The blame game
I was pretty upset and frustrated last night so I decided to start trying to deal with the problem then: my bank's customer service line is open until 10pm and the check people's customer service line is open until midnight. The conversations went as follows:
Call check people: "We've released the funds to your bank."
Call bank: "We have not received the funds."
Call check people: "We've released the funds to your bank. We have no idea why they don't have them. You should have another conference call with us all tomorrow."
I got very upset with all of them and decided to wait and deal with it in person this morning. It has become readily apparent that the people working the phones at night are much less informed (and perhaps much less competent) than those working during the day. I couldn't sleep (again) because I was so worried.
I showed up at the bank branch at 8:55 and waited for them to open at 9. Virginia waved me over and picked up the stack of account paperwork from her desk (apparently she made some calls on my behalf yesterday). We were unable to figure out anything else while talking to the bank people, although she did manage to speak to the "very large overdraft department" or whoever they were that called me on Monday and were investigating my account to explain that we were working on the situation. The "very large overdraft department" had/has put my account into a special status that basically means that no checks that I write will even go out anymore. Really, that's not a big deal since I haven't written a check in at least two weeks and haven't even attempted to use the checking account in the 10 days since this happened.
We decided to call the check people and do a conference call again. We got a man named Adrian (different from Adrienne, the person in charge of my account in the "very large overdraft department".) on the phone. Adrian was probably the first person from the check people who has seemed to have much in the way of a clue, and was also the first person from their institution who seemed to have any sympathy for me. Adrian asked me to give him a moment to read all of the notes on my account before he spoke with me; he was obviously impressed with how often and how long I had been following up on the problems. And then he put me on hold to investigate.
When Adrian came back, he explained that THE CHECK PEOPLE HAD LOST THE MONEY AND COULD NOT SEEM TO FIND IT. He explained how the money in the form of a check was shuttled from his company's bank to the Federal Reserve to my bank and then back through the three organizations when the check was returned and then theoretically back again when the money was re-released. Except that it sort of went missing somewhere along that route. He was sure that it was in some sort of "rejection account" somewhere, but that it would take a while to find it. He did come up with an idea for a temporary fix until they found the money, but even that was going to take until Monday, if it was feasible at all.
It finally got to the point where this was going to be an indefinite problem. I started to cry at Virginia's desk. Virginia looked very alarmed. I made Adrian re-explain the whole thing to Virginia and she practically started to cry herself about 3/4 of the way through the explanation. (She's going to have to go another weekend without any money!?) Right at the end, before she gave the phone back to me, she totally snarled at him (apparently he asked if she was satisfied with the explanation). He also apparently told her something to the effect of "It's not your bank's fault, it's not our...well, it doesn't really matter whose fault it is." which really pissed her off as well.
When I got back on the phone with Adrian, he said he was going to do some research to try to find the money and to try to find me a solution. He promised to call me back at 11 (it was now around 9:30).
Next Virginia and I went up to the teller window (with me still sniffly and looking like I had been crying). The teller was a guy named Casey, who also gets a major "nice to me" award. I wanted to cash checks from my roommates that they had already made out to me for August rent (the most important being the check from our new roommate who is moving in during August but who currently lives in Michigan...it would not be so easy to get another check from her made out to someone else) and to withdraw enough cash from my savings account to cover my portion of the rent as well. (The rent check really needed to be mailed today to make sure our landlord had it in time for Aug 1 and it is my responsibility to write the large check.) My orignial (bad, but well-intentioned) idea was to have the whole amount in cash and give it to my other roommate so that she could write the check. Eventually Casey and Virginia talked me into getting the whole amount as a cashier's check to give to the landlord. This involved the absoulute hilarity of having to call my landlord (because my roommate didn't answer) and ask him how to spell his last name with a long line of bank customers and Casey and Virginia watching. The landlord was quite confused. In the end, we got everything set, although it took about another half hour to fix because so many managers' signatures were needed to make it all work. Whenever Virginia would run away to find the manager (and with the ever growing line of customers watching), Casey made small talk and flirted with me. I couldn't tell if he was actually flirting with me or was pity flirting with me because I was so obviously having a bad time, but it was nice. He kept saying "We are the biggest bank in the country. We will take care of you. Don't worry." He even offered to go beat people up at the other bank for me. Then he realized that he was not very big and offered to make the big guy who works at the branch go beat people up for me. I felt kind of better as he kept saying "we'll take care of you" over and over again. He gave me his card in case I needed anything.
