#this is a Bahn related question
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Germans!
I have a question
Ich habe eine Bahnreise nach Wien gebucht die wohl jetzt so nicht stattfindet, bzw. der ICE fährt nicht wie geplant durch sondern ich muss einmal umsteigen. Blöd, Aber gibt schlimmeres.
Frage 1:
Wenn in der DB App steht das die Fahrt ausfällt bleibt meine Sitzplatzreservierung trotzdem bestehen? Weil der ICE fährt (zumindest auf dem Hinweg) wie geplant los, nur am Ende muss ich einmal ungeplant umsteigen.
Frage 2:
Auf der Rückfahrt startet der ICE erst in Linz statt in Wien (zumindest glaube ich das, ist die gleiche ICE Nummer) Bleibt da die Sitzplatzreservierung auch bestehen?
Ich wollte was gutes tun und Bahn fahren und jetzt bin ich super verwirrt 😭
Ich hab gerade 20 Minuten in der Warteschleife gehangen und will nicht mehr 😭
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Intr0duct!on
please do not send me asks for donations, here’s why. my nsfw blog: @justagirlwithanoralfixationmy rp blogs: @thorns-and-rosier @your-chchcherry-bomb
song stuck on repeat:
• Hello, you can call me Luca or Skye (but feel free to call me nicknames based on my url, let me be one of those people)
• I’m genderfluid, so my pronouns change a lot (card). Please check here what they currently are before referring to me.
• pronouns: they/she/he + any gendered terms, last updated January 8th
• also important: I am offline every day from midnight till 7 am, CET. Everything posted in that time frame is queued/scheduled.
• I am happily married to @sotiredimbored & @aidens-ocean-galaxy & @calypso10191
• my gender is whatever coked up Bowie had going on.
• I’m biromantic or whatever (I just like people) and somewhere on the ace spectrum, but too lazy to find a label
• and a minor
• idk about religion rn, but leaning towards paganism and hellenic polytheism
• I speak German and English (fluently), know the basics in Italian, Spanish and French, and can insult you in Korean.
• My fandoms are: PJO, The Marauders/Harry Potter (fuck jkr), The Hunger Games, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Sherlock Holmes (BBC, the books, Sherlock & Co.), Dead Boy Detectives, Derry Girls, Stranger Things
• Twitter is the only thing we deadname in this house
• me living in Germany is cause for multiple mental breakdowns a week over fucking Deutsche Bahn, don’t be put off.
• I am kind of fucked in the head, don’t expect me to be normal. Ever. • As in I have depression and am probably autistic, but testing isn’t available to me so self diagnosing will have to do, (maybe also bpd? fuck therapy tho)
• on that note: major swear warning, not even my intro is clean
• other TWs include: suicidal thoughts, depression, SH and
• here’s my Pinterest if you’re interested
• my blog is a safe space for you unless you find yourself in my DNI.
• DNI: transphobes, homophobes, racists, sexists, zionists, MDNI blogs, if you wanna convert me or smth, etc.
• If you don’t like my stuff, the door is right there, don’t be rude about it.
• please don’t hesitate to send me your thoughts and questions about literally anything. Inbox and DMs are always wide open. • I’m sorry if you followed me for something specific and now have a bunch of shit I reblog on your dash
• and also please send music recs, I love discovering new music.
Tags I use regularly:
#skye’s silly thoughts ➾ shower thoughts, lyrics I relate to, and shitposting #tin can vents ➾ vents I suppose, I don’t always put TWs so beware
#my fucked up family ➾ self explanatory
#my poor poetry attempts ➾ my poetry/writing
#cal <3 ➾ my beloved, he is half my soul, as the poets say
#my silly bug boys ➾ about The Beatles, my commentary on Get Back, etc. #love letters ➾ submissions
#luca’s fanfic ➾ my fan fiction
#music stuff ➾ my guitar covers and maybe original songs in the future
#skye’s asks ➾ my asks
moodboards by my beloved (cal <3):
by aiden my love:
My Taste In Music. About Requests. Microfic Navigation. My Cover Of Landslide.
#skye’s silly thoughts#luca’s fanfic#music stuff#skye’s asks#fic recs <3#cal <3#my fucked up family#my silly bug boys#my poor poetry attempts#tin can vents#Spotify
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Hello!
