Week Ten: Final Boarding Call

Last week, last chance to run around London! My friends and I went to Trafalgar Square for the last time and went a little camera crazy. We went to my favorite restaurant … Wagamama! We also went back to my favorite spot to sit in all of London… next to the River Thames, with Tower Bridge on my right, and Queen’s Walk right in front of me.

Our crazy farewell to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery

My favorite spot -- a walk down Queens Way near Tower Bridge

London Bridge... lit up in pink??

This past week I also did a few firsts, though. On Friday, I saw the musical Avenue Q with Alisa, which was absolutely hilarious and managed to scare me even more about graduating from college next year. The story was like a grown up version of Sesame Street, and the main character basically discovered that he wouldn’t be able to “be everything you want to be” like kids are taught earlier on and he spent the whole time being confused and trying to find his “purpose.”

Outside the theater of Avenue Q!

On Saturday, I finally went to some outdoor markets, like Green Market and Borough Market… I love free food samples! After we spent too much money at some clothing store on the way to Camden Market, Alisa and I decided not to go to any more markets, to save ourselves from immediate bankruptcy.

Free samples at the market!

Yay for hot dogs and sauerkraut! Yummm...

On Friday, I went to lunch at a Thai place (oh how I LOVE THAI FOOD) with a coworker of mine, Shaluki. We got carried away with talking and I think that she stayed out for lunch longer than she should have but if I have learned anything, it’s that it is OKAY to take a long lunch sometimes... we’re in the UK! Come on, gotta take advantage of it.

My last week at the internship was probably the most relaxed yet. I kept working on putting together info on Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and Qatar for Martin, updated the invitee list for the two UKTI luncheons in Beijing, and we had a meeting about Sport Accord 2009, to be taking place in Denver. Andy and I had a short meeting with a UKTI employee from the southeast region about putting on a road show this fall. It made me sort of sad that I wouldn’t still be working there because it would have been quite an experience seeing the planning of the road show through from the beginning to the end.

On my last day at my internship, several coworkers and I went to eat lunch out at St. James’s Park like we did the first week that I was here. Andy bought me my lunch, an Italian prosciutto baguette and chocolate mousse from Pret-a-manger! Yum. Right before I had to go, Andy made a little speech in front of the other coworkers that I became friends with over the past 8 weeks and gave me a card that was signed by everyone AND a Time Out Madrid book (I’m headed to Madrid for the fall semester to study abroad, so it was quite thoughtful). Somewhere during Andy’s short speech I managed to break into tears (just for 10 seconds, don’t give me that look) and had to run away briefly.

I flew back to California on Sunday (yesterday), on a flight that took about 11 hours. Not too bad, I suppose, considering I managed to get in a couple hours of sleep and watched three movies. Maybe four. By the time I got through customs, waited ages for my luggage to come out, and squeezed past other people to make it through the exit… I was SO READY to go home! My brother and mom were at the airport and after hugging them I declared that I must be the one to drive home (I am always the driver for family car trips anyway, I seem to like driving the most out of anyone). Oh, 405 freeway, how I missed you. It was even better because the traffic gods seemed to favor us and we got home in good time. My mom immediately put some home-cooked Vietnamese food on the stove… and today we’re going to my favorite sushi place for dinner. THAT is what home is for. Food. And okay, people that I missed to death while being away.

It is difficult to be too nostalgic when I still have so much to look forward to… I can’t wait to see my cousins here, my friends here, and get in plenty of that food that I can’t seem to stop talking about this entire time. In 12 days I am flying to Montreal and staying for 3 weeks, my original hometown and favorite place in the world to this day, despite all of the places that I’ve managed to see in the past 2 ½ months. I will visit even more family there, and roam around as I have been this summer, and revisit old places that I loved to go to. After that, I am headed to Madrid for my fall semester study abroad program, and that is bound to be quite the experience. So basically, I’m taking a 5 week break from Europe, only to come back for more. And with more trips ahead, I can’t help but procrastinate on feeling sad.

By the end, I realized I was actually quite sad to leave my internship site – I can’t explain what a great group of people my coworkers were to the fullest, although I have attempted plenty of times to tell bits and pieces of my experience with them through previous blog entries. What I have learned through my traveling is that what made a place memorable for me are the people that I associate with it. It is the same reason I fell in love with Guadalajara, Mexico (where I studied for six weeks last summer). All of these places that I’ve visited – London, Prague, Rome, Paris, Cairo – were spectacular in its own right, unique and impressive, and all that jazz. But I loved having London as my home base, I loved feeling like I lived there instead of just visiting, and the people that I met there made it the greatest part of the trip for me. To all of the people I met while traveling and working this past summer (especially my crazy coworkers Andy, Martin, Andrew, Sarah, Kate, Gary, Shaluki, David, Simon, and Ivan) – thanks for making my experience one that was worth every single cent-that-suffered-a-horrible-two-to-one-exchange-rate that I had to pay to have!!! I don’t regret a thing, and that is the most important factor of all.