I finally made it to the lab at around 10:15. I realized pretty quickly that being as tired and upset as I was, I was not really fit for much of anything and ended up leaving pretty soon after (well, after lunch that is).
Adrian finally called at around 12:45 while I was walking home. I was not upset that he was later than he said he would call; I figured it meant that he was making progress and it just took longer than he thought. (Well, that and I don't think he understands time zones). He found the money. The federal reserve had it and apparently had forgotten to tell my bank that it was there. He really layed a lot of blame on the fed. He even made a little swipe at the government which didn't really make sense in context but he got points for trying. He also assured me that their company will bend over backwards to fix any other problems that are a result of this issue. (Banks fighting over who gets to pay my overdraft fees!) The money will be back at his bank tonight and I will be able to call them tomorrow (anytime after 6-7 am) and set up a direct electronic transfer to my bank account, which will take 48 hours. Obviously at this point I'll believe it when I see it, but the story seems too elaborate to be made up and I seem to be on the radar of people at both banks who want to solve my problem and who are actually following up. The explanation also makes sense as far as what I was hearing from the customer service people last night. So....maybe by Monday morning. At that point I will just have to go back to my bank to get the "no check status" removed. I'm not even concerned about the lack of money anymore, I figure that since I got the rent taken care of it will be okay.
My landlord happened to come by while I was home to drop off some papers and I gave him the cashier's check in person. He yelled at me for worrying. "All you had to to was give me a call and I would have been okay with it being late. It's really not worth your nerves." (It sounds better in his thick Russian accent.)
I basically slept for the rest of the day to try to calm down. I'm feeling better now and am ALL READY for Project Runway tonight.
Guess What!
I am the lucky winner of another trip to the bank tomorrow because THE MONEY IS STILL NOT IN MY ACCOUNT AND THE ASSHATS AT CUSTOMER SERVICE CANNOT GET THEIR STORY STRAIGHT AND FIGURE OUT WHAT IS WRONG.
I am so excited. I just don't know what to do with myself. /sarcasm
I am so over this whole situation. I have an unfortunate feeling that the next couple of days are not going to be pretty, but I don't feel bad for any of the people I scream at on the phone. I know it is not personally their fault, but (other than Virginia) they seem to be doing so little to help and seem to not be understanding how serious the situation is for me that I really don't care if I offend them.
Waaaaaaaaaaaah.
Fungus Girl
I have had not one, but two separate types of cells contaminated by fungus today! (Fungal contamination is something that should happen rarely if at all.) Eeeewwwwwwwww!!!
The ever so helpful MD/PhD student who sits near me said "You know, some people just shed fungal sprores." I decided to poke him mercilessly after that, just to be sure that I was generous and shared my fungal spores.
I'm sure that the president would be quite upset at the amount of innocent life that I poured bleach on, killed, and then threw away today.
Last week's woes
Last week was a rough week here in Iggy-ville. I thought about writing about what was up a few times, but mostly I was too upset and stressed out to be coherent or to be able to write about it without getting upset. Fortunately I calmed down a little later in the week and then got distracted from worrying while my mom and sister were here.
At the end of the week of July 4th, I received a large sum of money by check. It's sort of a long story as to how I got this money, but suffice it to say that it was BIG. I earmarked the money to pay off my credit card bills (which were scary and stressfully large themselves) and to go on vacation. I deposited the check at the end of that week.
According to my online bank statement, the money made it to my account on July 11th. On the 13th-14th, I paid off my credit card bills and I bought a vacation package the following weekend. I put all of the leftover money (earmarked to be spending money on the vacation) in my savings account. I was really, really happy. I was of course excited about my vacation, but I was also excited to sort of have my financial house in order. I've never been particularly good with money and my stipend isn't very large. I had some months in the past where I didn't manage the stipend very well and ended up running out of $ before my next check came on the 1st of the month. I've been a lot tighter with money later and have not been running out of money and have been a lot more pulled together money wise. I felt like the final part of paying off the credit card bills and putting a chunk into the savings account was the start of my really having my act together.
