davethegrinch.net

Sarah says:

It is 7:46am on Thursday, Sept 13^th 2007. I am on the southwest train service from West Byfleet station to London Waterloo. I am commuting. I am a commuter. To work. To an office. I am awake, dressed in the best that my backpacker wardrobe has to offer, fiercely fighting for a spot on a train with all the other early morning commuters who are all dressed in their office attire, looking half asleep, carrying ever-enlarging cups of chain coffee. And everyone reads the London Lite, the Metro Lite, The LondonPaper. In this country, you get your tabloid news for free.

 

Not a bad opening paragraph but it likely makes no sense to anyone reading this. How has it happened that I’m commuting to work in London?

 

Ok, here is the story. Let’s rewind to June, after my Mom’s visit to the UK and before Portugal and Morocco. In mid-June we left the UK for Amsterdam to visit our friend, Beth and we ended up falling in love. Mmm, ok maybe it wasn’t that romantic. The truth is, we went to Amsterdam still feeling worn out from travelling in third world countries and began to think about taking a break somewhere for the fall/winter to recuperate before travelling on to other third world countries. Having come to that mutual realization, David and I took a look around the unbelievably cute city we were in and said, “well….we could live here…”

 

Sarah, on a single breath, and having decided to interpret the contemplative but non-committal response from her husband as a, “definitely yes!”, spews forth: we could come back here by September and both get jobs and find a cute apartment on a cute canal and both get bicycles and I could make soup everyday because it will be really cold and we could make friends and take weekend trips to other cities in Europe and maybe even go snowboarding in the Alps and we could stay here living in Amsterdam, I’ve always wanted to live in a foreign country, until spring and then we’ll have saved some more money to resume travelling and everything will be cute here and we could totally have the true Amsterdam experience.

Phewww…..

 

To be fair and to contradict the image my spew (see above) may have set, we spent weeks walking all around Amsterdam trying to examine it with objective eyes – could we really live here? Is this what we truly wanted? Could we really get jobs? Would we feel like we were selling out, virtually ending the adventure, going home without going home? I mean, as tempting as it would be to reunite myself with incoming funds, an apartment of my own, a social life like we’re used to, and…..real clothing, if we really stepped off the adventure super highway would we be devastated? These aren’t easy questions to answer; I think David and I have woken up every day of the past 9 months feeling different than we did the day before about what we’re doing, where we’re going and how we’ll get there. And even after talking and thinking and talking and thinking it over and deciding that, yes, Amsterdam would be a wonderful city to take a rest in for all the right reasons, we still have twinges of doubts. For instance, in honour of the 60^th anniversary of the separation of India and Pakistan, the BBC recently ran a whole series of documentaries about the two countries. Watching these programs filled us both with a yearning to go back, a sadness that we’d not spent more time there the first go round and a nostalgia for the challenge. Enough time had passed for us to forget the smells and sounds of India, the shear exhaustion of simply being there and with each program we watched we completely fell for the beauty of Incredible India all over again. But we know in our hearts, and we take turns reminding each other, that it really is best for us to take a break. We miss India and the adventures of India because we’re missing India from the clean and quiet comfort of David’s mom’s couch. If we were to jump back into that existence now, it would take about 4 days for it to feel like a complete pain in the ass. We have stopped seeing things with fresh eyes. A nice break for 6 months will rejuvenate us and, in the meantime, we will be continuing the adventure – just in a different capacity.

 

Thus was born The Amsterdam Plan.

 

Having made our decision to settle for a little while, while simultaneously setting records for the over-usage of the word “cute” about a single city in a single day (please see previous Amsterdam entries) we set out to make it happen. It would require a little bit of planning which we decided would best be done from the most economical location going for us at the moment: David’s parents’ house. Mum, Dad, we’re moving in.

 

Before we left Amsterdam that June, though, David met with a couple recruiters who, by this time in early August, were ready with prospects. It took him about a week to secure three phone interviews and the following week he was on a plane back to Amsterdam for in person interviews. Three days later, he had a job offer. Accepted. TomTom, the satellite navigation people. Cool name, cool product. Done. Start date: well this is Holland and, so the rumor goes, NOTHING happens very fast so his start date of Sept 17^th, a full three weeks in the future, was considered stellar.

 

Meanwhile, I dropped a line to my former manager at comScore explaining our situation and asking if they perhaps needed any help on projects that could be worked on remotely from Amsterdam. Not as much of a longshot as it sounds since the position I held for this company in Seattle was basically a remote position and it’s a completely paperless, email and IM dependent job. However, I didn’t hold out much hope that anything would come of it and had resigned myself to a tourist cafe job. You can imagine my shock and delight when 3 days later I was meeting with the EVP of comScore Europe in his London office and three days after that I was signing a consultant contract. My old company, my old people, my old job – except this time done from home…..in Amsterdam. Great, excellent, done. All they requested was that I give them a couple of weeks in their London office so that we could all get to know each other and figure out exactly what my role would be – fair enough. As I mentioned, David’s start date was set for Sept 17^th and, this all happening around August 15^th, that gave me a month commuting to their London office, while all that time we’d be boarding for free with the parents. And once we relocated, I agreed to flying to the London office every other Monday-Tuesday. Not a bad situation. How swish is this: I am a consultant, working for a US company, working from home in Amsterdam, commuting every other week to London. I mean really. As a girl growing up in Louisiana, I certainly could never have dreamed this up.

 

So that, my friends, is the long story of how I came to be commuting to London for work.

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Amsterdam, Global Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.