Day 211 - 228 (October 14 - 31) London Calling

Day 211 - 228 (October 14 - 31) London Calling

Well I spent the next two weeks or so in London. I had a few things to do (UK taxes...). But I soon got an offer for a new job with the company in Switzerland so I had to get a few more things done. I actually had to go to the US Embassy to get more pages in my passport! Guess I have been traveling too much...

It was nice to be back in London. I was there long enough that it did kind of feel like home. The sunset on the flight fro Zurich was gorgeous. It was a perfect rainbow of colors that slowly faded into the black night sky. I took time to wander around London again for a bit and still enjoyed it as much as when I lived there. It was hard to read emails and Facebook sometimes. There were a lot of people I met that were still traveling and sharing their stories as they went. One good friend had been a very successful asset manager in London, quit his job and was traveling down to Brazil to teach English for a few years. Or the young English guy riding a motorcycle from Argentina to NY or the group of American teachers working in Chile and many others. I met so many people doing things like that, it was hard to not want to do something similar. As excited as I was for the job in Zurich, it was hard not to be jealous of them. Well I guess I have hard part of my adventure and while I am not following their path, the rest of mine has yet to be determined.

I took this time to catch up with a few friends that were in London too. I talked with several of the people I used to work with, meet up with Blake (a friend I met at Hogamanay in Edinburgh last year) and Tim/Akash/James (three crazy Kiwis that I traveled with in Northern Argentina and Bolivia). We all had several stories to share and things to catch up on.

I was staying with a good friend and her family. Thankfully they let me store my things there while I was traveling. But now since I was in London and I needed to get to NY to catch up with my flights to NC, I booked a flight to NY via Iceland Express... we'll see how that goes. But first I had to sort out my things that I had stored. I managed to trim my clothes and belongings down to two large suitcases. That was a lot of donations to the charity shop!

I managed to go meet two of the guys I will be working with for dinner one night. They were in London working with our (yes our, I have a job now, signed contract and everything!) office here. I learned a lot from them. I have a challenging but interesting new job to look forward to and definitely lots of global travel to tackle.

I also planned two more trips. One up to Blackburn in Northern England to see a friend (Chris) I met in Australia and hadn't seen since then and a short flight over to Amsterdam to see Elly and Barry (friends from Greensboro who took a temporary assignment to Amsterdam, much like I did to Australia...). Unfortunately the morning I was going up to visit Chris, he text me saying he fell down the stairs and hurt his leg and was on the way to see the doctor... Seriously. So no trip up north. More about AmsterDAMAGE later.