I was a little bored at lab on this past Monday (7/24) and logged into my online bank account. It had a large, red, negative balance as it was very much overdrawn. It turns out that the large check was being removed from my account. I left the lab immediately and called the company and the bank and tried to start figuring out what was going on. I didn't get very many great answers, but I was told it would solved between the end of the business day on Wednesday and the end of the business day on Friday. The financial institution that gave me the check also said they would reimburse all of the overdraft fees that I would incur based on the problem. I was slightly calmer that it would be eventually solved, but I was quite upset because now I had no money in my bank account. I had enough cash on Monday to go to the drugstore and buy deodorant and soap and mouthwash and some of the other toiletries that I had run out of (particularly important in all this heat), which took all of the cash I had. I went through Monday-Thursday morning with no cash. I could have asked friends for some cash, I could have put some groceries on my now "emergency" credit card, or I could have tried to get some cash from the emergency card as well, but I just couldn't bring myself to. After all, the cards had been paid off for less than a week and I wanted them to stay at a zero balance for at least a statement (even though I supposed that this WAS the emergency that emergency cards are meant for) and I'm not good at asking for help or depending on other people for help. I just kept telling myself that "tomorrow it will all be over and I can make it one more day." I mean, a large dinner really just seemed overrated. I was calling customer service at the bank and the other company daily and I was calling other companies (like the cable company) as their checks were returned to tell them that it wasn't my fault and to see what type of documentation they would need to not charge me fees. The whole thing was so defeating: I had been so happy to have gotten everything worked out the week before and now I felt like I must be doomed to having financial problems that would never clear up.
I planned on going into the lab for just a couple hours on Thursday before my mom and sister came to town. Right after I got to the lab I happened to check the bank account and noticed that the check had been subtracted TWICE and now my account was in overdrawn with an UNBELIEVABLY large amount. I started simultaneously crying and cussing out the bank and I stormed out of the lab to go and call the company again. On my way out the door, I realized that perhaps a stop at the bank branch might be useful. I arrived there at 11-11:30 and stayed until 12:45 where both an account manager (my new friend Virginia) and the bank's manager worked to try to make things better. It was really the first time that any customer service people were very helpful throughout the ordeal. They found out that the double subtraction was the bank's fault and took care of it. They found out that the check was being returned and that they would have a reason by Friday morning and offered to find out at 8 am Friday morning and call me about it by 8:30. They gave me the necessary forms to get the other company to reimburse my overdraft fees (currently $199). They told me that if I had any trouble getting the company to reimburse me, that they would personally cancel the overdraft fees. They wrote letters to the companies that I had bounced checks to telling them that the overdraft was not my fault so that they would not charge me returned check fees. They assured me that this would not impact my credit rating. In the end, everything was solved that could have been solved at that point and I felt somewhat better. The only thing left to do, we agreed, was to call the company to see if there was any more information they could give me as to why the check was being returned.
I went home and called the company and finally started to get some answers. I kept telling the customer service representative that she needed to explain things more slowly so that I could write them down to tell the people at the bank. She told me that she could talk to my bank representative herself if I called her from the bank, authorized her to talk to the bank and then sat there while they talked to confirm it was okay. I immediately hung up the phone, called Virginia to see if that was okay and walked back to the bank. During the walk to the bank, my head was finally clear enough for the first time that week to realize that I could go to the ATM and get cash from the savings account (remember all the money I put there?) and then pay myself back later. I felt pretty dumb for not realizing that sooner. We got the call initiated and found out that the whole problem was that the check had been miscoded. The money is on its way back to my account and should be there by the end of the business day on this coming Tuesday. It isn't there yet...
