Nomadic Woman (Lone lady travels)

As a woman, in many parts of the world, it’s downright daft to walk around unaccompanied by friends or even a man. As a blonde, perhaps even more so in many places… But the reality is, there aren’t really so many places where it’s impossible to be a woman travelling alone. However, if you are willing to do it, there are certain things that you have to put up with, and this rings true for most the places I have travelled alone…

 

• people may well think you’re a prostitute if you’re sat in a bar by yourself
• people will ask you where your husband is
• people will ask why you’re not married (yesterday’s count; 4 people, 3 of which were women)
• people will look at you if you’re sat in a bar or restaurant alone in the evening, but they will rarely approach you
• people will ask you if you’re alright (‘You need support, ma’am?’)
• people may well think you’re a little odd

For today, I’ve told one person I’m not married, and one that I am, and that my husband is at the hotel.  I’ve made ‘friends’ with a crazy lady who knows nothing about me after a 30 minute ‘conversation’ but I know all about her Australian pilot husband who flies private jet around the world, I’ve seen all her Facebook profile pictures from the last 5 years. Two men told me ‘You don’t know how beautiful you are.’ That doesn’t happen if you’re travelling in a group. 

I have no problem with this of course. My point is that I think it’s easier to travel alone as a man. There are fewer questions, fewer expectations, you have more opportunity to talk to people without having to lie about non-existent marriage. Of course, when you travel alone anywhere, you have to be careful, whatever your gender, but as a woman even more so. 

Interestingly, countries where I imagined to have trouble as a woman on the road, such as Syria and Brazil, where actually no problem most the time. And those countries where you’d think it might be easy to travel as a woman alone have been the ones in my experience that have been the opposite (like France and Belgium).

On poppycock (Or the value of communication)

My Twitter feed right now includes someone who has retweeted about going shopping for bread in Paris, a tweet consisting of a url, a hashtag and a twitter username, and someone who has retweeted “‘Fuck yeah, boxes’ every baby, ever” (who I have now ‘unfollowed’ or whatever verb it is we’re supposed to use). 

My personal inbox contains a string of emails in which extra people kept getting added in as cc, even though the majority of the conversation should have only been between two people, and then the others informed only of the outcome. 

Technology definitely helps if you live abroad; speaking to friends in far away places and family back home is obviously much easier and cheaper with Skype & Face Time, organising events/trips etc is much simpler thanks to email and mobiles. Something that Scott Berkun wrote in Big Ideas for Curious Minds (which incidentally I got a free electronic copy of for commenting on Scott’s blog!), struck a chord:

Since the telegraph we’ve been sending bits of data to faraway places, and we’ve gotten better at that every year since.But where we’re far behind is in the quality of what we send each other and how little difference it makes.

Why do we bother answering an email if we’re not going to first take the time to read it properly, and then if we’re not going to give the time to answer it properly? Why do people post that they just ate baked beans on toast for dinner on Facebook? Why do you retweet a hashtag? 

So here’s a little communication manifesto:

• Re-read an email you write before you send it, making sure it answers the questions it is supposed to
• If you have to think twice about posting something on Facebook, then you probably shouldn’t bother
• If there is more than one person in an email conversation, think about whether there needs to be more than one person in said email conversation
• Go for coffee with friends, look them in the eyes and listen, and talk, and enjoy instead of posting on their Facebook wall
• Switch off the technology sometimes. That means if you’re on the bus, try looking up and around rather than retreating into the diversion that your iPhone screen provides on demand
• Use technology to help you to communicate better; spell-check, online dictionaries, FaceTime, reminder apps that remind you a week before someone’s birthday, email used wisely… 
• Think about the value of what you are communicating. Does it help if you communicate it? Does it need to be communicated or simply remembered, cherished? 

Read more wise words from the wise and generous Scott Berkun here

 

Google says play don’t translate (YouTube vs Dictionaries)

Having grown up in a country where monolingualism is the norm, and now living in a country where most under the age of 40 can easily communicate in more than one language (I wouldn’t go as far to call it multilingualism), I am intrigued by how Google sets its priorities.

Go to any Google country home page without logging in. Try to find the translation services, without using the Google Translate url. To find the Google translate pages, you generally have to go via its ‘More’ menu, or you have to Google it, or you have to know the Google Translate url. A few years back this wouldn’t have bothered me, since the translations that Google came up with were unreliable and often comical, but now it is a pretty good service, and great for those quick searches.  But why is it tucked into a little dark Google corner?

What surprises me (or maybe it’s just disappointment at the reality of the world), is that YouTube and Play sit higher on the menu hierarchy than translation. I use Google Translate daily (and I long for the day they have Google Translate for Swiss German dialects), and I imagine I am not the only one. I rarely go to YouTube (the videos I watch tend to be embedded in blogs, newspaper sites etc), but can it really be true that entertainment and distraction are so much easier to find than a translation tool for the daily reality of most people’s lives? I understand Google was not built for me. I understand that I like dictionaries and that is fairly weird, but I feel the Google menu does not reflect the reality of many people’s lives.