As someone who is considering studying/going into archaeology do you have any advice? about anything related to that at all?
Hello!
My advice would be to ask yourself what you want out of it. Archaeology is not a job that will make you rich or famous. The work is often dirty, physically demanding, and not particularly well paid. However, If you have a deep love for history and people and enjoy solving puzzles there is a lot that can be gained from archaeology.
Archaeology is a wide-ranging subject and as such there are many ways to approach it. Here in the UK anthropology and archaeology are separate but similar disciplines — archaeologist Chris Gosden in his book Anthropology and Archaeology: A changing relationship (1999) describes both disciplines as being the two strands of a double helix: compatible, but distinct. Archaeology and anthropology are both studies of how we (humans) live in the world: anthropology tends to focus more on the present, while archaeology tends to focus more on the past. As I'm sure you can imagine, with such a wide field, there are many different ways to approach the study of how people live, from the more philosophical approach of cultural anthropology to the scientific techniques of bioarchaeology. Furthermore, I very strongly believe that a degree in archaeology/anthropology is tremendously useful, if only in that it will change how you look at the world and the people in it. If you would like a book recommendation, I would suggest Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Bahn. It was the first book related to archaeology I ever owned and I found it very useful for getting to grips with what archaeology even is.
If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask me. I am about to embark on my final exams, so I may be a bit slow to reply, but my inbox is always open :-)
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Last spring in Finland I attended a course “German for those who are going to have an exchange year”. They told us about the stages which one usually goes through during an exchange. As far as I remember, the stages were roughly somewhat like this: firstly one views everything and everyone better than in their home country and everything is super interesting and fun. This basically means that the everyday life hasn’t kicked in yet. The next one is getting annoyed at everything and everybody. Comparing the country to your home country and maybe even feeling like it would have been a better idea to just stay home. After this comes the stage of adaptation where one gets used to customs and stops comparing everything to one’s home country. Last phase is coming back to home country and seeing it in a new way. And of course telling stories of the exchange year to friends and family until they are bored to death.
I remember thinking two things when we were taught about this. Firstly, who the hell would go through a phase of hating the country they go to? It seemed so irrational. The second thing was “Now that I’ve heard about this stuff, I can rise above it and use my brain and self-knowledge to avoid it. Yeah... As you might guess, it did not happen. I admit, during last few weeks I have spend a huge amount of my time wallowing in “WHY DO YOU DO THIS LIKE THIS” “Why can’t you do it in the right way” “What the hell is wrong with Germans!”. Mostly my frustrations have been related to my university. The mornings I am usually in a good mood. I drink my coffee, get ready (I have started to care more about what I wear and how I look like now that I am in Berlin hahaha) and go to school. All in all it takes me around 45 minutes to get from my home to university which includes walking, tram and S-Bahn. The way there and back are usually my favorite bits of the day. I enjoy watching people, traveling through Berlin in S-Bahn and listening to music. On the way back from university the people in public transport are usually going to pubs or parties so it’s nice to see happy and lively faces. I try not to overwhelm myself with school even though I feel like I need to be constantly studying to keep up. The thing is, even though the courses seem a bit challenging, partly because I am not used to academic English and partly because I am studying in a new study field, I find all of them interesting and genuinely think they are useful. I think I will shortly find a balance because now I feel super drained after every day and still feel like I have the “responsibility” to do fun things and go to places whenever I am not studying. It’s like a freshman year all over again.
So, what has happened after the last post? Quite a lot. I was on a Wanderlust trip to Dresden in October. We also visited a famous bridge (Bastei) in Saxony. The views and the scenery were incredible! Dresden was also very cozy and historical city. It was a lot smaller than I expected. We only had a few hours to browse through the city but we could easily reach the most important sights by just walking. On the bus we opened bottles of wines we got from Lidl and played some car games with the people who sat around me. I suggested searching “questions to get to know each other” so on the few hour way back we just simply shared our biggest secrets and fears as if we had been knowing for a long time. The french boy sitting in front of me got interested as I mentioned we are throwing a sitting here, so he wanted to help. We formed a committee of 5 people for a sittning, planned it in a cafe and contacted international office. Their response was rather dry and due to International office organizing a similar event in December, we decided to postpone the sittning and start planning it again in January.