It has been pretty stressful, but things are better especially now that I have some cash and went to the grocery store. I felt a little bad for monopolizing Virgnina's whole day (or at least ~11-2:30 particularly since lunchtime was included there and I don't know if she had time to eat) but am extremely grateful that she was so helpful. I am trying to think of something nice I could do. Anyway, I've learned a lot of lessons, most notably that a large cushion in my savings account=good and that I should not try to deal with these problems on my own with customer service but should let real professional people handle them in person. Hopefully, this will all be cleared up soon and I can start being excited about travelling again... :)
Va-cations
I finally got my act together and scheduled a vacation. Thanks to lots of careful researching and an expedia sale, I managed to get a very good price and stay well within my new budget for the trip. Actually, the flight+hotel package was less than I was expecting, so more money gets to be budgeted as "spending" money while I'm there. Yay!!
Here is a picture to tell you where I am going:
I had orignially thought about taking a daytrip to London (on the train under the English Channel!) while I was there. Now that I have saved so much money, that might be back on. Woohoo!!
As for the potential wedding that I mentioned before, I had a long talk with my best friend on Friday night (which killed my Friday night plans but it was worth it) and found out that the whole engagement thing was further off than she had originally thought, so I have plenty of time. (Note for those of you who find yourself in this situation: Saying "You seemed kind of freaked out about ring shopping last time we talked" pretty much opens the floodgates and gets you all the info you need. :) )Also, she apparently told him that I am the only person he is allowed to consult with about rings/ring styles/proposal stuff so I might even end up with some advance warning. :) We are trying to synchronize schedules so that I can finally meet him in person.
Speaking of vacations, I think I desperately need a vacation from this heat. Ummm, hello...I live in Boston. It is not supposed to be oppressively hot here. If it was supposed to be oppressively hot, we would all have central air now, wouldn't we? It has been so hot that I can't sleep. Boo. Hopefully the weather people are right and the lightning storm outside (readers of mm's blog...am I allowed to blog during a thunderstorm? I am still highly confused on this matter.) and it will cool off tonight.
Also speaking of vacations (okay this one is a business trip, not a vacation, but humor me), my boss was out of town yesterday and today and will be out of town again Thursday and Friday. This has left me with a fair bit of free time at work. As a sort of last minute thing, my mom and my sister are coming on Thursday to spend the weekend here. It should be fun and should entail much shopping. Yay! Like last year, my dad is not coming although I guess there has been a little discussion of it. I am glad that he didn't make a plan to come and then back out so that I felt let down like last summer. I certainly wouldn't be upset if he decided to come at the last minute though.
As for mental vacations (okay, this one really doesn't fit), episode 2 of season 3 of my favorite reality show Project Runway will be on tomorrow night! Yay! I can't wait.
Okay, I have to go now because the lightning is freaking me out...I suppose my other post will have to wait for later. :(
Laundromat drama, quintessential Brookline, and race
I've written before about weirdness at my local laundromat, particularly
the time when my clothes almost got stolen, but today was definitely a whole new adventure, which also very clearly illustrates one of the little jokes I often tell about the place where I live.
You see, I live in a Boston suburb that is a little quirky. One of the quirks has to do with our police department. You see, we have basically no crime and the police are sometimes desperate for things to do (other than give parking tickets, which they are obviously good at). There is a large sign, updated daily, in a main intersection that lists the percent of people that day who were wearing their seatbelts while passing the intersection as well as the goal which is 100%...yes, that's true someone sits there and counts who is wearing seatbelts all day. Once I was walking home from a bar after a beer or so (not drunk at all and walking through a perfectly safe area) when a police officer pulled over and asked if I wanted a ride home, obviously bored. Then he decided that he ought to call a female officer because it would better kill time. The police department made QUITE the showing at the town's 300th anniversary celebration as well. I had only seen them actually doing something useful once, and that was talking to a man on the street as if he may have done something wrong. The strange thing about it was that he seemed to be cooperating and everything seemed fine, but the policeman and police car to suspect ratio was rather high. It is definitely comforting to live in such a safe area and know that the police would be ALL OVER anything that went wrong (it would surely make their week) but it seems a little silly sometimes.
Anyway, tonight when I went to put my stuff in the washer the laundromat was empty save for one man. He smelled of alcohol and was extremely talkative. There was something kind of off about him and I spent my time sort of smiling and nodding enough not to piss him off but mostly ignoring him. I was a little uncomfortable, but not too bad. I did wonder whether I should leave my clothes alone, but I figured it was unlikely that he would steal them from the washer (since who would take WET clothes? and since he obviously had his own laundry) and that leaving was preferable to staying at the laundromat with him. So I left.