It’s obviously something they’ve thought about, because if you go to http://www.google.com.pg, the home page for Google Papua New Guinea, the country with 841 languages (for a population of around 6 million), there it is!

So maybe we just need to wait a little longer for Google to catch up with the polyglot reality of Switzerland?

Doing it with the lights on (A disappointing Earth Hour)

For Earth Hour 2013 (March 23rd 8:30 – 9:30pm for those who missed it), I was on a hotel terrace restaurant overlooking the sparkly Dubai Marina. The waitresses kindly gave us one of those plastic bracelets you snap so they start to glow (the kind you get at university nightclubs), and informed us, that Ma’am, Earth Hour would commence at 8:30pm, Ma’am, and that, yes, Ma’am, they would be switching off the lights. 

I was intrigued, not only because Dubai Marina is an electrician’s dream, in that there are buildings reaching to the clouds that need lighting up, but also because the lights are not only so you can see where you’re going in the dark, but also for selling. Bright neon hotel signs, brands, floodlit malls, beams lighting up the newest highest shiniest building… you get the picture. At 8:30pm, nothing happened, lights remained bright and numerous. At 8:35pm, the lights on the terrace where we were sat went out. We looked around. We looked around again. Nada. Niente. Other lights stayed on, the sky stayed illuminated. 

Dubai by night, even during Earth Hour

After about 30 minutes, the Ramada must have finally got the memo that something should have been happening, as they switched off the big red illuminated branding across their towering hotel. All other lights in the windows stayed on.

I was very disappointed in Dubai’s attempt at Earth Hour (although I’m sure it’s not the only place where this happened). For a place where a massive SUV is the chosen method of transportation, and apples come in a plastic wrapper, have they built a society that cannot cope without an hour of light? Is it because of the insane amount of commercialisation (they don’t want people to miss the Ramada sign for an hour), or because of an insane level of energy consumption (Air Con, SUVs, beautiful (and ugly) skyscrapers whose exteriors ‘require’ illumination) that people have got so used to they cannot deal without it? Either way, I don’t think Dubai is the only city where Earth Hour was shunned in favour of keeping the lights on, but it’s worrying.  

In Europe, there are so many campaigns to switch off lights as you leave a room, to fix dripping taps, to share cars, to take showers instead of baths, to buy energy conscious appliances and so on. What hit me in Dubai is that whatever we do for the environment; our small steps in our little households, there are nations growing where these tiny considerations are so far off the priority list.

Scary, isn’t it? 

To find out more about Earth Hour, click here

 

 

WiFi Wishes (Get me connected!)

Going back to what I have previously written here about hotel rooms, and tiny things making a massive difference when travelling, I’d like to talk about WiFi. Firstly I never know whether to pronounce it wiffy, why Fy, or another way, when travelling, and neither does anyone else. However you pronounce it, I have three WiFi wishes…

1. Why haven’t all hotels cottoned onto the fact that almost every traveller without exception travels with more than one wi-fiable (watch out for that addition to the 2014 OED; you saw it here first), device? 

Do you know anyone who will only connect with their laptop? The difficulty with this of course, is that then you cannot use What’s App for example, while trying to stay on top of your work inbox on your laptop. And, if you would like to connect your Kindle to the network to synchronise today’s issue of the Guardian, then you ought to do that once you’ve done your work emails, messaged your friends and are just about to head out of the door.  Since hotel WiFi connection procedures tend to require you to type something along the lines of a 16 digit code and your room number into a badly structured web page (which is often poorly translated into English & other languages), having to do this on each device is particularly painful and in my opinion, unnecessary. 

2. Airports without WiFi are like Christmas without Santa

People spend a lot of time in airports. Alain de Botton spent a lot of time in Heathrow and wrote a book about it. There are great airports (Zurich, for example) and there are average airports (Manchester, for example), and there are fairly shocking airports (Birmingham, Lisbon, Gatwick, Amman, for example). One of the things that makes an airport great is free WiFi. If you’re delayed and need to send an email to let the people expecting you you’re delayed, it’s pretty handy. If you get no information from the flight company about when your plane might take off, the internet is often more useful than the ground staff. If you’re bored and you’re in need of some mind-numbing entertainment; the internet can help you with that!  With so many people passing through airports daily, I don’t really understand why more airports don’t offer free WiFi for travellers. I cannot imagine it costs that much to maintain. 