Wanderlust trip was good because everything was already planned and sorted out for us. We just had to be on time to catch the bus. I already booked another wanderlust trip to Magdeburg in December. They have a Christmas market there. I also want to see the city that was my other option to have an exchange year in. By the way, I am super glad I ended up choosing Berlin over Magdeburg.
The next day me, the Austrian girl who sat next to me on the bus and her friend went to see a light show in the city centre. There is this light festival held in Berlin where they project things onto famous buildings and monuments. The one projected on Brandenburg gate left me speechless. They projected things like collapsing of the wall, JFK’s speech and techno culture of today’s Berlin.
One Friday evening my friend, my roommate and her friends decided to go to a burlesque show. The bar was super fancy as was the show. I just couldn’t get my eyes of the woman who performed. She danced to a remix of Britney Spears’ Toxic so naturally I had to ask her after the show if she liked Britney Spears. She said they only picked it because they needed something that people would recognize but at the same time something that isn’t the actual song. :( She was amazing tho.
In October I also went to see Prinz Pi live at Columbiahalle. I’ve never been to this venue before and it was so cozy! Man the concert just got better and better and I just had goosebumps for like half of the show. At the encore Prinz Pi said something in the lines of “You know.. The next place I go to.. You don’t want me to tell the audience that the audience of Berlin was dull? Go crazy then!” and I have never seen an audience getting so hyped during a song (”Gib dem Affen Zucker”). I got inspired of this so I already booked a ticket for Sido’s Christmas show in Columbiahalle. Actually I tried to go to his normal tour’s concert which is actually today, but I thought too long and it got sold out. People were asking 200€ per ticket (the original was around 45€) so I gave up. Then I decided to go to his christmas show but AGAIN thought too long because they are held in 20.-22.12. and I needed to sort out my flights to Finland first. But one day I decided to go to eventim’s page to see if someone was selling their ticket (they were, but overprized again) and I saw that there was one original ticket on sale even though it was sold out before. Someone had cancelled their ticket and some forces of the universe told me to refresh that page at a right moment. So now I have my ticket and just can not wait for it!
In the beginning of November I went to Prague to see my friend. The train ride was only 19 euros and I could easily do my homework and watch Kotikatu there. Priorities were sorted out! I navigated to Revnice where we went to a local brewery and shared things about our lives. The beer was the best beer I have ever had in my life which is sad because I literally can’t get it anywhere else than from there. Damn brewery! The next day we played board games, ate well and went swimming. My friend introduced me to a new thing: putting honey in a coffee. At first I doomed the though: ew, who the hell does that? Honey belongs to tea, not coffee. Then I tasted it and... it was delicious. It is yet to discover if it because of the honey or their super fancy coffee maker. Then we went to the brewery again and played a Czech card game called “bang”. I think I got the gist of it and even won the game once. On our last day we were just sightseeing and went to a concert together. The songs were translated to me and for a moment I felt super ambitious to learn Czech. I don’t want to miss out on funny songs just because I don’t know the language!
Last weekend there was a celebration in Berlin due to it being 30 years from the fall of Berlin wall. It was a bit similar to the light festival. We were out with friends two nights in a row and found a super cute place in Prenzlauer berg: Houdini. They have Indian food and cheap cocktails. We continued the evening to this living room looking place that was connected to a Späti. The Späti-drinking culture is something that is missing from Finland. Here Spätis are these small shops that mostly sell drinks (beer, soda, water, cider and so on) and candy.They are open late which is actually where the name Späti (Spätkauf = late shopping) comes from. There are often benches and tables where people can enjoy their drinks which are cheaper than in normal pubs of course. The Späti man asks if the beer is to be enjoyed in the living room and adds a small fee if it is. And there’s a bottle opener on the counter. Everything is sorted out so in my opinion Späti-drinking is a good way to go out and get drunk with small budget.
Yesterday we had an excursion with my German class. We went to Berlinische Galerie which is a museum of contemporary art. They had an exhibition of Bauhaus, the art/design/architecture Academy in pre-WWII Germany that affected modern design and architecture. We were walking around and filling up a worksheet the teacher gave us. I enjoyed it so much and everything seemed so pleasing to the eye.
