russia. Every time he visits me in Britain (which is rare) he complains endlessly about how overpriced everything is. But he consistently refuses to believe me when I complain about overpricing in Russia. His Russia is frozen in time, somewhere back in the Brezhnev era. When I try to persuade him, he claims I find it expensive because I live in a business traveller bubble. Maybe. But I am the same business traveller in Moscow that I am in Rome, Paris or Madrid- and Moscow is way more expensive than any of those. If I persist in my views, he insists that if only HE were there with me, he would ferret out good bargains. The last conversation on the matter ended with the argument ending declaration “well, you just don’t understand because you never faced down Adolf.” Once any conversation moves to the War, I know it is time to change topics.
Now I have decided to take scientific measures to prove my point. In doing so, I have been partly inspired by my childhood friend C. C works for some government agency (I forget which) and she monitors inflation. This involves getting pensioners, much like my father, to go around supermarkets and note down prices. If the pensioners she recruits are anything like my father, they were probably doing this anyway- C just makes sure they get paid for it. Presumably this information then gets compiled into some sort of database for government purposes. My aims however, are strictly personal. So I have started gathering receipts from grocery trips to different cities and taping them into the little black book I always carry on me. I then use it as concrete evidence to demonstrate to my father that he is allowing nostalgia to warp his bargain drive. Yet despite the presence of concrete evidence demonstrating that rice cakes in central London cost 85p, whilst in central Moscow they are £3.30, my father still refuses to accept my argument. “Man does not need rice cakes. If you had lived through the war, you would have looked at the price of black bread.” Probably I should give up, I sense this is a battle I shall never win.

moscow

It has been a long time since I was last here- too long in fact. It has been an even longer time, seven years to be precise, since I left Russia to study in Hungary. But the moment I arrive it feels like I still live here. Some things simply never change. I lock in to Moscow mode. I have been told I am a different person when I am here- I am not, I just use different parts of myself to function. But being back makes me realise acutely both how much I have missed Moscow, and why I will probably never live here again. As one (Russian) girl in my office put it- everything in Russia is great- except sometimes it makes you want to cry. I think of this as I go to my first meeting. In addition to my business card, reception takes and photocopies my passport and migration card- all of which are studied with more attention than I suspect my actual company materials will be. I then have to fill in several forms, all of which need to be stamped. I am then given an entry pass, and an armed guard escorts me through the building to the section I need to be in. fortunately I anticipated this and arrived at the office complex 15 minutes early to allow time for the procedure. This is quite efficient in many ways- one of the companies I am meeting tomorrow needed me to scan and fax over all my passport details 48 hours in advance, and I am sure there will still be piles of forms to fill out tomorrow when I arrive. At least I am used to this. I could have taken a consultant from my company with me, but chose not too on the grounds none of them speaks Russian. This is true, but another part of the reason was simply that I cannot imagine explaining this sort of thing to one of my British colleagues. I cant imagine taking them around on the metro and trying to explain its wonderfully efficient system, which is super user-friendly and well-signed posted….in Russian. And I certainly cannot imagine trying to explain the situation when I arrived in the airport and ran back in forth between several queues in an attempt to get through passport control within an hour or so, hindered by the people in front who would invite the 20 friends who materialized out of no where right as they approached the front of the queue and suddenly gained the right to go first.
In the evening I go for an incredibly delicious Korean feast with old friends. We drive through the city with its bright illuminated streets and wide avenues. We reminisce about the past, laugh, drink beer and eat kimchi and I am reminded what a special city Moscow is, particularities and all.

