Two days near Chicago

While I quite enjoyed my last trip to Chicago, sometime in the late 1990s, I was not that keen to get back there and so I manage to restrict a business trip there to just two working days with a day travelling either side of that. I caught a flight Sunday lunchtime that arrived in Chicago Sunday afternoon, I worked two full days on Monday and Tuesday, then caught a flight back late on Tuesday arriving back at lunchtime on Wednesday.

One of the reasons for my reluctance was that, unlike last time, I was not in central Chicago but about 45 minutes north of there in a suburb galled Grayslake and I do not like suburban America as it is designed solely for the car and I insist on walking. There was a pavement by my hotel but that ran for a full 20m before disappearing. I have no idea why it was there.

The hotel was on the crossroads of two busy multi-lane roads (IL 120 and US 45) and the only interesting things that I could see were in the opposite corner and to get there I had to cross 12+ lanes of traffic with no pedestrian lights and only a narrow refuge in the middle of each road.

It was there that I went each morning for a long walk as part of my £14k steps a day regime. Because of the six hours time difference I was working on a three hour time shift which meant getting up at 5am Chicago time / 11am UK time instead of 8am UK time. As a plan that worked well and it gave me a good hour of walking time before breakfast and the drive to the office for an 8am start.

Grayslake is just one of hundreds, if not thousands, of small lakes made by glaciers scraping the ground during the last ice age, a geology I had also seen in Finland. Many of the lakes are small and ugly while others have been used to centre housing developments around. One of these is Grays Pointe and I did a lot of walking there.

Grays Pointe has two unnamed lakes and on my first morning, the Monday, I walked around the main one (150m long) half a dozen times waiting for the sun to come up. This lake had a fountain. On my second visit there, a very misty Tuesday morning, I found a second smaller lake. This one was more natural and had a bridge over it. This is the photo I took approaching the bridge, one of a very few photos that I took on the trip.

Other walks were less interesting. I did about 5km doing loops in the hotel and neighbouring hospital's car parks on Monday evening and a similar distance walking up and down Concourse C (500m long) at the airport on Tuesday.

On the plus side, the work went well, relationships with the customer were reinforced and all the travel plans worked out fine so I consider the trip to have been a success.

Some good words for American politics

There is clearly something seriously wrong when there is a reasonable chance that Sarah Palin could be elected Vice President of the USA in a few weeks and could then be President within a few years, but there are some aspects of American politics that I have respect for.

I like that fact thay they have fixed term elections which prevents those in power from calling elections at times that they are popular. Mrs Thatcher was behind in the polls for most of her time in office but managed to win repeated elections by calling them at the right time (for her), such as just after the Falklands War.

The USA also has two elected chambers whereas in the UK we started to dismantle the unelected House of Lords several years ago but have yet to decide what to replace it with.

Finally, the President is able to appoint whomever he/she wants to the various offices of state whereas the Prime Minister is limited to people in parliament. As a result, for example, Peter Mandelson is becoming a Lord just so that he can join the Cabinet.

So, three cheers for democracy in the USA but these are outweighed by the one massive boo for allowing people like Sarah Palin to rise to the very top.

Slavery in the USA

Sometimes a simple fact brings a compelling insight to a complex matter. Thanks to Wirearchy · The War On Drugs (Oops, Blacks) In The USA I now know that:

There are more black men in US prisons today than there were slaves in 1840, and they are being used for the same purpose; working for private corporations at 16 to 20 cents an hour.

There is something terribly wrong about the USA and facts like this help to show this.

USA foreign policy confuses me

The news that the USA gives $1bn to rebuild Georgia only serves to highlight their foreign policy inconsistencies, particularly when compared to, say, Palestine.

Russia is accused of land grabbing and is told to respect previous boundaries but Israel is allowed to hold on to lands captured in the 67 war and to continually grab more land by building townships in Palestinian areas.

Both Russia and Israel are accused (rightly) by most people for responding with disproportionate force to attack on their territory or people.

Palestine and Georgia have governments which are treated with some suspicion.

But there the comparison ends, the USA gives Georgia $1bn and cuts aid to Palestine. Go figure.

Top telly

It's season end for several dramas and they are all coming to an end nicely. The Daleks are bit of an easy clue that one of those dramas is Dr Who. The finale has been well publicized so we all knew that we would have the Daleks back, this time with their creator Davros, and that many of the characters from the four new series would be joining the Doctor, but that was just the icing on the cake of a cracking story. Sadly I have to wait a week for the final part and even sadder that is the last series of Dr Who for a couple of years.

