Keeping up with your travel companion

Teacher vacation

Ever think about planning vacations and wonder where all that stress comes from? I guess part of it is doing it with a partner, who often has different ideas about what is enjoyable and how loaded  an itinerary should be. Often I want to relax and visit some historic sites and/or soak up the local buildings and scenery.

Yet this can be a problem with any people you travel with, as their idea of sightseeing may be far removed from your own. Ideally, if you build schedules where some time is given for each person to pursue his or her own interests and pace, things will probably bubble along okay, but often this might not be palatable to some of the traveling partners.

Compromising and balancing where you go and how many places you visit can greatly enhance your memories of your vacation. It also makes you less fatigued in dealing with trip tribulations.

Bali Bombs

persistent salespeople

My wife and I went to Bali over Christmas in 2008. My wife had high expectations, as many Japanese enthuse about Bali being a dream location. Unfortunately our dream seemed more like a nightmare.

What was not to like;

Selling militants

Aggressive sales people selling things on the street as well as in the stores where sometimes my wife opted no to buy to avoid being harassed. It got so bad near the volcano, that we almost couldn’t shoot pictures. Instead, we were ‘tricked’

nto going into a fruit stand to get away from some of the more militant touts, only to have the fruit stand seller try to rip us off by weighing all the fruit together.

Milling about taxi touts

Even in our hotel parking lot in Sanur, we had people hiding in the bushes offering taxis, whether we were remotely interested in one or not.

Food poisoning

For my wife, this trip was ultimately bad as she suffered food poisoning twice. She finally went to a clinic on our next to last day and was treated for an intestinal parasite.. Both times she fell ill after eating at local restaurants recommended in our guide books.

Run down hotel facilities Even within nicer hotels, some of the facilities were a bit shabby and looked as if the hotel had avoided spending money on necessary repairs.

Good things

Cheap beer

I’m guessing the bacteria in my stomach and the generous amounts of Bintang I drank helped me battle the parasites my wife fell victim to. The beer helped me to cool off, and overlook some of the continual disappointments (at the time).

Relatively cheap massages

I say relatively cheap as the quality of the massages varied greatly. We tended to go to a middle of the road place, and we were pretty happy there, paying 9-11 dollars for a 90 minute massage.

Sorry, those two good things above are not enough to warrant me revisiting Bali.

Shredding ties

A nice retort came back to me when I joked with a coworker about shredding some of his ties. He suggested starting with his ‘company name’ ties first, something I didn’t get at first.

I often feel the same, and wonder why I do work there. The farewell party for a Japanese-American reminded me of why sometimes I think i have been there too long. I arrived early (after a shopping detour) to discover only the staff there, in a world of their own. That world wasn’t interrupted until later when some people popped in, people who had told me earlier they wouldn’t probably be coming.

I made the mistake of talking briefly with an odd couple at work, in the same clique. That and being parked in front of the screen where a rugby match was going on contributed to a feeling of isolation. Though I suppose some of that is my fault, as I drank steadily and the amount of food served under our ‘party plan’ was minimal a best. My wife wondered why I came home and was still so hungary.

Sometimes work just places people together, people who really have no reason for interacting, or very little anyway. So sometimes conversations bounce around that don’t seem to be pointless, but..you have to wonder why are we together at this place of business. Just another point in time, and all those ships keep passing day and night, often with little in common beyond wasting time until the next encounter.

Ravaged senses

Yesterday at work, I had the weirdest light flash in front of my eye. I literally was seeing spots and wondering, “What happened?” I suppose having this happen while deeply intoxicated (or after such a night) would be less alarming, but I was stone sober and had just arrived at work. Almost think it was a combination of tiredness and the bright sunlight outside overloading my optic nerves before being confronted by the fluorescent and artificial environment of an office. Makes you stop and wonder, how much of a toll the city takes on your senses, what with all the forms of pollution bombarding you so much that you can’t divine the real from the unnatural.

Of course, some of that unnaturalness is the city itself, its economic activity keeping it alive. People do have to live somewhere, but you have to wonder why people crowd themselves into boxes in close proximity and then complain about the resulting noise and the bad air. Living in the city is becoming a bad habit for me over the last 16 years, one I which I wish I could relinquish for more open spaces and less people. People often talk about moving to the countryside when they retire, but I’m wondering if the bodies (and souls) can survive until then.

Procrastination

TV exercise?

September 2 2008

I got an interesting email today from another lecturer, who quoted Da Vinci as saying that he wanted to apologize to God and humanity for wasting time. I guess we all need time to think, but I suppose some of us are better at using our ‘down time’ than others.

Just like a fellow teacher who works out 6-7 days a week. He said,” Well, I use the time you probably spend watching TV”. I hope he doesn’t work out that much!