Aberdeen

Amazing how dependant our world is on air travel, so much so that 6 days without it can create unprecedented chaos, and touch so many people. One friend was meant to be the best man in a wedding ceremony, which he obviously missed. A colleague was stranded in Rome and had to take a several day trip, patching together cars and trains to get back to London. Another colleague got stranded in Dubai, whilst changing planes on the way from Tokyo to London. I ended up commuting by train between London, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Aberdeen is the oil capital of the country. My father was raised in a satellite town 20 kilometres or so out in the countryside to the West of city, and in those days it was a sleepy backwater place, poor by even Scottish standards. Most of the lads my father grew up with planned to work on the land after school. Secondary school was voluntary back then, and my father was the only boy from his year who chose to go. The others didn’t really see the point. No one imagined that oil reserves would be found offshore, but they were in the 1970s, transforming Aberdeen forever.
That said, it is still a fairly bleak place, albeit an expensive one. As I arrived in the evening it was snowing, although it is late April and Spring in London. But then Scotland is known for condensing all four seasons into a day, rather than stretching them over the course of the year as the rest of the planet does. Sure enough, it was sunny for a few hours the next afternoon, although still blisteringly cold. For reasons beyond my comprehension, the entire core of the city was built with granite, giving it a gloomy grey colour to match the sky. But most of my meetings take place on industrial estates outside the city centre. From the outside, these estates look pretty grim, but that hides the activity that takes place on them, and the incredible sums of money being pumped about. Equally surprising is there multi-national character. Over the course of any given day, I find myself talking to Texans, Norwegians and Mexicans. But, unlike in most European cities, the cab drivers are all locally born, and astonished when they discover my local origins. One fellow driving me out to a meeting in Dyce was only two years younger than my father, but had gone to school a couple of towns over. He marvelled at my exotic accent, especially when I told him that my (adoptive) grandfather had been the headmaster of the school in Oldmeldrum. “You sound like a real Australian!” the taxi driver marvelled, and I didn’t bother complicating the story by correcting him. But it turned out that Australia was more on his mind than in my accent- he and his wife had thought of moving out there in the late 50s, during the Australian government’s “bring out a Briton” programme. Passage was apparently only 10 pounds a head in those days, and nearly all who went got land. The taxi drivers eyes got misty, looking out in the distance to the future that never materialized: a ailing father in law, the birth of children, a minor job promotion….and in the end they just never made it out there. “Just think, if I had gone, my grandkids would all sound like you” the driver said with a forced laugh, whilst I thought that if my father had stayed, I would no doubt be speaking proper Doric myself, instead of my bastard hybid tongue. The driver and I sat in silence, I guess each imagining how things could have been, had different decisions been taken half a century ago.

image making

so off i trot to the gym. I am asked if i would prefer a male or a female. i choose a male on the assumption that any female in such a job must surely be a bitch, whereas any male doing such a thing must be gay. gay men are easier to get on with an normally have better taste, so i went for the male option. the night before the appointment, harry is in town. he bursts out laughing and describes in detail the person he thinks i will be meeting: totally gay, probably latin american or arab. he proceeded to describe exactly what would happen and how. I doubt harry has ever gone through such a process, but he clearly knows what he is talking about. I showed up at my new gym last night, just in time to see Joao, my new personal trainer, prancing towards me. thats right, prancing. i have to admit, joao is lots of fun and he makes me laugh, which is just as well as the initial tests indicate i am way more out of shape than i thought. i had figured that biking around everywhere would at least keep me fit, but evidently not. although my BMI is excellent, i did poorly on most of the tests. Furthermore, after a 45 minute work out, i confess that i woke up today barely able to move. and here i have to grudgingly admit Joao the uber gay brazilian knew his stuff. he analyzed my body and proceeded to select exercises that hit every one of my (numerous) weaknesses. he came up with activities i had never heard of, and managed to exercise muscles i didnt even know i had- although i certainly feel them all today. and he did all this with a huge smiling and flying jazz hands. He also recommended i train in boxing, correctly concluding it was well matched to my personality. so we spent a good while in the boxing arena, as he taught me some basic moves. fortunately here i was not quite so lost. like most Scots, i know how to fight. the more he teased me dancing around the ring, the angrier i got and the harder i punched. it felt good.