Heathrow hell

Aah, no better way to start the holidays then with a nice weekend break! I have just come back from a few wonderfully relaxing days in Switzerland (the one in Europe, not the Central Asian cousin just yet). It was beautiful. Fresh snow upon my arrival meant that we even got to spend a day enjoying the slopes, whereas yesterday I spent the whole day strolling around Zürich basking in the sun. That's the life! It was a great way of recharging the batteries before facing those long weeks of study ahead of me.

They say you have to take the bad with the good. The bad in this case then would definitely be Heathrow Terminal 2. I don't normally fly out of Heathrow, mainly because it doesn't get those bright orange planes. London Gatwick is my airport of choice. It is closest by and has plenty of affordable flights. Unfortunately the orange people have had some difficulty breaking into the Swiss market so a Swiss airlines flight out of Heathrow it had to be. I was stunned! Heathrow T2 was built in the '50s and by the looks of it, it hasn't so much as seen a paint brush since. There is also something really disturbing about the check-in hall. The ceiling is so low you get the impression they actually forgot to include this floor in the original design. Then when somebody finally noticed the omission they split one of the levels in half. Truely claustrophobic. Everything about that place feels so hopelessly outdated, improvised and just generally inefficient.

Going through security is your basic comtemporary airport nightmare. At Heathrow, security checks are done before entering the departure lounge so everybody has to join the same endlessly meandering queue. Clearing security itself has these days become a rather embarrassing experience, especially if you travel with carry-on luggage only. The transparent zip-lock bag for your liquids allows your fellow travellers to scrutinise exactly what brand of toothpaste you use and how many tubes of facial cream and war paint it takes to keep you looking presentable. As if you weren't feeling exposed enough not only do you have to remove the usual coats and jackets but they also make you take off your shoes. If only I had remembered to buy some new socks.... Then while your luggage is scanned for explosives and pointy objects, some big burly security woman gets to feel you up. By the time you reach the departure lounge you feel strangely violated.

Thankfully after all that humiliation I could put myself in the hands of the Swiss who reassure you in no less than 4 languages that all will be well and you should just sit back and eat your chocolate. The plane arrived right on time with proverbial Swiss precision. The airport looked smooth and spotless. Within minutes I was outside. Time to let the "Zwitserlevengevoel" begin!

Bless you

Tomorrow morning I have to get up early and be in College much earlier than I have gotten used to recently. The last week of any lecture block is typically characterised by a sudden flurry of activity as all assignments for the courses are due. These assignments make up 30% of your overall mark so, although they are not crucial, it is still worthwhile to do them properly. The reason I have to be in early is that tomorrow we have to present a poster for my class in Project Management. Then on Friday is the deadline for our Marketing essay. Both projects are group assignments which means we carry them out in our allocated "syndicate groups". No, I am not kidding. That really is the official term they label us by. I think it makes us sound like some white collar crime organisation but is is probably meant to make us feel like the budding business people that of course we are.

For our presentation tomorrow we have chosen a somewhat unusual topic. Since the course is on Project Management most groups have chosen to work on things like the Wembley stadium, the Sydney Harbour Bridge or some other major construction project. We have decided to emphasize the fact that we are doing a degree in Health Management instead and are discussing the management of the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong. It is an interesting topic but, as it doesn't really fit the frameworks we have been taught in class which were often designed for construction or IT type projects, it is not an easy one. For our marketing essay we have taken a similar approach. I am so sick and tired of hearing about Easyjet, Tesco or the iPod. All my classes recycle these same examples over and over again. There is some logic to it but it is not something that interests me personally. Our essay instead deals with marketing of Tamiflu, the anti-flu drug.

As you can imagine a lot of my reading over the past few days has focused on infection risks and viral spread. I think I may have discovered a new method of disease transmission in the process. I now have reason to suspect that viruses can be transmitted from computers to humans. For two days now I have been sniffling and coughing. I have already had to restock on Kleenex. I can only hope that it is flu rather than SARS.

Cultural learnings for make benefit me

This coming week will be the last week of term, meaning that from next weekend onwards I will be enjoying a mixture of holidays and days spent in solitary seclusion studying for my next round of exams. In all honesty, I have lost much of the zeal that I managed to muster during the previous series. Most of the courses I had this term were just not as interesting to me as they had substantially less to do with the healthcare sector. I did courses in Strategic Management and Marketing, for instance, which are simply not my cup-of-tea. I will still study of course and, being me, I will still want to do well but my heart is not really in it. After my exams I only have one bit of collective course work left where we have to engage in a business plan competition with each other. Everybody assures me this part will be a lot of fun but I am not convinced yet. I simply do not see myself as a true-blooded entrepreneur, but I will try to keep an open mind about it.