Afterwards we went to a open stage event which was basically a talent show. There were 10 acts of which everyone had 10 minutes to convince the audience who voted for a winner. We also had beer and wine counter there naturally. My favorite was this one dude in tight ballet outfit who preformed a circus act which was funny and impressive at he same time. His background music was swan lake but the dude sang along in a terrible way which made it less serious. Then he juggled with 6 balls and every time he messed up, he cried out in a dramatic way. Then at the end of the show he turned his back to the audience and we could see he was digging something from his crotch and then he turned around and swiped of sweat from his face with a pile of tissues he had as a crotch-filler the whole time. The tipsy audience laughed so much that the winner was pretty much clear at that point. The dude who went after him performed a horrible keyboard improvisation and his face screamed “ I am sorry to be here, I just want to flee!” hahahahah. The act that came second was funny as well, they performed “Let it go” but with a German translation, the google translate type of translation. Conclusion is: the audience wants to laugh at talent shows, not see real talent.
On top of all the events I have also been attending the hiphop dance class I think I told about. The teacher is super funny (and hot :D) and the dancing is so intensive and so much fun! I look terrible, though but it’s not the main point here. I might continue this hobby when I get back to Finland.
Now I have to start packing my things because I am going to Szczechin (Poland). I heard it is a city where Berliners go to shop because it is cheaper there. I feel like this trip can be either a massive success or a terrible flop. Time shows...
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List of Boston Slang Terms
* A-town" - Arlington, Ma
* "Olly-Olly Oxenfree"- A proclamation to players of "Tag" or "Hide-n-Seek", that they may return to a common area free of consequence as it may pertain to the game being
* the Ave - refers to Dorchester Avenue, or "Dot Ave"
* "that's beat"- that sucks. "she's beat"- shes's ugly
* "she's basic"- she's not that pretty or nothing special.
* bagged - arrested; "He got bagged for a DUI."; (Driving Under the Influence)
* the balls - awesome, great; "That concert was the balls."
* bang - to make a quick move (often, "bang a left"; also used often as "bang a U-ie" - make a U turn); sometimes used interchangeably with hang
* bang out - call in sick to work (It's such a nice day, maybe I should bang out and go to the beach.)
* The Boys - the cops, the police
* bozo - a pothead; used mostly in South Boston
* The Bob Loboat - The Boston Harbor Island Ferry that docks in Rowes Wharf
* cellar - the basement of a house.
* Cha-Chingham - Hingham, Ma
* The Charles - The Charles River
* chowderhead (sometimes chowdahead) - Often refers to a New Englander, at one time meant a person to laugh at or stupid person but has evolved to be a lighter term that has been embraced by those to whom it refers.
* The Chuck- The Charles River
* Chucklehead - A local idiot
* Chuck Town -refers to Charlestown. (A.K.A) C-Town
* down cellar (pronounced "down sullah") - adj., contraction of "down in the cellar", refers to being located in the basement.
* d-tech - An undercover police car
* "Dunks", Dunkee's - Dunkin' Donuts
* Dungarees - Denim pants
* frickin' - Another term for friggin', similarly used in place of the swear word f*ckin'. As in "that game was wicked frickin' pissah!"
* going to Chelsea - When something is crooked or gone awry. "Buddy, straighten yah hat. It's goin tuh Chelsea."
* good shit - An agreeable, non-threatening person. "I've got no problem with Mikey, he's a good shit."
* "Grinder" - a "submarine" or "hoagie" sandwich.
* Gump - an outdated term for dunce or nitwit. "What a gump that guy is!"
* "Hardo" - a term used to describe someone who is trying too hard, often pronounced "Hahdo." Another name for a try-hard. "Kehd got an A on his paper. Kid's a hahdo"
* Hoodie - slang term for a hooded sweatshirt
* Hoodsie (1) - A small cup of vanilla and chocolate ice-cream from the HP Hood Company. Eaten with a thin wooden spoon that comes with the Hoodsie. Also called a Hoodsie cup
* hoodsie (2) - In neighborhoods such as South Boston and Dorchester it refers to a precocious minor female who tries to appear older or wants to date older teenage boys or young men. The term is considered derogatory: "He'll get bagged if he keeps dating that hoodsie." One popular explanation says that the expression comes from the idea that the small cup a Hoodsie ice cream treat comes in is the same size as the bra cup of a hoodsie. A second popular, but more off-color explanation refers to HP Hood's one-time advertising slogan for the Hoodsie ice cream treat: "Short and sweet and good to eat."