3. WiFi in public places

One of the most visual memories I have of some time I spent in Reggio Emilia, Italy, is of students and residents sitting in groups or alone on the steps of various public buildings in the beautiful main square of the town, on laptops, typing away, or staring at the screen. The town created this initiative of free WiFi in public places as far back as 2006, claiming the benefits as creating new opportunities to study, work, for leisure and service, in public spaces that are open and multi-functional. (Read about it here in Italian). 

Maybe I’m being a purely selfish traveller, but these three things would make my life a lot easier!

 

Speaking proper (or trying not to apply English rules to Swiss German)

Speaking Swiss German earns quite some respect from the Swiss. I think in general in Europe, if you’re English and you can speak one or more languages other than your own, you are a rarity and you’ll have it quite easy, simply because people are not expecting you to have bothered learning any other language. 

 

I would like to somehow map the languages in my head (and others), in terms of proficiency, fluency,  complexity and how each language influences the other. I think that polyglots build for themselves a complex linguistic tapestry, with each word learnt in one language perhaps uncovering something in another, or intermixing languages depending on who they’re talking to. 

 

Going back to the Swiss German, (which I have learnt by surrounding myself with it and stubbornly refusing to allow the generally  linguistically able Swiss to practice their English with me), I notice how it is affected by the sociology of English. The concept of ‘speaking properly’ is very apparent in British English, where children are often told to pronounce their ‘T’s and not to use ‘like’ at the end of every sentence and to say isn’t instead of ain’t. I think because of this conditioning, I find myself in Swiss German switching to High German when I am in a formal situation. Which is daft, as Swiss German isn’t less formal in Switzerland. It’s a bad habit that I’d like to change. If you look at it from another perspective, it’s a bit weird, akin to me switching from British English to American English. 

 

And seeing as the Swiss would often rather speak English than High German, I probably loose a bit of respect when I switch. I guess its a case of trying to apply Swiss socio-linguistic rules to Swiss language, and leaving the English rules for English.

Bloody politics (Do I have BSE?)

It seems that it’s pretty hard to donate blood if you’re British and wanting to donate your blood outside the UK. I’ve tried in France and in Switzerland (where, somewhat ironically the blood donation vehicle that travels to train stations is the iconic red double decker London bus), and the short answer is that I have mad cow disease and therefore they don’t want my blood. The small print is that if you lived in the UK during the BSE ‘outbreak’ in the 1990s, you’re deemed at risk from having or having been exposed to Mad Cow disease.

I wonder why it’s like this, since there were other European nations that have been proven to have had cases of BSE too, but only Great Britain is mentioned. Surely the demand for blood (particularly the more universal blood types) outweighs the risk that us Brits have Mad Cow Disease. Considering there have been cases of the lungs of smokers being used in organ transplants, the blood rule seems a little excessive.

Then I read the article in the Zuercherzeitung (NZZ) on 25th February about the Swiss export of blood donations to Greece, and it becomes clear that they have enough blood to go around, so I guess no one is losing out in Switzerland because I am not allowed to give blood. Apparently Switzerland is one of the only European countries to export blood abroad, but as a consequence of the Greek financial mess, they cannot afford to continue importing Swiss blood.

So I have a solution: Switzerland doesn’t want my blood. France doesn’t want my blood. Maybe I can sell it to Greece for half the price Switzerland sells theirs, thus making me feel better about giving blood to those who need it, and making a little money on the side. If there are any other Brits abroad who want in, let me know. Pretty sure that’d be legal, right?

It’s a man’s world (In an airplane)

I find it astonishing that if you take a flight to or from a business destination (which can generally be determined by whether or not people clap upon landing, and the number of straw hats in the overhead compartments), the flights are full of men with only a tiny handful of women who appear to be travelling for the same purpose.

It’s astonishing because I (maybe naively) had the impression that in Europe, women were doing fairly well in terms of having international careers that would mean they too end up on a plane in a suit. Maybe because of the company I work for, I have a warped impression of gender equality in the workplace, and I’ve forgotten the male-dominated reality. Is the male dominance of the airplane a reflection of the gender career gap?

This isn’t intended to sound like a feminist rant, it’s merely an expression of my surprise at my naivety in thinking women were doing ok at getting themselves careers to rival mens’. Not that international travel is necessarily indicative of a successful career either. I have found myself in many departure lounges surrounded by men in grey suits.

Here’s the typical demographic of a departure lounge for a business flight:
– pairs of suited men (typically grey suit, mainly wearing ties) travelling together, usually with briefcases, and heavy looking laptops with the bar codes of their IT security departments, typing fairly slowly with one finger. (Engineers?)
– a handful of more trendy looking (they probably work in design or IT) younger men in pairs, with Moleskine notebooks, checking their emails on iPads
– the trios who are on their way to do a presentation; one woman, and two men (normally all with wedding rings). They pass a DELL computer between them while they check the Powerpoint and the Powerpoint notes, and laugh about little in jokes on the numbers they’re going to present. All in suits.
– the lone scientist, with a laptop bag from a conference in Baghdad in 2009, scruffy shoes and an old flip phone, struggling to send a text message. Reading an academic paper or the international equivalent of the Telegraph
– then there’s me.