What I am very excited about, however, is what we will get to do after that: our individual research reports. This will be the major assignment of the whole course and constitutes an individual part of research and the writing of –here we go again– a thesis. You are largely free to decide what topic you want to work on and it is generally considered a useful stepping stone into whatever career you wish to pursue afterwards. Although recently I have been applying for consultancy jobs my dream is still to work for organisations such as WHO or the Red Cross. Early in the year I spoke with one of my professors about this as he does a lot of work for WHO and he suggested that I do my final project in his group. Last week we discussed what sort of project I can do that will put me on the radar of these organisations. I came out of his office with a big stupid grin on my face that lasted for several days! In fact, I think I might still be grinning now.

I have been given the amazing opportunity to work on a project that will likely involve working with people in WHO and several other healthcare institutions. That is not even the best part of it though. To phrase it in my professor's words, I will be getting my “boots dirty” and not exactly in the most obvious of places… The dirt I will be scraping off my boots is to be found in the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan! I had to Google a map to see where exactly Kyrgyzstan is but eventually I was able to locate this “Switzerland of Central Asia” somewhere between Russia and China. I have no idea yet on the details of anything. I am not even sure what it is exactly that I will be doing, or how long I will be doing it for, over there. It will definitely not be before the summer and there are a lot of other things to do before then but I am already so excited about it that I simply had to share this news. Once things become clearer I will certainly keep you updated. In the mean time I will alternate reading my boring text books with staring at the pictures in my brand new Lonely Planet on Central Asia. Very nice!

Auld Lang Syne

It's almost five months ago now that I moved into my current place, having been rather suddenly booted out of my first London residence. Finding a decent place to live in London is a real challenge, particularly if you're on a tight budget. You wouldn't believe some of the apartments -if that's what you can even call them- I have looked at! By the time I went to view this place I was beginning to feel pretty desperate so it was a pleasant surprise to find a nice and reasonably spacious room. I did have some doubts about sharing a house with no less than four others though. After all, in Amsterdam I had an entire apartment all to myself and I had become quite comfortable in that luxury. The landlady didn't give me much time to think it over and I had to make a snap judgment. Fortunately I have not been disappointed.

The house is old and definitely has some flaws but what has made all the difference is really the flatmates. They are a good bunch. We are a very mixed group with no two nationalities, occupations or personalities alike but that is probably part of the charm. We all get along wonderfully and occasionally do things together; go out drinking in the pub or stay in and have a movie night. Most of them moved in only a few weeks before I did which means that their 6 month contracts are about to run out. All three of the boys have chosen to move out and are now looking for a new place together. For me it would not make sense to move out. I have no idea where I will be in a few months time, whether it be London, Amsterdam or yet another destination, and it would be too much hassle to move for what could well be only a short period.

The past couple of weeks we have seen a parade of potential new flatmates pass by. The landlords seem eager to make the place look as presentable as possible and have cleaned up the mould in the bathroom, replaced the shower curtain and are telling us to do all sorts of bizarre things. They ask us to switch on all the lights, especially in the bathrooms, whenever there are viewings and want us to turn the TV on at MTV. I would be put off by a place where the TV is continuously blaring loud music and the lights are on for no obvious reason but clearly they have a different view on what constitutes effective marketing. So far, however, only one of the three available rooms has been taken so maybe I'm not the only person who doesn't care for MTV after all...!

It will be interesting to see how all these changes are going to affect the atmosphere around the house. I just know I will miss these guys. In a way they have become the people I am closest to in London as we spend so much time together. I have come to think of them as friends and I definitely do hope we will stay in touch.

I blog therefore I am

Many great people have kept diaries. These meticulously kept documents of course really come in handy when they write autobiographies on their equally great lives. Tony Blair recently expressed regret at not having kept a diary of his years at no. 10. Too bad indeed. I am sure we would all have loved to know exactly just what he was thinking on more than a few occasions! Some people even owe their fame exclusively to their diaries. Think Anne Frank, although I am sure she would have preferred owing her fame to X-Factor had she been given a choice.

Personally, I have never been very good at keeping a diary even though I did have one as a kid. It was one of those classic little books with a red leather(ish) cover and a shoddy lock even your five year old brother could have picked. To be fair, I don’t think mine ever tried but he could have… I wrote in it only very sporadically, maybe about two, three times a year and some years not at all. To me it always felt unnatural to write something that was to be read only by a future, distant version of myself. I never understood the point. I also assumed my brain would provide sufficient storage capacity for all those memories I could ever wish to preserve. Even though I know better now, I still don’t feel the urge to pick up a pen and write “dear diary”. I need an audience.