I tried to convince my wife to buy another computer (2 down, 1 hanging in there) instead rather than a new wide-screen digital TV, but now instead I am living my life vicariously in different police and sci- fi dramas too much. No wonder I have stress, mentally dodging all those bullets and aliens.

Then again, exercising with the TV can be fun. Just think, you don’t need Wi sports!

Missing the boat with the pc explosion

I’m reading a book on Microsoft that features people who work and have worked there (though some may have left by now, the book is dated 2003). It’s amazing that some things you considered true are (long hours, a demanding tech world, some young millionaires), but some things are not (Microsoft’s products are  lot more complicated than Apple’s because the Microsoft products have to work with many different PCs, whereas Apple’s only works with their own machines. But also they talk about the pressure to ship when things are still buggy (something I curse Bill for that every day) and some of the unfairness in the company when it comes to sharing credit and giving blame for cancelled projects (sound familiar).

Missing the boat

Of course, being a non-techie, it’s difficult for me to envision some of the difficulties, I just see the result and judge that. But the Microsoft culture also changed as they became a bigger company, so that also is a chunk of the story you don’t always see published. Several of the people talked about that, and of course with growth comes bureaucracy and  an unhealthy distance between departments. Communication becomes more labored and time intensive, and after a while the company atmosphere is probably colored by which department you’re in and where on the food chain you are.

Another thing I got out of the book is how money does and doesn’t change your world. The people away from Microsoft mentioned that the money (or lack of it in some cases where people had been gasp, laid off) made a difference in that you could decide if you wanted to continue to work and had a safety parachute to possibly do things you had always dreamed about doing. Working for a small company that may take off is a dream. When I worked at one young company, it seemed it would take off, but it didn’t happen. They asked us to work long hours, and we didn’t get any stock options. Some things are just luck, and what you know and what you do with it.

Losing that ‘country’ feeling

Losing my country

I’ve run into a weird phenomenon with some coworkers. When asked about their country, in their profiles they have listed places they don’t seem to be from! Now in one case, a person says one nationality, listing a country as home, but it turns out it’s near there, but not quite the same place.

Now the second case is odder. This person claims one nationality, family living in another country, father and mother from different places.Won’t say where in that country the family lives, so I have to wonder, which flag is on the passport?

Is there some reason people are embarassed to state where they live?  Haven’t a clue. It seems people think it’s difficult to explain, but I don’t think so. Maybe I’ll start telling people I’m from the Americas or that I live in Asia close to China!

In the waiting zone

Recently, as another semester waits to kick off, I feel more and more like just kicking back and not thinking about much. Sometimes those are the best times when something actually gels in your head. Now, how to best use a blog with my classes…zzzzzz

In the zone

Feeling blue oceans

What customers really want

I’ve been reading a book about tapping ‘blue’ oceans in the business world. The concept is not entirely new, tapping unseen markets, but the approach and methodology behind it is well researched with case studies and examples over a 30 year span. Every industry has companies competing for the same customers, yet some companies change the playing field by pursuing new customers with an innovative look at what customers and potential customers really want.

I’m wondering what is untapped in Japan and how do you find it?

Expanding minds want to know

Where’s the box?

I keep harking back to a time in my dreams when I wasn’t living here, and certainly didn’t dream of Japan. Was that a simpler and easier time or just a less expanded time? Seems like when people don’t think much beyond their neighborhood, the ideas that they have are really simple, but are they any less useful? People really do make their own realities, and it does take some doing to change the one you’re in (or seem to be in). Experience is just that and everyones’ is different. One of the Russian expats that I know was commenting that her town is considered pretty backward in Russia, yet these supposed Moscow cosmopolitans that have never left Moscow know very little beyond their metro backyard.

So who is the bumpkin and how do you tell if one is sophisticated or not?

Is it clothes, words, thoughts, or something else? I meet people all the time, and they judge me by what I say or don’t say, and perhaps by the nationality they think I carry in my accent. But do they really know who or what I am? Well, probably they know as much a I know about them, which is often very little. People seem so guarded nowadays, that very little real substance seeps through. You get occasional flashes of reality, bytes really, and then masks slide back into place, and you wonder, what was that really about, that brief exposure.

Oh well, mustn’t think too much about it, or I might get too real myself.

Or would I? Or would I simply be who I am now with an added mask?

Though I have to say I’m not one to usually consider pretending to be a clown, but I suppose we all have our moments for drama, whether high or low..

So who am I ? Well I guess I am who I think I am, but sometimes it feels like I am who other people think I am. But to be honest, who people think you are might be miles away from who you really are (which could be a good thing or not).