London Eye, Big Ben, and House of Parliament

Week Nine: Skipping over Europe, landing in Africa

It was a shorter week at my internship than usual, because on Wednesday afternoon I flew from London to Cairo! (Meaning I didn’t work on Thursday). I did some more work for Martin about the Gulf Region, and for Andrew regarding the Beijing Olympics. All in all, a very relaxed week in the office. On Tuesday, I actually couldn’t even make it into the office… latent stomach flu from Paris, it turned out. We ate so many things in Paris, I can’t even begin to guess what it could have been. Basically, I spent Tuesday either trying to lay deadly still in bed or making a run for it to the sink… not a fun day. My roommate Jessica was nice enough to buy me some ginger tea bags so I could make tea and I drank about a gallon of it that night. Then I brought in more tea bags to my internship the next day and spent my day sipping ginger tea while doing my tasks… luckily for me, the sickness was gone by the time I landed in Egypt.

Cairo was quite an experience, to say the least! The closest experience I’ve had to Cairo is when I visited Saigon (err… “Ho Chi Minh City”), but even then there are some big differences. The driving there was outrageous… no one bothered to even look in their side view mirrors, roads with two lanes seemed like there were three because cars formed an extra one in between and just straddled the white dotted line. Half the time there weren’t even any lines, just a big space and it was just a big driving free-for-all. Pedestrians… oh wow. I have never seen so many pedestrians come within an inch of their lives so many times before. In Vietnam, yes, it’s quite dangerous too, but most of those vehicles are motorcycles, bicycles, or mopeds, not full on cars like in Cairo that could easily squish them like a bug. The streets are full and crowded most of the day, except for an interval around 4-6 am in the morning. They call New York City the city that never sleeps, but I’ve discovered that there are plenty of cities that never sleep… Cairo being one of them, hands down.

My friend, Yehia, took me to see the Pyramids of Giza the morning after I arrived. He does not like doing tourist stuff, and I guess it’s understandable because he’s lived in Cairo all his life and it’s all normal for him, also because he’s travelled all over the world and somehow developed the idea that most hyped up places are nothing too amazing to him. However, he humored me. For our tour of the pyramids, I rode on a camel and he rode on a horse. My camel was named Moses and every time he sat down, he made me lurch forward and I was clinging on for dear life the whole time. It was a good leg muscle workout though. Worse was when he went into a gallop, and I was bouncing high off his hump and hitting my butt on the way down. All negligible facts, considering I RODE A CAMEL!

Pyramids of Giza

Me and my camel Moses

The Sphinx

View of Cairo from the pyramids

I met a bunch of Yehia’s friends, some of whom are Americans living in Egypt because they are the sons and daughters of American diplomats working in the embassy. We all took a day trip out to the sea (where we, against my wishes, spent our time in a nice looking swimming pool instead… not so logical) and went for a nice dinner. There were so many of us that we actually had to take two cars, Yehia drove one and then he took one of his drivers to drive the other one. On the last night I was there, we also made plans with his friends to take a night time felukka (like a small sail boat) ride down the Nile River, and that was really nice and breezy, not to mention pretty.

Sailing down the Nile River in a felukka

I visited the Khan Al-Khalili, the largest bazaar market in Cairo, where it was crowded and narrow. Vendors shouted a lot of things at me, and I suppose I should be happy I couldn’t understand them because they were calling me Yehia’s wife at certain points, then I would be Daniel’s wife at other points (Daniel is one of Yehia’s friends in Egypt who was with us at the time). I did understand when someone yelled at me in English, “Oh, lucky men!” and I finally realized what they were trying to say to me. It was an interesting experience at the Khan, and it’s not as if I have never been haggled before, so it wasn’t disturbing at all, just entertaining.

Khan Al-Khalili

We also went to Coptic Cairo, which is one of the oldest, if not the oldest part of the city. It is basically the remains of when the Romans were in Cairo and consists of some very old cathedrals (instead of mosques, like the rest of the city). Right outside Coptic Cairo, however, was the oldest mosque in Cairo, which we passed. It took us forever to find the right route to Coptic Cairo and we must have asked directions from at least seven different people on the street. This was one of the many times that we got lost in Cairo… even though Yehia has lived there all his life, his sense of direction is not any better because of it, but rather, it’s the same as it is when he is in San Diego – nonexistent.

