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While I've been travelling around on my own, you find yourself in situations where it sucks to be alone. The main one for me I think, is when you go out to get something to eat and you're dining in and you sit at a table for one and look like a real loner while you order, wait for your food and then eat it by yourself, and you have nothing to do or no one to talk to you so you just kind of sit there while the full tables around you glance at you and whisper amongst themselves, 'Look at that girl... she has no friends... she has joined toes, you know... enough said, really.'
However, I have found a way to look not-so-lonerish and it is also beneficial for my LJ. I take my little notepad and write in it. Then I'm not sitting there doing nothing, I look involved, I look studious, I look like a potential author and one day the pub will advertise that Helen Buckingham wrote her number one best selling novel at that site (or at least world-acclaimed journal entries). That's what J.K Rowling did, she wrote Harry Potter in a cafe. I saw the cafe yesterday in Edinburgh and on the window it said 'The Elephant House: Home of the Harry Potter novels. Now selling draught beers.' Anyway I've been working on listing stuff from my Contiki training that I want to write down and remember and now I came online to write it out properly but I've already wasted an hour playing on Facebook and email and MSN. So I had to buy another hour, and this time I'm not going to muck around, I'm going to WRITE. To give you an idea of the kind of stuff I got up to on training and I'm going to share these dot points with you...
This year Contiki was running 3 training trips. Each trip had approx 25 trainee Tour Managers and about 7 trainee Drivers. The trips were staggered, I was in ETT2, our training began about ten days after ETT1.
The first week of training was at the Contiki office which is about 2 hours out of London, there was a bus picking us up from a hotel up the road from the County Hotel, the one Contiki would set us up at, Suzi and I had been staying at the County since we got back from Paris, so we were all set up there. We left our luggage at that hotel but lots of people had come from other hotels / airports and had all their luggage with them to take back to the hotel at the end of the first day. Everyone was all dressed up in their best clothes to meet the big wigs and when we got there the first conference began, sitting there while the managers we would never see again stood up there and told us how several years ago they had been in our position, new little TMs sitting there ready for training, they said how hard everything would be and you'll want to quit but don't (oops) because this is the best job, THE best job, and we chose you out of hundreds of people because we believe you can do this, we want you all to succeed, even if we're assholes to you we really do want you to succeed, i know whats its like cos I've been in your position, I wish I was still doing tours instead of head of the Contiki chain, and yeah yada yada. And us bright little new TMs sat through all these talks and got our assignments back and received our new briefcases filled with stationery and files and all this interesting stuff and Helen just loves stationery so she was very happy. We met Bern and Pete, who would be our 'personal trainers' on the road, in that they would push us and push us and we would hate them but its so we would succeed in the end. "You'll hate me" Bern said, "And I don't care." Earlier in the day someone's phone rang and at the end of the first break before our next speaker a woman stood up and reprimanded us so severely about having phones on and how disrespectful we were, and later in the day when we realised she was Bern I think half of us shat ourselves! lol The next day we would begin our week long seminars in London with Raquel, who was the woman who interviewed us and scared the pants off us, and again we were told how very lucky we were to be getting trained by Raquel, she is the best, THE very best, we will be better TMs having being trained, we are so lucky, training will begin at 8am tomorrow morning in the conference room of the County Hotel, where you will be staying for next week while you're with Raquel. The drivers are going to the Netherlands for a week for intense driver training, you'll meet up with them at the end of next week before you head off to Paris. The County Hotel is in London, and the bus isn't taking you there, you're finding your own way back. See you tomorrow at 8am.
The managers were leaving the room and we're just sitting there glancing at eachother, then hauled our stuff out onto the street. 23 people in full business wear, the guys in suit and tie yet with massive rucksacks on their backs and the girls in their heels dragging their suitcases, as well as carrying our new briefcases and huge assignments. We didn't really know where we were but eventually we found a bus... then a train... then a tube stop... and walked to the County. Suzi and I were so grateful that our stuff was already there! Also once we got to the tube we knew the way to go. So there it was, our first challenge as trainee TMs.
It's taken me 45 to write this. I think this is going to be one of those staggered entries.
The majority of us were Australians and Kiwis. The other nationalities were Dutch, Hungarian, French and Canadian (one of each). As I've mentioned before they were just the most awesome group of people and they are the thing I miss most about not doing the trip. Anyway the next day we were in the conference room of the shoddy County Hotel (yes, its CRAP, great to see Contiki really takes care of their staff) and began a week of intensive study and belittling. We began learning about the paperwork and started practicing talks and research and spent hours every night doing homework!
The first two things drilled into us was 'Waste not a moment' and 'FIND OUT', the latter being the most crucial thing of all things Contiki. If you don't know something - anything - you find out. If you were asked a question and you didn't know the answer, you quickly learnt to say, 'I will find out' instead of 'I don't know' or risking a guess. Every day Raquel / Bern went through the 'Find Out' list and people had to say what they had said they would find out the day before. Some of the things I didn't know and then had to find out was where a client could buy luggage in Russell Square, also the nearest public phones in Russell Square (the block we were staying in and where the Contiki tours depart from), as well as the residence of the Prince of Monaco, who Peter the Great was, and where Andorra is on the map (I knew it was on the border of France, but I was looking on the wrong side), to name a few.
