Transitions (Finish Line)

Fragments

Like:

London fixed gear bike scene.

Abundant antique, used, and new bookstores.

British Museum. Seeing the Rosetta Stone.

Returning to the land of free refills.

Dislike:

It is over.

Leaving friends.

Not Sure Yet:

Return cell phone.

We took a ferry across the English Channel to get to our final stop. My conclusion was that the people who have swum the channel are insane. Cold, long and not calm waters characterize it.

Running

London, like Paris, was difficult to navigate by foot. In fact, I actually got a little turned around one day and spent a good deal of time trying to correct my wrong turn. The pro to getting lost was that I got to see a fox really close. It was strange, seeing the crafty creature in the middle of a park in the center of a large city. Anyhow, the easy fix to this is to run along the river. The Thames River has a rather wide walking path that is perfect for running. Well, it has one major drawback. There are sections of the path where street performers, tourists waiting to ride the Ferris Wheel, locals coming to and from work, and skate boarders congregate at the adjacent skate park. Given all of the foot traffic, I felt like I was doing some agility training (not that the sport I participate in requires all that much agility). Don’t get me wrong; I am not saying that these other pedestrians should not have been there, rather that for my purposes they were an inconvenience. On the contrary, some of the street

performers were quite entertaining. There was a wide range of the skill levels among the performers. Among them were: the classical guitarist sporting a bright blue suit and face painted blue (somewhat skilled), the hippie playing the diggeridoo, the lizard man riding a stationary bike alongside his miniature replica (not so skilled), and the jugglers on stilts (quite talented).

On one particular run, I learned a bit about culture in London. There have been a number of occasions when I have caught up to a fellow runner and started five-minute conversations with them. Usually what I have found is that the individual is training for a race or another sport. They have some goal in mind. So this particular day running on the Thames River Path I came up on a runner wearing a backpack. He was keeping a pretty decent pace, especially for

wearing a cumbersome backpack. My initial hypothesis is that he was carrying some weights in the pack and was training for an endurance race, or for backpacking or something else of interest to me. Upon approaching him, I slowed down to his pace, said hi and asked the question that was on my mind: “what are you training for?” He was somewhat unsure how to answer the question, so I elaborated by asking if he was training for a race, or for fitness.

Answer: C) None of the above.

To my surprise his answer was, “I am just running home from work.” Of the possible reasons in my mind of why he was wearing a backpack, this reason trumped them. Brilliant it is… Take the tube/underground to work à hard day at work à need to de-stress à change into running gear à put your corporate suit in the pack à get home à shower à dinner. Not to mention, the advantage you have of avoiding the stress of crowded public roads and public transportation of rush hour. Since that encounter, I noticed that this wasn’t just the strategy of one individual, but rather that there were many people who sported backpacks and running gear at that hour of the day. Maybe one day I will have a job and get to run home.

Motif

Sometimes certain themes keep recurring in my experiences. Time and again on this trip I was confronted with the theme of World War II. It came in ways such as visiting a WWII concentration camp in Germany, going to the Ann Frank house in Amsterdam, and seeing the Churchill Cabinet War Rooms in London. It appeared subtler in books I read such as Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel, Everything is Illuminated by Jonathon Safron Foer, and Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Formally I learned about it in comparative economics when we were studying socialism, communism, and the nature of planned economies.

Numbers

I am in the plane at the moment and thinking about how we are finishing right where we began. 10 weeks ago I was in the Copenhagen airport, and today I was there again. Yet, I hope that I am not the same person that I was before the trip. I have 42 new friends, 4 classes finished, spent many Euros, ran 952 kilometers (nearly 600 miles). Nevertheless, much of what I have learned cannot be quantified. Everything our global business strategy textbook was laid out in 4-square tables, 5-Step lists, graphs, and diagrams. In fact, the author did a great job of following his own advice; in order to best facilitate knowledge transmission, one of his steps was to codify tacit knowledge. Put simply, implied knowledge should be stated in a systematic manner. That way, you know that you know something. This gets tricky when you are trying to express ideas such as the overall demeanor of Russians and how there is a universal European culture.

Next Steps

Some days during the trip I felt like a participant in the local culture, and other times I felt like a mere observer, a loud mouthed American tourist. The next time that I go overseas I want to go deeper into the culture. I want to get passed the tourist stage, dive into culture shock, and finally recover. I probably only penetrated the outer layers of the cultural onion in the short time that we spent in each country. I know I was culturally insensitive at times but I think I have a better idea of how to build trust in intercultural relationships.

I think, taken out of context, the lyrics of a Death Cab for Cutie song are fitting for my current state,

You and me,

Have seen everything to see,

From Bangkok to Calgary,

And the soles of our shoes,

Are all worn down,

The time for sleep is now,

(Well we didn't go to Bangkok or to Calgary, but my shoes are all worn down...)