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Back from travel
Tuesday, November 15th, 2022 07:38 pmSo I'm back in the US after five weeks out of the country running around the UK, Germany, Denmark and Ireland. Mostly not vacation. We have offices in London, Munich, Copenhagen, and Dublin, and I wanted to meet my coworkers. Have wanted to meet my coworkers for more than three years.
Anyhow, with the pandemic sort of in a manageable-ish place, I finally said I am not waiting anymore, I don't care if you help me finance or plan it, I am just flipping going. I am hoping to plan another such trip to Ukraine when it's ...doable? Remotely reasonable? But for the time being this is what I could do, and I did get to meet some coworkers who had been in Ukraine and Belarus, but have relocated. Best part of this for me was getting to meet the last person I mentored at work. When I was helping him onboard, we were totally remote and 7 hours apart in time zones. I wished so hard that whole time to be able to sit down with him, and it was really nice finally doing so.
I did also have a couple holidays while I was over there and took four half days so I could go do some things I wanted to, such as: head up to Sheffield to see a comedian I like on a weekday, stay over and take a trip over to Manchester so I could go see Thea Gilmore in concert (!!! after being a fan over 20 years!), and travel from the UK to Germany via train rather than plane because ye gods I don't like flying.
Anyhow. So I got to see several UK comedians while I was over there, spent some time seeing Bonn, bopped over briefly to Malmö mostly just so I can say I've been to Sweden, saw Rossini's William Tell from front row seats in Dublin, and did a day tour in Ireland of the Cliffs of Moher and Galway.
Broadly this was all really nice, and traveling this year has been a great antidote to the past couple of years where that was totally untenable. And though it was a bit of an expense, it was totally doable and isn't going to put a huge hole in my budgeting for this year. (I did generally stay in hostels and minimize costs in as much as I could. This is not to say it was totally inexpensive, but it wasn't bad.)
It's also nice, afterwards, to be back in Boston and in my own apartment again. Staying in hostels is sort of fun and social for me, but ye gods, when the bathrooms are stupid it stresses me out so much. Like the ones in Munich and Dublin where the shower setup was unavoidably creating somewhere between a lake and a puddle in the bathroom. In Dublin I kept wanting to go downstairs to shared bathrooms by preference over using the one in the room with me, it was so unpleasant.
After this trip I'm beginning to form more of an opinion about Germany, which is useful. It's not entirely positive or negative, which I suppose is more likely to be a realistic take. This was a particularly interesting time to go through several European countries including Germany - I consistently was masking on mass transit and generally in grocery stores. From what I saw in the UK, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, and Ireland nearly no one else was. In Germany it's still required on transit. When on a train that went from London through France and Belgium, no masking required the whole time. Going from Belgium on to Germany we had the first point where we got an announcement it was required on crossing the border.
I don't know how I feel about everything on this topic at this point, but I think if anywhere makes sense, to me transit makes sense. It's something where some people cannot actually live their lives without it. For people who are immunocompromised, I'd sure as hell rather be living in a place like Germany right now if I were them, versus anywhere else I'm seeing. And I'll be visiting my (elderly, not in amazing health) mom for Thanksgiving again, so whether or not I might at some point stop masking on transit, I'm not stopping in the next couple of weeks. I'm honestly not sure I see the point of stopping during winter at all. It's not that arduous. I understand school being a difficulty, and I wouldn't want to mask for 8+ hours at work, but transit?
Well. Anyhow, I'm glad to have gotten to do this trip, and it felt like a reasonable point in time to get in before whatever happens this winter with the war and everything else. ...boy do I hope next year trends better.
Anyhow, with the pandemic sort of in a manageable-ish place, I finally said I am not waiting anymore, I don't care if you help me finance or plan it, I am just flipping going. I am hoping to plan another such trip to Ukraine when it's ...doable? Remotely reasonable? But for the time being this is what I could do, and I did get to meet some coworkers who had been in Ukraine and Belarus, but have relocated. Best part of this for me was getting to meet the last person I mentored at work. When I was helping him onboard, we were totally remote and 7 hours apart in time zones. I wished so hard that whole time to be able to sit down with him, and it was really nice finally doing so.
I did also have a couple holidays while I was over there and took four half days so I could go do some things I wanted to, such as: head up to Sheffield to see a comedian I like on a weekday, stay over and take a trip over to Manchester so I could go see Thea Gilmore in concert (!!! after being a fan over 20 years!), and travel from the UK to Germany via train rather than plane because ye gods I don't like flying.
Anyhow. So I got to see several UK comedians while I was over there, spent some time seeing Bonn, bopped over briefly to Malmö mostly just so I can say I've been to Sweden, saw Rossini's William Tell from front row seats in Dublin, and did a day tour in Ireland of the Cliffs of Moher and Galway.
Broadly this was all really nice, and traveling this year has been a great antidote to the past couple of years where that was totally untenable. And though it was a bit of an expense, it was totally doable and isn't going to put a huge hole in my budgeting for this year. (I did generally stay in hostels and minimize costs in as much as I could. This is not to say it was totally inexpensive, but it wasn't bad.)
It's also nice, afterwards, to be back in Boston and in my own apartment again. Staying in hostels is sort of fun and social for me, but ye gods, when the bathrooms are stupid it stresses me out so much. Like the ones in Munich and Dublin where the shower setup was unavoidably creating somewhere between a lake and a puddle in the bathroom. In Dublin I kept wanting to go downstairs to shared bathrooms by preference over using the one in the room with me, it was so unpleasant.
After this trip I'm beginning to form more of an opinion about Germany, which is useful. It's not entirely positive or negative, which I suppose is more likely to be a realistic take. This was a particularly interesting time to go through several European countries including Germany - I consistently was masking on mass transit and generally in grocery stores. From what I saw in the UK, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, and Ireland nearly no one else was. In Germany it's still required on transit. When on a train that went from London through France and Belgium, no masking required the whole time. Going from Belgium on to Germany we had the first point where we got an announcement it was required on crossing the border.
I don't know how I feel about everything on this topic at this point, but I think if anywhere makes sense, to me transit makes sense. It's something where some people cannot actually live their lives without it. For people who are immunocompromised, I'd sure as hell rather be living in a place like Germany right now if I were them, versus anywhere else I'm seeing. And I'll be visiting my (elderly, not in amazing health) mom for Thanksgiving again, so whether or not I might at some point stop masking on transit, I'm not stopping in the next couple of weeks. I'm honestly not sure I see the point of stopping during winter at all. It's not that arduous. I understand school being a difficulty, and I wouldn't want to mask for 8+ hours at work, but transit?
Well. Anyhow, I'm glad to have gotten to do this trip, and it felt like a reasonable point in time to get in before whatever happens this winter with the war and everything else. ...boy do I hope next year trends better.
