A huge weight fell off my shoulder. I walked out of the featureless office building and into a summer afternoon in Paris. I had just finished the oral part of the interview for a job that had taken me to Paris once before already. The process, with its frightening formality and insistence on the French language, had been drawn out. It had kept my brain engaged for months and my level of preoccupation slightly but steadily elevated. Now it was over. I could saunter off into the sunshine.
Except there was not much sun – the highrise across the street was brightly lit but the black sky framing it spoke of impending rain – and I was in no state to saunter. A walnut-sized blister had grown over the last few days on the ball of my right foot, between the second and the third toe, making walking almost impossible. I had hobbled to the station in the morning, and hobbling was all I was going to do.
The day would be much different from Sunday when I had developed the blister in the first place. Flucha had been in town and, as has become tradition over the months, we were out to make the most of the time we had together. We had started by going to Dulwich to spot evidence of Stik who had left street art based on pieces in the local picture gallery in a few places across town. When we had found them, we were halfway along a walk suggested in that most magnificent of local guides, Walking Village London. We did the second half as well and finished it off with cake and coffee at the Dulwich Picture Gallery café.
That was the first half of the day. After the walk, we took train and tube to North Greenwich where a couple of new attractions have opened to the public. The first is a walk/climb across a Himalayan bridge stretched over the spiky tarp of the Millennium Dome. Spending 22 quid requires a reservation but you'll get training with the biners and the rope and nearly an hour to bounce around on the blue elastic and have your hair tousled by the wind. Fun for city dwellers that have never seen rock.
The second attraction had been my reason for coming. A handful of swish helical towers have recently been stuck into the mud of the Thames. Cables were then strung across them and gondolas attached. In the spirit of a ski lift but without snow, they now ferry passengers from one largely abandoned side of the river to the other. Despite the cable car's integration into the public transport system, complete with a short line on the iconic map its own color (1) and the possibility of taking the ride with a simple touch of one's Oyster, this is clearly built for tourists. The special fare of £3.60 attests to that, as does the fact that no Londoner would think of traveling between North Greenwich and the Royal Victoria Dock.
It's a tourist trap in other words. In yet other words, it's awesome. The ride is breathtaking, though much too fast, and the view fantastic. Unlike the the London Eye with its I've-seen-it-on-TV vistas, the cable car lets you see the Thames barrier, the shiny towers of the Docklands, docks in various states of dereliction, the Olympic stadium and observation tower, and the river in a part that is rarely seen by tourists. If you come to London, you must take the Emirates Air Line, as it is officially called.
Our walk continued on the other side where regeneration has turned wharves into housing and a devastated wasteland into a huge conference center. Highlights for me where the dozen decommissioned cargo cranes lining the dock and the bridge crossing it. The bridge doesn't look like much, just two vertical towers and a straight span, all right angles, boring. But it was built with the possibility of a future upgrade to a transporter bridge, which deserves high praise for quirkiness. Plus, from on top, directly in the flight path, one can wonderfully experience the power of the aircraft taking off from City Airport, less than a mile away. Shame it's not a busier airport.
By the time we were on our way home, we had four hurting feet and one blister on its way. When it grew bigger, over the next few days, I took measures, the trip to Paris in mind: I consulted a dictionary. "Ampoule" I would say in response to the possible question of why I was walking so funny. But when I was asked into the meeting room to stand in front of the jury no one cared. The interview was all business.
Going through the questions of the past five years that were posted on the organization's web site, I had identified what looked like a consensus and duly prepared for that. In my practice talks, I clocked in at four minutes. Not too bad for a five-minute presentation, I thought. I always speak slower and with more stuffing than when I practice. Nevertheless, I prepared a riposte in case a member of the jury didn't like my brevity: I'm not a man of baroque decoration, I would have said, but I needn't have worried. Just three quarters through, I was rudely stopped and told my time was up.
Thirty minutes of questions followed. Some I could answer; with others I felt a bit lost. It's hard to make sense with a vocabulary of 150 and grammar that goes down the drain when nervousness runs high. But it went all right overall. I was stumped only once when one jury member asked about ticks. I know they can be a vector for Lyme disease but couldn't really see how this was relevant for the job or even how it fit into the question the guy had asked. When he rephrased his question, I realized he wasn't talking about "les tiques" (the ticks) but rather "l'éthique" (the ethics). It's pronounced the same but made much more sense. Shortly after that the interview was over, and I was out in the street hobbling towards the rain.
(1) Or rather the color of Emirates, the sponsor.
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