Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category
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The Itinerary
Some of you might know that I am currently doing some traveling. I’ll try to keep up with my blog and post throughout this time, but I can’t make any promises. In the meantime, here’s my tentative itinerary, not including any possible side trips while I am in Moldova.
- January 21 – February 2: Almaty, Kazakhstan
- February 3 – March 24: Balti, Moldova
- March 25 – March 29: Pärnu, Estonia
- March 30 – April 7: Traveling around the Baltic countries
- April 7 – May 5: Atlanta
- May 5 – May 11: Road trip across the U.S.
- May 12 on: Seattle, WA
If you find yourself in or near any of these places while I am there, I’d love to meet you!
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My chameleon hand
One of my more unusual assignments at work: serve as the model for an experiment with hand drawings. This was the result after some Photoshop processing.
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Conferences and commitment
Locks hang on the "Bridge of Love" in Kiev.
In Kiev, there is a roughly 100-year-old bridge known as the “Bridge of Love.” It is not a particularly long or wide bridge, as it only connects two parks and is intended for pedestrian traffic only, and in fact it seems a little unstable. But as the bridge is one of many structures worldwide to carry the legend that passing across it with a significant other will lead to eternal happiness, couples have scribbled, tied cloths, and placed metal locks onto the bridge as signs of their commitment.Despite the fact that I just had an unforgettable experience learning from and working with people from over 20 different countries at AIESEC’s International Trainers Congress and I have lots of memorable photos from the trip, this is the photo that stands out most in my mind.
The locks on the bridge are to me a reminder of the commitments I made to myself and to others at the conference: to aim for and achieve my goals related to gaining and practicing training skills, keeping up contact with people from the conference and applying my newfound knowledge in a meaningful way. Shamefully, I have often failed to complete the lofty goals I set for myself at these conferences, but I think there are several things that differentiate ITC from the past ones.
First and foremost, the goals I set coming off the other conferences were largely AIESEC-related, and my occasional love-hate relationship with the organization (or at least AIESEC United States) often got in the way and sapped me of energy. The skills I gained at ITC, on the other hand, are much more applicable to my overall life, and practicing them makes sound sense regardless of the medium. In the near term that’s likely to continue to be AIESEC, but in the future it could be anything. Second, I was too busy much of the time to really reflect on the things I wanted to achieve and put the appropriate amount of effort into them, as I was constantly sideswiped by “just getting by.” As I mentioned in my thoughts on mental bandwidth, I think this problem is, at least for the immediate future, solved. Finally, I am a somewhat older and more experienced person now, and I think that will also play a role.
So with all that said (and no actual details about the conference itself — I’ll correct that oversight another time), I’m looking for suggestions on as many effective ways to hold myself accountable as I can reasonably implement. What are your thoughts, oh few readers of mine?
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MIA
For any of you trying to get in touch with me, I’m going to be pretty much entirely unavailable for the remainder of my time in Kiev. If you send me an email, don’t expect an answer before May 14.
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A clarification
Apparently that whole thing about ironing shoelaces was an elaborate joke. :-/
Now I must go search the office; I’ve been informed that gullible is written on the ceiling, but I absolutely can’t seem to find where…
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The Olympic Torch relay
The Olympic Torch relay kicked off in Almaty on its way to lots of countries before it arrives back in Beijing to kick off the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. The relay slogan is "Light the passion. Share the dream."
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Pictures, by popular demand
Popular by all of two or three people, but here are a first few pictures. More will come as I continue organizing my photos and uploading the ones I feel up to sharing. And yes, I’ve joined the hordes and decided to use a flickr account. The nice integration with Windows Live Photo Gallery, which is a surprisingly good (if horribly named) program, sealed the deal.
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Biggest cultural shock yet
In Kazakhstan, it is considered slovenly to not frequently launder–and iron–shoelaces. Clearly I have no chance of looking remotely respectable.
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Celebrating International Women’s Day
"Congratulations on the holiday, our dear ladies!"
I was going to post photos today, but some technical issues unfortunately prevented me from doing it… so, some time on Tuesday, perhaps. It’ll give me the chance to take some more photos, while I’m at it.
Meanwhile, today we celebrated March 8, International Women’s Day, at work. I actually wrote a column about it for the ‘Nique this week (that I’ll post later), but the above photo is the poster the Magic department made for all the ladies in our office. We also all pitched in to purchase cake, flowers (well, amusing balloon animal-style flowers) and gifts for the entire female staff.
It might seem fairly insignificant, but the entire approach, with all the guys in the office holding a meeting to determine plans, and assigning responsibilities, etc., not to mention everyone contributing a not insignificant amount of money, was just something totally alien to what I would have expected in the U.S. Perhaps part of it comes from working at a much smaller, younger and more closely-knit company, but I can’t help but feel that part of it is based on cultural differences between the U.S. and Kazakhstan.
That’s pretty much been the story, in fact: there hasn’t been anything huge that has just totally caught me off guard about this country; for the most part it has been in line with my expectations. But it’s the little things that jump out at me out of the blue that are adding up to an interesting cultural experience.
So far, I feel that I’m learning a lot, even though I have experienced relatively little here to date. Let’s hope it keeps up.
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Things I did not miss
Some things, unfortunately, are present everywhere. For the non-Cyrillic readers among you, that’s L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, advertised on the side of a bus stop in Almaty.
As seen on the side of a bus stop in Kazakhstan.
In Brief
My name is Arcadiy, and arcadiy.org is my website. Funny how that works.
I write about life, technology, my random side projects and whatever else strikes my fancy. I make no promises about the utility or entertainment of anything here. However, I would love to hear your thoughts on anything I mention.
In my day job I'm a Program Manager at Microsoft.
You can read (or look at) more by me in my momentstream.
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