When I returned, the man was still there and there was another girl about my age. They seemed to be having a little confrontation. It turned out that she was having trouble getting the change machine to take her money and the guy was trying to "help". He kept ripping the money out of her hand and clumsily trying to show her what to do. She was obviously uncomfortable and kept looking at me for help (but there wasn't much I could do). She finally got her $10 back from him, said she was going to a nearby store to break the money and left, asking me to watch her bag. I went back to ignoring the guy, which was harder because he really wanted to talk about the girl. Shortly thereafter she came back with a guy (prompting the drunk guy to say "Oh, you brought your muscle?" picked up her bag of clothes and left. This seemed to really tick off the drunk guy, who then wanted to talk about how disrespectful to him it was and also how terrible it was that she obviously didn't care about me. I went about putting my clothes in the dryer, although he was talking at me the whole time, telling me that I was using the wrong dryers etc. I just kept on ignoring him as much as possible.
And then the police arrived. In typical Brookline fashion, three police cars with uniformed officers came to investigate the situation, accompanied by another car with 2-3 plain clothes officers. I overheard later that they had also sent a car to a nearby address to speak with the girl. They came in and asked the guy some questions and then one officer saw me and took me outside to discuss the situation. I told him what happened, and from the questions he asked me I surmised that the girl was shaken up and had not explained well and made it sound like the guy cornered her and stole $10. They thanked me and told me that I had helped a lot. For some reason I felt weird leaving my clothes alone in all of this mess (although I don't know why...its not like something would have happened with all of the police there) so I stood outside the laundromat along with the other neighborhood residents who had come to wash their clothes that the police would not let in. Random passerbys kept coming and asking questions. The laundromat is at the intersection of my side street and a main road and cars kept pulling over to ask what happened, blocking the little of the road that was left after all of the police cars parked. They were in the laundromat a long time talking with him. He finally left and looked quite annoyed. Anyway, it seemed like a strange event with an extremely stereotypical Brookline Police response. I couldn't help but giggle, except for when I was talking to the policeman or when my roommate happened to come across the whole thing and find me in the middle of it and ask worriedly "Are you alright?"
The one nagging thing that is on my mind is about race. The drunk guy in question was black, while both the freaked out girl and I are white. I can't speak for the other girl, but it didn't matter to me that he was black. The weird behavior was what made me uncomfortable. The guy obviously thought that she was unhappy and left in the first place (and asked me to watch her bag) because of his race and then seemed to think the police call was also a race thing. Anyway, I don't know what I think about that part of the scenario...was there a way to make it clear that it wasn't about race?
The money and the vacation
I got the money that was going to be used for my vacation (among other things) earlier this week. Yesterday I realized that I wasn't going to have as much leftover as I thought, thus meaning that I would have to scale back on the vacation that I was planning (and had been browsing on expedia for over a week). I was a little down and then another thought hit me.
On Tuesday night I had a long phone conversation with my best friend about different vacation destinations (because she's been everywhere) and she gave me lots of recommendations. The other half of our conversation was about how her boyfriend had taken her to peruse engagement rings so he could get an idea of sizes and what she liked. We talked a lot about how she felt about the matter (she thinks it is to early for him to be thinking about it) and whatnot.
And suddenly, on Wednesday I realized that (duh) this perusal of engagement rings meant that she was going to be getting married, possibly in as soon as a year. And that perhaps I ought to have money on hand to cover many of the expenses that would be associated with her getting married. I went through a little crisis where I wondered whether I should go on vacation at all or whether I should just save all the money as a cushion for unexpected expenses like one's best friend's wedding.