Remnants of the Roman influence... the wall

Outside of the hanging cathedral, in Coptic Cairo

The oldest mosque in Cairo

I was fed really well in Cairo, he made sure of it, as always. Between the fabulous food that his cook whipped up for us and the awesome restaurants we went to, I was never left hungry – which may also be a bad thing. I tried a lot of different Egyptian dishes and loved them all. Granted, I’m not hard to please when it comes to food, but I still stick by my story that Egyptian food is delicious. Yehia always says that many Egyptians are overweight/round/fat, and I can see why. Good thing my trip was short… I would probably soon join the ranks of those exact same Egyptians in terms of weight!

What I didn’t like about Egyptian lifestyle is their tendency to be late. Though we did manage to do some really fun activities, before actually getting to do them was the part I will now call waiting-in-the-car-in-front-of-people’s-houses-for-them-to-come-down-almost-an-hour-later-when-they-said-they-were-coming-in-five-minutes. Believe it or not, this happened more than once. Yehia said that his friends usually know better than this and that I came on a bad weekend but later he admitted that Egyptians tend to be very tardy. To which I would like to add on… sometimes they are also flaky and don’t even show up. There was one incident when we waited forever for a girl to come down from her apartment building… only to have her say (after more than half an hour spent on the phone with him, as we’re sitting in front of her building) that she was not coming at all. Verdict: completely unacceptable. We could have done without all the unnecessary waiting this weekend, but if I overlook that, then my trip was quite an amazing one.

The Citadel

Week 8: Getting Rained on Everywhere!

What a British summer indeed! Cloudiness and sporadic showers… not to mention getting blown away by random incredibly strong gusts of wind! Now I’m really British… starting a conversationwith weather as my topic. But really, when it’s THIS bipolar, it deserves mention!
This week at my internship I worked more on the case studies: contacting the right representatives, collecting more information from them, reporting them, etc. We had a sports team meeting on Monday and I actually contributed ideas on what we should do to bring in more UK companies... I was very proud of myself. And I hope they were impressed, haha. I drank a lot of coffee that day… and I got stuck in the rain, without an umbrella because I had taken it out of my purse for my trip to Rome (so sunny!). Just my luck! Needles to say, I got drenched.

On Thursday, the UKTI organization had their annual Sports Day! My supervisors and other coworkers formed a football team, so I went to the site at Barnes Bridge to cheer them on! They were dressed up in funny baby blue jerseys… and it was hilarious when they were trying to hustle on the football field. Quite entertaining to see them outside of the office and not in suits! I really felt like a part of the team, the day was absolutely outrageous. Andy registered to run in the 1500 meter dash and David registered as a challenge… David is about half a foot taller than Andy, who is also scrawnier. But amazingly enough, Andy managed to beat him! I was cheering very loudly (actually we all were).

Early Friday morning, I took the Eurostar to Paris to meet up with Isaias! I slept the entire 2 hours and change and woke up in a different country. Funny how that tends to happen in Europe. I used some of my French, but most of the time I just let Isaias do the talking since he’s been studying/working there since January and wanted to strut his stuff a little. We ate a lot. The first meal when I got there was this big rotisserie chicken that we bought and then ate with our fingers in the park near the Louvre (I know, very civilized). We ate dinner at midnight… we bought a bunch of pastries for breakfast the next day and I had to carry it around all day because we couldn’t finish that fast. We ate gyros and fries in the Latin Quarter for lunch. Then we met up with our friend who went to our university in San Diego named Vincent (he is in the French military but was doing his thesis in San Diego where we met him) and he brought along several other military men. We all went to an Irish pub and had a considerable amount to drink, after which we went to a crepe restaurant! Keeping up with men when they’re hungry is difficult… especially as a girl. But I stuck with it and ate every dish they threw my way! Basically… another weekend of indulging in more food. Typical for me by now!

I went to the internet café once in Paris, and wow… they changed up the keyboard! They moved the letter A to where the W should be, the M up to where the L should be, the period is different and you have to press shift first… and even though numbers show up above the letters, they can only be entered by pressing the number pad on the right side of the keyboard. The exclamation mark is where the period should be, the @ sign can only be entered when holding down alt and ctrl at the same time… Let’s just say it took me forever to type something. It was probably the most disorienting thing about France, oddly enough.

We climbed the Arc de Triomphe at night. We climbed up the Tour Eiffel the next day. I saw the Notre Dame, Latin Quarter, Sacre Coeur, Moulin Rouge, Champs Elysees and a lot of stuff in between. The Tour Eiffel lit up in blue with yellow stars; we think it is because Sarkozy (the French president) is currently the president of the EU. There were a lot of Spanish speakers around, and Isaias and I loved listening for them (he’s Mexican and I’m practically honorary Mexican, haha). We did not bump into any real mean Parisians, as their reputation insists, except for one old lady that rushed past me angrily when I lingered too long in the metro. Otherwise, smooth sailing! Picture time! Enjoy! And remember… Egypt next weekend!

The most awesome team on Sports Day! Whoo!