Also about to close is Heroes 2. Somewhat curtailed by the long-running writers strike in the USA, this is still proving to be a confusing and compelling story. The novelty of the first series has gone but the new series is flourishing without this advantage, And like one of the main characters, Professor Suresh, I still have no ideas who are the goodies and who are the baddies!

The final series coming to a close this week is House which has now provided four series of rich comic dialogue that more than makes up for the fact that I have no idea what is going on each week with the medical diagnosis; lupus gets mentioned most weeks and I still do not know what it is!

The thing that connect these three programmes for me is that they all know what their respective strengths are, and they are all different, and they play to them strongly. They are all very good television programmes and will be missed.

Back in Dallas

This blog was never meant to be all about travel, but then I was not traveling very much when I started it a year ago and now I seem to be doing rather a lot of it!

This week I am back in Dallas for just a few days, mainly for a communications workshop on Friday but it is also a good opportunity to catch up with people who I last met in August. Some are coming up to me with hard questions which is not part of the plan!

This is the hotel that I am staying in and is, depressingly, the most interesting photo that I have managed to take so far. Still, it has free beer and snacks in the evening, which is all I need for my evening meal, and free wi-fi access in all areas.

Some final thoughts on Dallas

Without wishing to be at all unfair, this picture sums up Dallas to me - it's a few islands of identical buildings spread far apart and linked by more concrete than makes sense. Roads that are twice as wide as UK motorways carry less traffic than most of our dual carriageways. Every place you go to is some miles from where you are so you have to drive. I saw one cyclist all week and nobody walking along the street.

Weather wise it was hot and sticky outside (over 30 degrees every day) but when you go inside anywhere it is like walking into a fridge. I wanted to wear a jumper at times.

We ate out every night and most of the places we went to had the decor (plastic tables and seats etc.) of a cheap fast-food joint in the UK. The best place that we went to, a Brazilian restaurant, was a lot better but was still only at the level of a Harvester. I would not have called any of the places a restaurant.

The only positives that I can think of now are that it is clean, safe and you do have a wide choice of places to eat that all have spaces available. So there was nothing really to hate about Dallas but there was nothing to love either.

I shall not be angling to get back to Dallas quickly but, in contrast, I am very much looking forward to potential trips in the near future to Russia, Ukraine, Dubai, Egypt and Morocco. I like places with character which, for me, Dallas does not have.

Feeling rather out of place

This trip to Dallas is going rather well and, to be honest, it has been rather enjoyable on the whole; but there have been some times when I rather felt that I was in the wrong place.

Last night we all (40 people) went for a team meal at Fogo de Chao, a Brazilian style restaurant that does meat, meat and more meat. It does 15 different cuts of meat and you can eat as much as you like. I may have been the only vegetarian there!

To add insult to injury I was sitting with a group of typical Americans (from an European perspective). We were talking about our children when one of the guys suggested to another that he took his son down to the sports shop, bought him a couple of guns and joined the NRA on the grounds that there is nothing better in life. I bit my tongue and carried on nibbling my lettuce!

My hotel in Las Colinas, Irving, Texas

I am in Dallas this week for a series of workshops and meetings with my current client. The whole area is a suburban sprawl called the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex, i.e. the two original cities and intermediate towns (like Irving) have now all merged into one.

"Las Colinas is a developed area in the Dallas suburb of Irving, Texas. Due to its central location between Dallas and Fort Worth and its proximity to DFW Airport, Las Colinas has been a viable place in the Metroplex for corporate and business relocation. As a planned community, it is synonymous with corporation offices, luxury hotels, landmark office towers on shining lakes, private country clubs, gated executive enclaves and urban lofts." ~ from Wikipedia.

What this means in reality is lots of modern buildings spread widely apart, some landscaping, lots of roads, very few pavements, fewer pedestrians and all the usual American shops and dinners ("restaurants" is too posh a word for them).

I am staying at the Hyatt Summerfield Suites - Las Colinas which gives me two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen and free wireless internet!! As you can see from the picture, it is situated next to some water. It is also only a few hundred meters from the client's offices and I managed to walk back yesterday despite the heat (over 30 degrees) and the lack of a pavement for most of the way.