Off to Oberammergau

Tomorrow morning, I'm off for a quick trip to the small German village of Oberammergau to see the Passion Play. This is a play that the village puts on every ten years as a result of a promise the villagers made to God back in the 1600s that they'd do a Passion Play every ten years if they were spared from the plague. Of course, I imagine that it's now more of a tourist thing than a religious experience, but I'm looking forward to it.

It's about a four-hour drive across part of Austria. I don't actually get very far into Germany (so I don't get to go nuts on the German autobahn, darn it). I'll be meeting my friend Stuart, who's doing his annual teaching gig in the Netherlands right now. The package includes lunch on Friday at our hotel, then the first half of the play in the afternoon, then dinner at a hotel in town, then the second half of the play Friday night, and then breakfast Saturday morning. Like everything else around here, it's not cheap, but as I tell people, it's not very often that I find myself living in Europe in a year that's divisible by ten, so I have to take advantage of the opportunity.

Don't be such a tightwad

Everything went fine with the presentation yesterday. It was quite an ordeal. I stayed up late Tuesday night getting ready, got up Wednesday morning and went to my seminar, left my seminar after an hour, rode the Tube (subway) to the expensive shopping district and bought a tie (thanks for the new tie, Thomson Reuters!), rode the Tube to the other side of London, gave my presentation, rode the Tube back to my seminar, stayed out late at the dinner they had for the attendees last night, and then collapsed.

My valuable lesson was this: sometimes, fork over the cash. My boss told me to take a cab if I felt I needed to, but it was an easy Tube ride from the seminar to the presentation. There were no transfers required, and it was just a short walk to and from the station on both ends of the trip. The price difference was $10 versus about $100. Why not save the company some money, right? So I just took the Tube.

I got there on time with no trouble. On the way back, though, there was a problem at one of the stations, so we were stuck on on the Tube for about fifteen minutes without being able to exit. There's no cell phone signal down there. If that had occurred on my way to the presentation, I would have been late to the presentation and stuck underground with no way to tell anyone what was going on. The lesson for me is that next time I have an important presentation, I'll spend the extra money to make darned sure I show up when I'm supposed to. No harm done, but it could have been scary.

An unexpected twist

It's been an interesting day. My class has been fun. We've got class members from Sweden (currently stationed in Dubai), South Africa, Germany, Australia, Israel, and England, and probably more. There are two token Americans. Also, most of them are from the Reuters part of Thomson Reuters. I haven't gotten to know many people from the Reuters side.

The twist came late in the afternoon as I was checking messages on my BlackBerry. I had ten messages waiting for me during the afternoon break, which always means that something is up. I just don't get that many messages in the space of two hours in my current job. Turns out that the vice chairman of the Thomson Reuters board of directors needs a demonstration of WestlawNext, our big project, in London tomorrow. It also turns out that there's only one person in London right now who's qualified to give a demonstration of WestlawNext. So I'll be cutting class for part of the day to demonstrate our baby to the vice chairman. Unfortunately, my wardrobe isn't prepared for such an exigency; I'm dressed for sitting in a training class all day. I packed about as lightly as a person can pack for a four-day trip. My boss told me to buy a tie on the way and to charge it to the company. This should be interesting.

I'm looking forward to the opportunity. I like giving presentations like this one.

Impressions of London so far

If there's a job in the world that consists of traveling to different cities in Europe and figuring how to get around on their public transportation systems, that's the job I want. I've said this before, but I just love being dropped in the middle of a city somewhere and trying to figure out how to get from one place to another. It's the same feeling of satisfaction that we all get when we work through a complex tax return: you know it makes sense, and you know that the right answer is out there somewhere, but you have to navigate through a maze of complexity to get there. What could be more rewarding than that? So, to chart the course of my life, after I'm done doing this law thing I've been stuck on for the past fifteen years, I want to work in hospice care. When that's over, I want to get back into astrophysics and do some research in that field. Then I'd like to hold some sort of political office for a while. And then, to wrap it up, I guess I need to be a transportation engineer. That's going to be challenging.

Anyway, back to London. I survived flying coach. That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger, right? I have to say, the whole left-side thing is unsettling me a bit. As we were descending into London, I saw a roundabout. I watched cars approach it, enter on the left, and drive clockwise. That's just wrong. But it sure is nice to end up in a place where I can understand the signs and understand most of the language, although it's a bit tricky if they're speaking softly.