You also learnt (well, I did) that if you're answering a question, you say the answer confidently, because your answer is nearly always second guessed. When you answer a question, you often get 'Is it?' or the eyebrows go up, or you get the strange look and you have a mini panic... and you have to maintain your confidence and say 'Yes' because if you're in any way unsure they play on it, even if you're answer is correct, because you should know for sure and its unacceptable to not know... you will find out, so you can answer them properly next time. So next time you get a chance you peep at your notes and see if you were right or wrong and answer them all confident-like next time! And if you answer confidentally the first time and you're wrong, they'll make sure you know that you're not working hard enough and you'll make sure you find out!
On the first day we'd received our briefcase with a range of exciting stationery inside it... lined notebooks and maps and highlighters and a stapler and pacers and a ruler and a file and I was in my element. But then we had to prep these stupid things for when we were on the road. We had four 200 page lined notebooks, and our first nights homework included ruling. The books had different purposes and needed to be very specifically ruled, eg one book needed 6 columns of different width on each page back and front. Ruling is easy and brainless but oh my God, ruling 400 pages of 6 labelled columns in one night is absolutely mind-numbing. To finish this story I'll have to tell you about one of the guys on the trip, Tom, who was from the Netherlands. He went by Tom cos no one could pronounce his real name. First of all, he's your stereotypical Dutch guy, very tanned with blonde hair, blue eyes and chiselled features. He used to be in the army so he's way muscular and would pump out 100 push ups before bed every night! lol When he's on tour his female clients are absolutely going to all lust after him! Anyway the best thing to complement his appearance was his accent and deep voice... he was totally Schwarzenegger. He said no one had ever told him there was a resemblance, but just to hear his voice say certain things was so funny. One time someone said that they thought Tom looked familiar and another guy said 'Oh, he was in Terminator one AND two." hehehe. Anyway when we were being told we would be spending the night ruling notebooks Tom puts up his hand and says in this deep Arnie voice 'Vye do ve hav to doo this?' and on this first day with Raquel we're all absolutely shit scared of her because she'd been abusing the hell out of us all day and she just stared at him and he goes 'You vont us to rule these books and it is stoopid, vye can't you just give us ruled books, it is such a vaste of time, ve could be doing other things.' and the rest of us are just open mouthed and the room is silent as Raquel stares at Tom for a good few seconds, and then she coolly says 'Why should we do things for you? I have a job. You don't. Deal with it Tom.' and she starts talking about the rest of the homework and the rest of us were just breathless and afterwards were talking about how army-man Arnie Tom could stand up to Raquel and get away with it. And he did get away with stuff! He could be a bit of a smartass on the microphone and he would always get feedback about it, one time he was talking about things you could do in Italy and then said '...if you don't like these things, vell, you know, you could all-vays turn to drugs.' He laughed, and everyone else just audibly gasped! ..then started silently laughing, it was like when you're in school and you don't want the teacher to see you laughing at something, we bent low in our chairs and looked at eachother with our mouths open and couldn't stop laughing, we were all desperate to turn around and look at Bern's face but didn't have the guts.. and Tom just kept going and at the end there was silence and eventually Bern lectured him about promoting and encouraging drug use, and told him to quit being a smartass, but the line long remained a joke amongst a group, we were all convinced if anyone else tried to say something like that we'd get absolutely busted, but Army Arnie man Tom could get away with it because he looked and sounded like he could easily break you in half. And maybe Raquel and Bern also thought he was hot. It's feasible.
Anyway, tangents. Ruling was crap. Try staying up all night ruling and yeah... you'll hate rulers for quite some time.
Another thing we stayed up in the night doing was learning tour codes. Each contiki trip has a tour code and for every code you had to know how many nights, how many countries and how long you spend at each site. I still don't understand why this is important because its right there in the brochure, so easy to look up, but basically at the end of each day we were told the codes we had to know for the next day and the next morning the first 15 minutes would be calling on people to recite different codes. If anything this experience has totally reminded what its like to be a student in a classroom, makes me rethink my teaching strategies! I thought of the times I do it in the classroom as a teacher and now I know how incredibly awful it feels to be sitting there, praying that your name won't be called and then not knowing the answer... ohh its awful. An example of the kind of thing you have to say is like if I got told I had to list a UE, I'd have to say 'UE - Ultimate European, 46 days, 22 countries. Paris, 2. Chateau, 2. Lyon, 1. Barcelona, 2. French Riviera, 2. Venice, 2. Florence, 2. Rome, 3. Sorrento, 1. Overnight ferry, 1. Corfu, 3 ... etc, basically know the route of every single tour. I'd be okay with learning the ones we'd been set for homework the night before, but then they'd start asking us to recite the ones we'd learnt at the beginning of the week and that became really hard, cos each night you had new stuff to learn and study and research and not a chance to revise over the stuff you'd done previously.
I've realised that I filled three pages of notebook with dot points about training, but so far I've only written about 3 of them. Takes a whole lot longer to write it all out properly!! I'll post this for now and will have to update later, I don't know when??!! 48 hours from now I'm flying out to New York, (it still doesn't feel real, I think when I'm on the plane and actually realise whats happening I'm going to pop with excitement) and set out on my USA trip, 6 weeks camping, woohoo!!! :)