In the end I decided to continue planning my vacation and just scaling back the cost. I am going to spend the weekend looking both at cheaper ways to do the destination that I had decided on and also to research some places that I hadn't thought about as much before. (thanks for the suggestions guys, keep them coming.) Criteria=saftey, particularly for solo female travellers; lots to do so; ease of transport to the things to do; preferably by mass transit or walking, I have no desire to drive; and cost. I'm not sure about beachy places both because I feel like I'd get bored easily and because I sunburn so easily and don't want to have to spend my time indoors covering myself with burn lotion. As far as Canada is concerned, I've been to Vancouver, Whistler, Calgary, Banff, Ottowa and Quebec City once and to Toronto and Montreal mutliple times (Thanks road trip happy parents and close proximity to Eastern Canada while growing up!), I have actually been to Florida (1x), the US West of the Mississippi (2x to Colorado and 2x to SF) and NYC (? times but a loooong time ago) fewer times that some Canadian cities. I've never been to an islandy place and I've been to Europe twice. That's the extent of my travels, so I obviously have a lot of options. I still have to think about exactly how much I want to spend versus how much I ought to save (either way, I am going to earmark some money for the potential wedding monthly now, just to make sure that I don't get into a bad financial situation like I did last summer with all of my bridesmaid adventures). Gah! Who knew that travel and friends could be so complicated?
The Minion
I'm sure you all are enjoying
Bob's minion adventures. Mine are much less exciting.
My minion is pretty great, actually. To get a place in our lab, my advisor made him promise to work here all four years of college as well as over the summers. He independantly got himself a fellowship for the summer as well. Anyway, I was frustrated with him most of the time during the semester because he was a freshman with no lab experience so I had to explain A LOT to him. He also wasn't there for very many hours a week, so he could never stay for a whole experiment and instead I had to plan around his schedule to try to be doing an interesting or educational step while he was around. It was not fun at all, basically it was just excessively time-consuming and felt like a baby-sitting job.
All that changed when he started full-time for the summer. I was a little worried before he came (I think I mentioned it in some previous post somewhere) because my advisor gets upset when he thinks someone doesn't have enough work to do and tends to be a little harsh on people with minions to make sure they are busy enough. ("I am paying him by the hour and I don't want my money to go towards time they are wasting!") I knew that I had plenty for the minion to do, but most of it involved experiments that have multiple long incubations where there isn't much to do. I was a little worried about how to impress upon him that he had to look busy during that time and not spend the whole two hours on his cell phone. I have lots and lots and lots going on right now and I definitely don't have time to spend babysitting him and assigning him things to do all the time...sometimes I just need to concentrate on what I am doing.
Well, in the end it was nothing to worry about. During the very first incubation on his very first day, he came over to my desk, took a textbook and started reading it and taking notes on it. He does that every day, although he has started bringing his laptop in and surfing a little during the day too, which really I can't say anything about. :) He also volunteers to help out other people in our area of the lab when they have little mundane tasks to do. I couldn't ask for anything more as far as independance goes. It's kind of nice that he looks things up or thinks about them instead of immediately asking me questions too.
It took a couple of weeks to teach him how to do the experiments I wanted him to work on for the summer, although after that he has been great. There are a few steps where he needs help or supervision still, but he knows to come get me when he gets to them and does all the rest on his own. Like I said before, I really couldn't ask for anything more from a kid with no lab experience the summer after his freshman year. He is a little hard to read which makes it kind of difficult to tell whether he is happy or stressed or bored, but we are getting a better rapport and he is opening up some. (I am a little worried that he is having some problems outside of lab, actually and I don't know whether I should do something or what to do, although I would totally want to help in any way that I could). I've been leaning a little towards giving him more free time rather than less, just because my recollection was that the transition to working all summer was tough for me and sometimes I would have given anything for 5 minues to think before I had to do my next task.
So in summary, he's great 99% of the time. I was a little frustrated with him last week (when I was obscenely busy) and he seemed to need more help than normal although I don't think I let it show that I was getting frustrated. He messed up a really important experiment on Friday such that it became unusable. I was pretty upset because it meant that I was going to have to come in over the weekend both to deal with the experiment and to finish all of the work I had planned to do myself on Friday that had been postponed by my helping him. I was majorly planning a calm weekend, but I could tell he felt really bad and wasn't making a big deal of it. Then my advisor found out and yelled at him which sucked. This week is going much better. I'm having him help me out with some other experiments that I need to do instead of continuing with his stuff for the week just so that he can get a little space from the frustrating stuff he has been working on.
