Happy holidays to you too. It's not called Christmas over here. Not even Xmas.
I made my phone call in Bangkok and promptly started my trip home to Blighty. I don't know why we call it Blighty, we just do sometimes. The same way that we sometimes get annoyed when people say that our food's crap. Up yours and all.
I'm flying home for Xmas so that I can slip slowly into insanity among my family. Well, part of them anyway. It should be fun and to catch up with old friends should be good too as most of them are close together.
The second reason I'm flying home is because of a job interview. You can take the boy out of Barclays but not the Barclays out of the boy and after sending through my CV and a half-hearted cover letter about 2 months ago I was contacted by a nice lady in the Singapore office that I visited some 8 months ago.
After much ado it turns out that there is a job opportunity there (I get nervous when jobs are described as "opportunities") that would enable me to advance on the work I have done for the bank until now. This job would also be in Singapore, which would be novel. However I do have to complete an interview or two conducted by some people who I would be working under. I guess this is just the Freak-Test as they've been described to me as fairly informal and a measurement of my personality. That shouldn't take too long then.
So on my way back around the globe I crossed the dateline and experienced time travel for the first time. I stopped for about a week with good friends in San Francisco. This was my second time there and I managed to see a lot more of the city and its surrounds than before. It's a very compact city, being surrounded by either mountains or sea and so has retained human proportions of about 7 miles square. I spent the week there exploring by myself or being driven further afield by my friends and did some wine tasting too. In all, a very nice week.
Then I flew to Canada. I am in Calgary as I type this staying with another friend. This one I met whilst I was in NZ walking the Queen Charlotte Track. Calgary is a bleak city. It's small and boomed in the 1970s and '80s when oil and natural gas started to be pumped from Alberta's North. This still makes Alberta Canada's wealthiest province. Architecturally it's pretty impoverished though. It is very cold and because of this most of the buildings in the city centre are joined together by covered walkways suspended above the ground. They call this the 15+ walkway system and it is possible to traverse most of downtown without ever going outside. This sounds frightening and it is unless you consider that the usual temperature of the air outside is -30 deg C in winter. Now that's scary.
Walking around the city today I found that I kept thinking of one of those classic nightmares that you sometimes have. Wandering around a city empty of people, tall imposing buildings around you, and the sky heavy and dark grey. It freaked me out a little.
I'll be here for a few more days, staying with my friend and helping out while she's at work. It feels good to be staying somewhere comfortable, knowing that I am going home.
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell, as the pithy comment at the top of this page reads. I think this is because without aims, desires, plans, or something to do one's trip becomes nothing more than a collection of flights and thinking about where you want to be next. After about 7 months my mind started to wander by itself and I effectively ran out of steam. I had lost the desire.
The next time I go away, if indeed I ever do, I'll make it a short trip to one or two places. Go deeper in them and make more of it. I don't regret any of the past 8 months, but I know now that it's time to come back and start making a better fist of managing my future. That sounds awfully pompous but whilst traveling I can only think about what it is I want to do. Now I can actually do it.
