The start of an American adventure

I’ve been back from Boston for 10 days or so now. I have to say it was an enjoyable trip. I felt quite perky as I arrived stateside. Aside from the fact that I was starting a new role which has the potential to be very exciting, I was conscious of the fact that although I have worked for American companies for over 10 years I’ve never really worked in the US. As I travelled I knew that this was going to be the first trip of many, so I couldn’t help but view it as being different from the normal once per year crossing of the Atlantic. I’ve always imagined that I’d like working in America, so now I’m going to see if that is actually the case or not. Furthermore I also don’t know Boston very well, and I’m sure this role will also have me out to California which is the spiritual home of one significant part of EMC’s business that I will need to work with. The other thing which I like about travelling to the US is the time difference. Boston is 6 hours ahead so it means that when I leave France around 4PM, I arrive at 5PM local time and even after staying up a bit for an early dinner, I always wake up at the crack of dawn the next day. I love this because it’s one of the rare occasions that I can combine what feels like a lie-in with a nice long morning run and session in the gym (the non-obese Americans are fitness mad so there’s always somewhere to do some training). Aside from the positive meetings at work, as the week went on I was reminded of many of the things I had discovered about the US on previous trips – the ridiculously sized portions of food, savory food that tastes unnecessarily sweet, disposable paper toilet seats that only seem to exist in the US, the wonderfully US centric view of the world and lack of any international news on the seemingly endless list of TV channels, and the fact that VPN connections and the internet seem to work much faster than when I’m that much further away from the EMC mother ship in Europe. At any rate, as I started my trip home to Europe at the end of the week, I was already looking forward to coming back. That said next time I’m going to stay downtown rather than in the faceless suburb that is Framingham!