The tomb of the unknown soldier, under the Arc de Triomphe

The Louvre!

Arc de Triomphe at the end of the Champs Elysees

View from the top of Arc de Triomphe of the Eiffel Tower

Eiffel Tower!

From underneath the base of the Eiffel Tower

View from the 1st floor of the Eiffel Tower

The Seine River and Notre Dame on the left

Notre Dame up close

Sacre Coeur (and the cute old man entertaining tourists with his violin)

Moulin Rouge

Disillusioned in London, and a pick-me-up called Rome

I would start this week’s blog entry with something normal like what happened at my internship or maybe how bipolar the weather has been in London or what I have done the past week… but there is something else that has been upsetting me so much that I cannot hold it in. I’ve been keeping up with the news in London and there has been a wave of stabbings going on here. Every day, someone new gets stabbed, maybe even dies or is in grave danger of dying… maybe even more than one person. At least one stabbing happened in Peckham, which I can reach by bus 10 minutes from where we live. The same bus that I take to go to my internship and back. It’s been happening in broad daylight, right outside of victims’ homes, in the middle of crowds, even with young children (an 11 year old boy stabbing a 9 year old girl). I feel like comparing it to the sniper situation we had in the US a few years back, but it’s different because to stab someone doesn’t require skill, anyone who wants to can do it… and I’ve heard that it’s actually quite normal to carry a knife around. My issue is this: it is illegal to carry pepper spray and tasers, but carrying a knife and actually using it… people can get away with it. The government, as of now, is still pondering if they should take more decisive action and punish those who unnecessarily carry around knives more harshly. Hmm… a faster reaction time from them would be nice, don’t you think? Sigh… what a crazy world. It makes me homesick. I live in a bubble outside of Los Angeles… nothing happens there. I think a bear somehow got into someone’s backyard a few years ago. That was pretty much the most exciting thing for us.

Now that I’ve put in my frustrated two cents… we can move on to the normal blog entry! (Yay, happy thoughts). The past week at my internship was pretty standard… some laughs with the coworkers and calmly doing my tasks. On the agenda was to compile a document with all the necessary info for entering the sport industry in the Gulf region (United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar). I started doing case studies on several different UK companies that have worked with UKTI for a while, and wrote another article, this time for an annual international event called Sport Accord.

Last Tuesday, the sun really came out to play! My main supervisor, Andy, and I took our time to deliver a package and walked slooowly… soaking in all the sun we could get. We walked by Trafalgar Square, where the festivities for Canada Day were being set up and I got really excited (remember, I was born in Montreal and am somehow Canadian at heart even though I moved to the US). After class that evening I came back with some of my friends and we danced the evening away at the open air concert. A band named Jesse Cook performed, and their music was rumba/flamenco themed – I LOVED IT!!! I think it’s great that a band from Ontario can have such lively Latin music. At the end a quartet led the crowd in the singing of our anthem… I was very loud. Hey, if you know the words and its Canada Day and you’re Canadian and you’re surrounded by Canadians… you probably would have done it too!

The best part of my week was (you guess it) my trip to ROME!!! It was ridiculously hot, and I cannot take heat at all. I packed a spray bottle and when I got there it was my lifesaver. I filled it up with ice cold water at the beginning of each day and sprayed myself and my two friends (Stacy and Jenny) with it every 10 minutes. The city was just full of history and culture, just bursting from everywhere. I loved all the fountains, all the piazzas (or should I say “piazza” to be grammatically correct in the Italian language), the Coliseum, and the Trevi Fountain… I wasn’t too keen on the Vatican to be honest, but that’s just me. Jenny really enjoyed that part of the trip and even realized she was more religious than she previously thought! We ate a lot of gelato… very typical American tourist, but my excuse is that it was really hot, so anything ice cold felt amazing. We also went dipping in the fountain in the middle of the Piazza della Repubblica (it’s socially acceptable here, which is the best thing when the sun is beating down on you!). The best part of the day would be when the sun set, for two reasons. One, I love taking pictures at night and seeing lights twinkling. Two, did I mention it was hot??? Anyhow… once again I will let my pictures do the talking. This upcoming weekend is a trip to meet Isaias (my friend who is interning in Strasbourg and came to see me a while ago) in Paris, and then the following weekend I’m staying with Yehia (my Egyptian friend who also visited me in London last month) in CAIRO! That’s right, I’m going to Africa! More adventures to come! But for now, enjoy Roma, Italia.

Inside the Vatican Museum

il Colosseo at night

Outside Basilica S. Pietro

Inside the Basilica

Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele II

Outside of the Pantheon

Inside of the Pantheon looking up

View from the bottom of the Spanish Steps

Small section of Palazza Navona

Sunset in Rome

Fontana di Trevi at night

Part of Areo di Tito, across from il Colosseo