After hearing about Bob's minion and the minions of my co-workers, I have decided that mine is the best in the whole world and that I wouldn't trade him for anything. :)
All by myself
(You may thank me later for putting Celine Dion in your head)
After all of my bitching (in this very spot!) about needing a vacation, I am going to take one. To make a rather long story short, some circumstances have changed money wise so that I can swing it (it may not be the most sensible plan, but whatever. At some point I will be a grownup with responsibilities who can't just pick up and go on a sweet vacation.) Anyway, I'm going to go on vacation in September, once some work calms down a little bit and during the time when the minion stops work to go home for a break before school starts.
One issue with all of this is that I have no traveling companion (not that I've looked very hard). While there are some people that I would really enjoy traveling with, I assume that they'll all have other obligations. But really, like I said, I haven't looked into it very much. I really really enjoyed sightseeing by myself in Copenhagen last year (Copenhagen posts
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14, posts 7-14 are more of the tourism stuff while the earlier ones are more bitching about my boss) and I would be happy to do it again. Getting up when I want, deciding my own itinerary each day, doing things at my own pace and such were all extremely relaxing. Yeah, it was a little lonely sometimes in that there wasn't anyone to say "wow! that is really cool!" to, (at least a partial reason why I blogged it so much and took so many pictures) but overall it was a fantastic experience that I am eager to repeat, although I could see how being by yourself would get old after a week or so.
Some people (most notably my mother) seem less enthused about the traveling alone idea. When I first told her about my little plan, her response was "with who?" and she seemed a little nonplussed when I answered "with myself". She got over it pretty quickly and started advocating for different destinations, but she still thought traveling alone seemed like a strange idea until I gave her all of the reasons why going alone was really the most relaxing option. After a little while, she kept repeating "Hmmm. Having no one to answer to." I, on the other hand, think that traveling by myself is a fantastic idea and is, in fact, a bit empowering. (Although I am not sure that I am going to tell my boss that I am going alone. Hmmm.) In the long run, (and slightly off-topic but not really) I think it is really interesting what activities single people (or really any people, but it comes up more often with single people) will do alone: I love traveling alone and going to movies alone but I won't go to a sit down restaurant alone (unless I'm traveling). A topic for another day, I guess.
The biggest issue right now is a choice of destination, which is also affected by the by myself thing. Some other graduate students in my lab found a cheap deal to the Dominican Republic and went there earlier this summer. I looked at the same package (or similar packages to other Caribbean destinations) but decided against all of them because while I have enjoyed beach trips in the past, I don't think I'm the kind of person who would like a week of laying on the beach by myself...that would drive me crazy with boredom quickly. (My mom on this point: "You're right. You're not really a beach bum.) I think I need a place with more sightseeing type stuff. I'm leaning towards Europe at this point (which feels extremely extravagant, although I am finding good deals) although I have not yet chosen a more precise destination. My criteria are: cool stuff/places I want to see (easy since my previous Europe experience is Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen and since really I could even stand to see Paris again), walkability, safety/security/comfort for solo women travelers, cost (nice segue from the previous post) and also ability to manage in English potentially without knowing a word of the native language or with my semiusable French. The first four of the five criteria are really the most important. It is kind of interesting that the solo traveler thing comes up AGAIN (and at this point may end up being the deciding factor as I vacillate between two different options). I think I am going to do a lot more reading and research this weekend because I just keep getting overwhelmed and being indecisive. I'd love any input of suggestions (hint, hint).
(By the end of my conversation with my mom, this is what she said: "GO TO LONDON!!!! No, wait, I think you should go to Greece. Greece is supposed to be nice. You should go to Greece. No, London. London. I mean, Greece." which is funny both because she changed her mind so quickly and because I hadn't even mentioned Greece nor am I leaning towards either London or Greece at this point.)
As ridiculously busy as I am lately (work=good but crazy, minion=surprisingly competent but time consuming, roommate situation=finally calm) I am feeling EXTREMELY happy just browsing vacation packages. I think there might be a market for vacation shopping as a form of therapy.