* different view - Hoodsie would also have the connotation of a young teen-age girl that sits on the hood of a car. Either to look cool to her friends, or portray herself as being older and sophisticated because she's 'sitting on the hood of a car'.
* Hopper - the toilet, in particular when used to take a dump. (pronounced, "Hoppah")
* Hosies - claim of first right, used in the same way as "dibs." For example, "I got hosies on the front seat."
* Igit - Short for Idiot. "Dude, you're a freakin' igit, kid."
* "No suh!" [No sir, compare "no sirree"] - "No way!". The appropriate response is "Ya suh!" OR "Ya huh
* Nor'easter - A strong winter storm with winds emanating from the northeast. A bad Northeaster is like a winter hurricane
* packie (also packet, package store or booze bahn [barn]) - liquor store
* pahk- the park. "I'm going to the pahk"
* "Perchead"- Percocet Abuser
* pissa (1) - good: "You hit the Lottery? That's pissa man." Commonly used in conjunction with wicked;
* pissa!(2) - used to accentuate an unfortunite moment. "My friggin khaki's (car keys) fell down da catch basin (storm drain), pissa ain't it".
* pissa (3) - used to decribe a (friend or acquaintance) whom is eccentric "Did ya hear what Johnny said/did.... gdam pissa ain't he"
* Ponsta - a person who plays video games excessively
* Ripper - a kegger or a big, wild party
* screw - a verb meaning "to take off" or "get out of here" a cop will say to teenagers hanging on a corner"hey you kids "screw".
* I'm sheets - tired, ready for bed. Bedford, Mass
* shiesty - A term meaning someone or something is shady or sketchy. "Those kids standing on the corner are wicked shiesty." Or "The food here looks wicked shiesty"
* the shit- something or someone thats awesome
* Sick nasty - see ill. As in that stunt in the movie was sick nasty. i loved it!
* that's was sick - that was awesome. "that's sick"-that's awesome.
* Skeezer - Used when describing a drug addict; typically used in reference to a "druggie slut." #also see "slampig"#
* skeeze - A person of questionable personal reputation considered to exhibit lack of discernment in intimate encounters and thereby considered to have high potential for being afflicted with a communicable social disease.
* skid - a loser or lowlife. "His brother is a real skid."
* skidder - referring to someone who bums (borrows) money from friends. Pronounced "skiddah"
* Slampig - A skank, overly slutty female, a "Sled Dog", equivalent to a whore or slut. "That chick's been a slampig."
* So don't I - pleonasm [1] used to agree with a statement; a replacement for "So do I" or "Me, too"; "I like the Red Sox." "So don't I."
* Spastic - Emotional outburst involving what appears to be uncontrolled waving of the arms, legs and head.
* Spaz - One who is exceptionally athletically uncoordinated.
* spuckie - related to a submarine sandwich, it is the bread it was made with.
* This fuckin guy... - a phrase used when everyone in a group sees an obvious loser.
* three-way - term for what you order on a roast beef sandwich, referring to cheese, sauce and mayo. (example: "I'll have a junior three-way and a medium coke.") also "all around."
* U-ie - a u-turn while driving. Also sometimes called a "u-dog". Almost always used with the verb bang, as in "After this next light, bang a U-ie and then take a right."
* Up - A general direction one takes when going anywhere. I'm takin' the kids up Foley Field to play ball; or "We're goin' up Maine for the weekend." This becomes "Down" when going to Cape Cod, as in "I'm goin' down Cape this weekend."
* Up the Corner - A popular hang-out spot in most Boston Neighborhoods. Neighborhoods such as Southie were infamous for the crowds of young kids hanging out in front of their block's corner store and protecting it as their own.
* wicked - very; or occasionally cool. Used indiscriminately, can modify anything (e.g.: especially "Wicked pissa." ; also"Wicked good." "Wicked bad." "Wicked boring.", etc.). Almost always used as an adverb, rather than an adjective; some Bostonians feel it is grammatically improper not to put an adjective or verb after "wicked".