When I was younger I used to be a champion letter writer. My friends and I would write long letters, overflowing with all the usual teenage drama, and then give them to each other the next day at school. Keeping a blog is in some ways the logical extension of that. Let’s face it; blogs are mainly ego-documents craving for a captive audience. It is like keeping a diary but deliberately leaving the lock open in the hope that somebody will come along to read it and think you are the smartest/funniest/most interesting person to have ever walked the Earth. There is definitely something exhibitionist about putting your private thoughts and experiences out there for everybody, not just your curious little brother, to see.

I don't keep count of how many people visit this site, nor do I know exactly who you are. Chances are I know most people personally. Just occasionally, however, a complete stranger may stumble upon this site. I can’t deny I find a certain thrill in that thought. At the top of this page there is a little button marked "next blog". It is my own little magic door to a world of voyeurism. I often simply start clicking and surfing around, stumbling into the lives of unknown others like they might into mine. I get to read about their loves and their losses, their passions and their grievances and yet, they will never know that I have been there. We are all eavesdropping on each other’s conversations, raising our voices just loud enough so that they can hear us too. We don’t worry about a Big Brother watching us; we welcome him in for tea.

Hunting victim

It was bound to happen sooner or later and now it has. Today I received my first rejection letter or actually: rejection e-mail, paper is just so last century. It's all part of the game called job-hunting, I'm well aware of that, but that doesn't make the process any more fun. And I must say, the first one is a hard hitting one. Not because I particularly had my hopes up for this job but because of the big flashing Neon letters in which the message was brought home to me. You see... I only put in my application yesterday!

I found the position advertised on the website of another one of the big consultancy firms yesterday afternoon. From what I could tell the job looked potentially interesting and the profile encouraging enough. Since only two weeks ago I had already polished and shined my resume for a fairly similar position, my CV didn't need that much tweaking and I sent it off some time late last night. Now of course I can only speculate what happened next but I imagine the scene will have been somewhat like this:

Somewhere in London an alarm clock goes off. It's 7:30 AM and the still slightly groggy company recruitment officer drags herself out of bed. Time for another day at the office! A shower, a bowl of Weetabix and a cup of tea later she gets on the overcrowded tube, wedged in amongst the other city workers for an uncomfortable half hour journey to the office. Once arrived there she pours herself a coffee and has a quick chat with her colleagues. It's just the usual chitchat: men, kids, what happened on Gray's Anatomy this week. Then, just before 9 AM, she turns on her computer and checks the company e-mail account. She glances over the new harvest, opens a standard reply message, adds a name to the heading and presses 'send'.

At exactly 9:01 AM this morning I was informed the company "will not proceed further" with my application. Wow, I don't think I have ever been rejected that rapidly before! I'm sure it must be some sort of record. No waiting, no anticipation, just a lightning fast resounding NO. I get no explanation and worse, am informed that I will not be able to ask for feedback or further comments. Such are the rules of the game. I'm sure this will not have been my last rejection either so I'd better learn to get used to it and develop some thicker skin. I do hope though that the next person considering my application will at least take somewhat longer than a minute before giving me the thumbs down.

The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain

Being a foreigner in this city, I frequently get the question where I am from. Almost without exception my answer triggers an unbelieving "really? I wouldn't have guessed" type of reaction.

Londoners are quite used to hearing all sorts of foreign accents. The city is full of French, Russians, Poles, Italians, Indians and so on. You name it, they've got it. All these nationalities have a tendency to flavour the English language their own peculiar way, the Dutch being no exception to this. The thing about me is, I don't really sound very Dutch. In itself this would of course not be such a bad thing if it wasn't for that pesky little line that usually follows: "But you sound so...American"! Now there are plenty of reasons why this is not something I care to be mistaken for.

It has made me think about how this could have come to be. It surely can not be because I have spent a lot of time in the US. I have only ever been there once in my life and I was 10 at the time. I have had formal training in English since I was about 7 years old or so. In total I am guessing I will probably have had about four different English language teachers. Each and every single one of them was a fervent advocate of good old-fashioned Oxford English. Also my spelling is completely British. I don't write 'color' but 'colour' and I'll spell 'centre' rather than 'center'. So if I have been trained to sound like a stiff Brit, how on earth did I end up sounding like a swaggering American? There is only one explanation I can plausibly come up with and it is an embarrassing one. I must have been watching too much Friends and not enough Morse!

Living in the UK, I am now desperately trying to clean up my act and transform into a modern day Eliza Doolittle. I am getting completely tongue-tied changing my pronunciation from "vaitamins" to "vittamins" and from "tomehtoes" to "tomahtoes". I no longer go shopping for a pair of pants but I will buy trousers instead, of course only while walking on the pavement, never on the sidewalk. If despite all of my best efforts at the end of the day I still can not manage to convince, I can of course always try to throw in the odd "Jolly good" or two. It sure can not get any more British than that. Cheerio!