And another complaint about electrical outlets: I outsmarted myself this time. Like I've said before, the Swiss, being the Swiss, have electrical outlets that are unique to Switzerland. If you want to go anywhere else in Europe, you need an adapter because the Swiss outlets aren't the same. Well, I planned ahead and brought the Swiss-to-Europe adapter for my laptop. But it turns out that not only are the Swiss the Swiss, but the British are the British. Their outlets are also different from continental Europe. Sigh. So I now plug my Swiss cord into a European adapter, which plugs into a British adapter, which plugs into the wall. Sheesh. I could have just brought the U.S. plug for my laptop because I'm at a hotel that has U.S. plugs as well as British plugs. I should have thought of that. Anyway, that's part of the fun of being an American living in Switzerland on a trip to Britain. And of course, no euros here. I had to get a pile of British pounds. I'm sure we'll be doing a family visit here sometime, though, so they won't go to waste.

Really? They speak English?

I'm off to London on Monday, assuming the volcano in Iceland behaves itself, which is not a sure thing. This is my first visit to the motherland. It's weird to contemplate going to a foreign country (other than Canada) and speaking English when I get there.

It's going to be strange walking on the left side of the road or the left side of the hall, shaking hands with the left hand, and doing all of that other left-handed stuff they do there. Also, I'm going be careful not to bring up the whole issue of the Revolutionary War in case some of them are still sore about the outcome.

Here's the really bad news: It's a short flight, so my company won't spring for first class, and I'm flying on Swiss Air. I'm not an elite passenger on Swiss. I get no special treatment. I don't get to skip the lines. I don't get the best food. I don't get to go to the lounge. That means I'm, well, just like most everyone else. It's an icky feeling. It's going to stay with me until I take another business class trip to Minnesota. Fortunately, I'm heading back in four weeks. Thank heaven!

Close encounters of the repeated kind

Back in my youth (which wasn't that long ago, I'll have you know), I saw a bit on Saturday Night Live or some other comedy show about what to do when you keep encountering the same person over and over again during the course of a day or several days, like a co-worker you always see in the hall. It starts to become awkward. Do you keep saying "hi"? Do you try to come up with something new to say each time? Do you start making observational comments about how funny it is that you keep seeing each other? Do you just stare straight ahead and ignore the person? In the bit I saw, one of the characters started trying to avoid those encounters by taking alternate routes, altering his timing, and so forth. He finally ended up crawling along the wall on the outside of the building in an attempt to avoid yet another encounter in the hall, and he fell to his death. (It was funnier than I'm making it sound.)

I'm starting to feel that way with my daily commute. Being me, I have a pretty regular routine for getting to and from work each day. I usually take the same train, the same bus, etc. Unfortunately, I have co-workers who have some of the same routines, so I'm always bumping into them and trying to come up with new topics of conversation. This is a real struggle for someone like me. Other than immediate and extended family, there are only eight people in the whole world who don't make me at least a little bit nervous in a one-on-one conversation that doesn't have a preassigned topic. (I counted.) I like my co-workers, but I'm running out of things to say to them.

What's an introvert to do? There's always the weather, but I mentally kick myself whenever I find myself lapsing into that easy and trite fallback topic. There's the "what are you doing for the weekend" question, but I usually don't have an very interesting answer. ("Going to church for three hours" doesn't quite cut it.) One thing that works around here is to ask about where they're next planning to travel in Europe or elsewhere. That's good for a little while, but then I start to run the risk of asking the same question I asked someone a couple of weeks earlier, only to have them remind me that we already discussed that. You can sometimes talk about kids, but your kids are never as interesting to other people as they are to you, and again, there's the risk that you start telling the same stories over and over.

You know, for all the talk in Europe of banning or not banning burqas, maybe there's something to be said for having something that allows one to escape into a little cocoon during the morning commute. In the United States, we call those "cars." Maybe it's time for me to move back . . . .

Europe and euros

I have no profound conclusions, just some observations about Europe's recent struggles in two areas: volcanoes and a common currency.

First, volcanoes: It's been interesting to see the aftereffects of the shutdown of European airspace last month. There's been a lot of finger-pointing and unhappiness with the ability of the various European governments to coordinate their responses. The European Union is a long way from being everything that its proponents hope it can become, and the trouble with the volcano really demonstrated how difficult it can be to get several countries to act quickly and effectively in the face of a crisis. Getting Germany, France, Britain, and Portugal (just to pick a few EU countries at random) to agree on something is a lot tougher than getting Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota to agree. Just think of all the historical baggage, cultural differences, and conflicting economic interests between those four countries. It will be interesting to see if anything comes out of the volcano crisis.

(Side note: Irish airspace is being affected again by volcanic ash. I'm hoping that none of this gets in the way of my London trip next week.)

Now, the euro: I love the euro for its convenience as we travel around to different countries in Europe, but as the trouble with Greece is demonstrating, the countries that have adopted the euro have given up a measure of control over their own economies. Greece's troubles are dragging down every other country that uses the euro. There are some signs of an agreement among the other countries to bail out Greece, but it's shaky, and what country wants to spend money to bail out another country that didn't have its act together? I think the Swiss at this point are quite happy that they haven't joined the EU and that they haven't adopted the euro.