* wicked gross mental fit - A sustained emotional outburst, generally triggered by a specific incident. "She came home drunk and her mom took a wicked gross mental fit." "She saw him making out with someone else and took a wicked gross mental fit." Believed to have originated in the Reading-Stoneham-Wakefield area north of Boston.
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tick... tick... badaboom!
Our last sem for this degree ended this week. My feelings are mixed. I felt that I could have done better but I also think I gave it my best. Anyway, cheers to a new graduate degree. Next question, what do I do with it? Haha. I'm excited to go back and spice things up a bit at school -- teaching, communications policy, data analytics, the innovative stuff. But I'm also kind of wishing I could stay here longer. The city is nice. It is laidback, I am loving the relative independence I have here. Must be the O-bahn. Hahaha. I have yet to see the beaches and hike some trails. I hope to do those by January. Trying to look for a part-time job but with only two months left with our visa, not sure if I'm gonna get a good one where I can apply what I've learned. My classmates are willing to work as convenience store clerks or fastfood crews, I can't and I don't like. Sometimes I think this is me thinking it's beneath me; probably. But also because I know I really can't thrive there -- I am clumsy with chores. Hahaha. I still hope to get that RA job. Might learn something new. The coffee here is good. I get why Starbucks did not succeed here. Ninang said that only Pinoys flocked to SB when it opened in 2018. It closed after a year or less. Still getting used to how quiet the surroundings are and the fact that people just cross the streets even with the cars still zooming past. Jaywalking is the norm. Loving the bookshops and the Central Market. Had brunch there today. I guess this kind of ambience is what I'm looking for in a city. I can sit in peace, enjoy food and read a book. Then walk around in public parks, get home without being stuck in traffic. Wishful thinking for Manila. I still hope we get there. *** Also, struck by "tick...tick...BOOM!" I can relate to Jon Larson's drive to succeed by 30, I am at that stage. We set deadlines for ourselves -- dictated by the world around us, but also because we feel like we need to see ourselves in a better place by now.
Why can't you stay 29 Hell, you still feel like you're 22
The story's really good and the songs are on repeat in my playlist. Loving the friendship between Jon and Michael. I cried when Michael told him about his HIV and also that many of his friends passed away because of the disease, the stigma too that comes with it. I felt that frustration when he can't write the missing song, ready to give up and do something that would give you income for now. But also, that fighting spirit to continue even if everything is not working out. It's really true that we have different paces in life, that we don't get all we want or those that we planned when we're still young and lanky. It's a long battle: of hoping, of waiting, and of surviving. Barely there, but happy where I am at the moment.
Why should we blaze a trail When the well worn path Seems safe and so inviting? How as we travel, can we See the dismay And keep from fighting?
youtube
*** Anyway, what's occupying my mind recently was the thought of being in a relationship. I guess I've come to the point where I am already praying for a person, a partner. I've never asked it from God actively. Must be the environment? Dunno. I guess because I'm already at the stage where I am settled with what I have-- I got a degree, I'm happy teaching and writing stuff, there's nothing more to ask right now than that opportunity to spend mundane hours with the person you like. So yeah, I'm praying for it. I know He's listening, I look forward to His answer. Before I go apply for Phd please. Hehe. xxx
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Table of Contents:
Intermodal Freight Transportation market Overview
Economic Impact on Industry
Market Competition by Manufacturers
Production, Revenue (Value) by Region
Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions
Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type
Market Analysis by Application
Manufacturing Cost Analysis
Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers
Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders
Market Effect Factors Analysis
Intermodal Freight Transportation market Forecast
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It provides a forward-looking perspective on different factors driving or restraining market growth
It provides a six-year forecast assessed on the basis of how the market is predicted to grow
It helps in understanding the key product segments and their future
It provides pin point analysis of changing competition dynamics and keeps you ahead of competitors
It helps in making informed business decisions by having complete insights of market and by making in-depth analysis of market segments
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Covid Lockdown
March 2020 to May 2021
The COVID quarantine is slowly lifting. Here is a quick review of our last year in limbo.