Travel peeves (And the perfect hotel room)

I’m currently living out of a suitcase, which is mostly fun and interesting, but there are a few things that I try very hard not to get annoyed about being constantly on the road…

• Hairdryers in hotel rooms are rarely very powerful. Luckily I don’t have an enormous amount of thick, long hair to dry, but even a little bob takes a very long time to dry in a pathetic draft
• While we’re on the subject of hairdryers, why are the cables never long quite enough to easily reach the back of your head? Those curly cables are stiff and frankly, unnecessarily impede the art of drying your hair, which, if you’re also affected by my first point, will not be a quick process anyway.
• The toiletry selection in the bathroom of hotels. Does anyone actually wear shower caps? Do women use the shampoo provided? I’d much rather see a hand cream or toothpaste, or a nice little box of applicator tampons, just in case. The exception to this is NH hotels, who have lovely toiletries, and the other extreme is Travel Inn, or Days Inn, or one of those ‘I used to be a prison’ hotels, where you can jolly well get yourself down to reception if you need toiletries, as they’re not prepared to enter your room during your stay, to clean nor restock toiletries.
• Designer bathrooms with no option but to cover the whole bathroom floor in water during a shower. It’s all very well (and indeed, rather pleasant) to lather up under a mammoth shower-head with your bare feet enjoying the marble floor, surrounded by glass, but if there’s no door to the shower, or no curtain, then you won’t be able to use the bathroom with socks on until the next morning.
• Airport security (particularly in the UK), has to top the list of travel frustration. There’s no eye-contact, there’s barely a grammatical sentence in sight, mere grunts targeted towards the traveller. ‘Got laptop?’ ‘Put it in the tray’ ‘Shoe bomb?’ … I wonder how we could make airport security more of a fun job for the poor souls who have clearly lost their soul to the full body scanners…I think if these grunting security staff enjoyed their jobs, I’d enjoy going through security more.

Going back to hotel room peeves, it doesn’t actually take a lot to have a fantastic hotel room; here’s my list of essentials for a happy hotel experience:

• A duvet and sheets rather than a mangy blanket and sheet covering it (Italy and France still seem to believe this is acceptable, Swiss hotels are good for duvets)
• Free WiFi
• A smoke-free smell and a window that opens, or a quiet air con unit
• A free bottle of water on arrival
• A kettle

Some hotels are now providing iPod docks, which I think is a fantastic idea. I also appreciate a magazine in the room.

If that’s really all it takes, maybe I should open my own hotel? Or stay home more often!

Speaking the right language (Accent vs vocabulary, language vs communication)

In my experience, if you have a good accent when you speak a foreign language, you can make people believe that you speak the language very well, even if you can actually say one word. It doesn’t really seem fair; if you sweat over your vocabulary lists as you’re learning the language, but can’t quite grasp the accent, then, no matter how well you learn the lingo, you just won’t pass among native speakers as being a competent speaker of the language. OK, so the reality isn’t quite as black and white as that, however, I believe that accent seems to have a higher status than a broad vocabulary (at least on the surface; the first time you converse with someone in a foreign language, after continued conversation you’ll be judged on other factors normally). 

As an interesting parallel, we seem to place higher value in foreign language skills in general rather than in communication skills. This could well be because foreign language skills are more quantifiable: you can say you speak five languages fluently (although if it’s me you’re saying it to, I’ll ask you what fluent means to you), but how do you express that you have exquisite communication skills? There isn’t a common European framework for communication skills, as there is for foreign languages. Great communication skills (or terrible communication skills) are not really something you notice about a person immediately, but when they do their first presentation, when you receive the first email from them, when they attempt to explain something to you. 

So, how can you improve your accent in a foreign language? And how can we start to raise the value of communication skills to level foreign language skills?

A good start on communication skills is to dig into a little bit of Orwell, and his essay on Politics and the English Language (the messages in this essay ring true of communication, rather than simply just English). Maybe if everyone reads this, we’ll start to think about communication a little more, which is one step to raising the value of communication skills).

For improving your accent in a foreign language, this is tricky. I always advised my students in France that they should imitate my accent. I told them it’d probably be fairly hilarious at the beginning, and they’d feel like they were making a fool of themselves (not because my accent is particularly ridiculous, rather students tend to often feel they’re making a fool of themselves unless they’re doing something ‘cool.’ My English accent isn’t particularly ‘cool’), but it would help their English accent. This definitely helps. Maybe you can also get some inspiration from this lady whose repertoire of English accents was spread over the web a few years ago.