The first COVID death in Seattle was in a nursing home on February 29th, 2020. We discussed the serious threat at Ultimate that day. Then Julia and I went to a Umphrey’s McGee concert at Showbox SODO that evening. I remember questioning if we should be taking this virus seriously, but brushing off the idea.
March 2nd our life was turned around in another way - the rental apartment we lived in for the past 8 years was being sold. Time to decide if buying a house is a smart decision…
March 11th the CDC officially declared COVID a pandemic. Things get serious fast. We begin watching the news constantly.
March 14th was our last day skiing for the 2019/2020 season. There was still significant snow on the mountain - but state restrictions closed down the resort. Then we jumped into a backcountry ski/camp trip. Shortly after that - even backcountry skiing was forbidden. That’s when the lockdown got serious.
The rest of March and April were uneventful. I thought I had COVID at 1 point, but tests were hard to get. The at-home test I did get returned a negative result. Julia had a small accident that took the Subaru out of commission for a little bit. No big deal.
Sadly the white cat, Lucy, had to be put down. The process with COVID restrictions at the vet made the experience extra hard. Sad to see my favorite cat gone after 12 years together.
May 27th we got the keys to our new house in Beacon Hill, Seattle! Huge day for us. One I didn’t think would ever come. Home prices in Seattle are pure insanity. Buying at the beginning of the pandemic gave us a little advantage - no bidding war at all. In retrospect it was an amazing decision.
We ate momo’s (Himalayan dumplings) the first night on cardboard boxes. Then got to work on improvements right away. I made the terrible decision to do ‘exploratory drilling’ in our walls at 2am that night to route some ethernet cables for the cable company coming the next day. Luckily it worked out - but I don’t recommend putting holes in your new home on day #1.
A train of professionals came out for the big jobs:
* Plumbers - pressure reducer and expansion tank
* Electricians - new panel and service
* Insulation - replace attic insulation
* Flooring - LVP in the mud room
Julia and I got our hands dirty a bunch too:
* Closet shelving/rods
* Toilet replacement
* TV mount install
* Hanging blinds (after 1 month with none!)
* Siding repair
* Install dog door
* Light/Fan upgrades
* Fence repair
* Bench and table builds
* Chicken coop converted to raised beds
* Yard work of all kinds
* More yard work of different kinds
* Plus a bunch of small stuff that continually keep us busy
Bamboo and Blackberries were the big task. Our house is directly next to a city ‘right of way’. Basically a big plot of land the city owns where no one can build. Kinda like a park or play field directly to our south. We call it the “side yard”. Opposite our fence that separates us from the side yard was a 6 foot tall 6 foot wide 60 foot long thicket of blackberries. Then it turned into 30 foot tall bamboo beyond that.
Julia and I took 1 weekend to clear the bamboo from inside our backyard. Then another 2 weekends to clear the bamboo from the side yard. Luckily a city mower came and tore down most of the blackberries with a tractor after I reported it as a nuisance. It was a beast of a job - but the neighbors came out to help (at least to take away the bamboo poles for their gardens). Then we sheet mulched the entire area to prevent regrowth. Huge project - which we are still fighting currently - but a massive improvement the whole neighborhood enjoys.
Discovering new local restaurants was hard during COVID. Many places still offered delivery or take-out, but no inside dining. Bahn Mi sandwiches and Bubble Tea has been a staple for us. Too many cheesesteaks and taco truck burritos also. Plus a bunch of other Viatemese, Chinese, and Asian restaurants that are popular here in south Beacon Hill.
Throwing the frisbee with my teammate, Patrick, was my only activity with someone other than Julia or the Grubhub driver. We got together about once a week with masks at Judkins Park to toss. A fun way to get some sun, exercise, and social interaction.
July 11th my grandmother died in upstate NY with my mother and family close by. Not COVID related, just her time to go. The best grandma anyone could have asked for. Always an open house and supportive of all my life adventures.
September 3-6 we got permits to hike in the Cascades, Alpine Lakes Wilderness, Enchantments. It’s a protected area with very limited daily permits for backcountry camping. I tried for 8 years to get these permits - so no chance we were gonna miss the opportunity. Unfortunately I got a small hernia on our birthday in July - but again - not gonna stop me! The prep-hikes in July/August went great. Another fun way to get outdoors safely.
The trip ended up amazing all around. A true life-list adventure filled with lakes, goats, vistas, and leg burning trails.
October, November, and December were totally uneventful.
January 2021 we began a bathroom remodel with Premier Contractors. Toby and his family/team worked with us to design a totally custom dream bathroom. Ferguson supplied the materials, the discount I’ve been waiting to use for 16 years of employment. Jackpot!
End of January came with great bathroom progress. They ended up replacing the majority of the house plumbing - as our old galvanized pipes were badly corroded. The electricians also came back to install new circuits for the heated flooring, jetted tub, mirror, and heater/fan/lights. We also got new circuits in the garage and my office to expand the power downstairs.
Because we are crazy - we decided to begin a 2nd project at the same time - a deck rebuild. The construction crew we got to design our back deck randomly had availability earlier than expected, which we jumped on. Why not knock out both at once?!? Demo began February 16th.
End of February the bathroom was tiled and the deck had cedar floorboards installed. Floyd, Hank, Jeff, Brian, Robert, and the whole Blue Oak Builders crew were amazing. Unfortunately the bathroom project stalled for a variety of supply/time reasons. They slowly made progress through March.
March 31st Julia and I got our first COVID vaccine shot. We jumped at the first opportunity, one of the first in our age group to get an appointment. We drove down south to the minor league hockey rink where they had the process down solid after a month of giving shots to more vulnerable people. Relief that the end was in sight! We celebrated by buying strawberry plants on the way home. :)
Then our 2nd Pfizer shot on April 20th. May 5th we were considered fully vaccinated. I celebrated with a game of pickup the first chance possible. I ended up going 441 days without ultimate - my longest streak in 24 years. Before this I had never gone 14 days without some sort of pickup, practice, league, or tournament game of ultimate. It felt amazing to be back in action - even if I’m fatter + slower than ever.
That brings us to today - May 23, 2021. Ski season is nearly over, flowers are blooming, concerts are announcing, Sounders are playing, friends are calling, and mask mandates are lifting. My schedule is already starting to fill up with fun. There really does feel like a light at the end of this tunnel. Finally!
Overall - I consider us lucky. Julia and I were able to work from home without interruption. Our companies had hiccups, but are more profitable than ever. Julia has been extremely busy with work - but that’s the life in a startup I guess.
We had no clue what buying a home at the start of a pandemic would mean. It ended up being ideal for us. Canceled vacations gave us extra time and money to invest in this 62 year old raised ranch style house. Room for Skye to enjoy, as she is getting old fast, is a treat. Not to mention offices on separate floors might have saved our relationship (seriously - who talks that loud on conference calls? just kidding my lover). We even got lucky with great neighbors who really look out for each other.
I realize that so many other people in Seattle / WA / USA / World were not so lucky during this pandemic. It sucks. I hope as these restrictions are lifted that everyone can begin to prosper again - both socially and financially. 2020 will go down as a monumental time in our lives. I look forward to post-pandemic-2021!
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Global Cargo Shipping Market Trends, Growth, Opportunities, Market Size Forecast to 2027|Key Competitors CMA-CGM SA, A.P. Moller-Maersk Group, China COSCO Holdings Company Limited, Mediterranean Shipping Company S.A., Panalpina World Transport (Holding) Ltd., DHL Global Forwarding, Nippon Express Co., Ltd
Cargo shipping market is expected to reach USD 17.80 billion by 2027 witnessing market growth at a rate of 3.8% in the forecast period of 2020 to 2027. Data Bridge Market Research report on cargo shipping market provides analysis and insights regarding the various factors expected to be prevalent throughout the forecasted period while providing their impacts on the market’s growth. Cargo refers to the goods which are transported from one place to another either by sea, land or air. There are different weight limitations of cargo depending on the mode of transport. The bulkiest of goods are transported through sea since they are transported through freighters which have huge load capacities. However, they take time and faster modes of transport include flights or long distance trucks.
Growing investments for development of infrastructure, rapid globalization and demographic changes, rising global seaborne trades and increasing imports and exports of various types of heavy and light weight cargo are the factors driving the growth of global cargo shipping market. Increasing global geopolitics and the time taken to deliver cargo shipment are the factors restraining the growth of global cargo shipping market. Signing of free trade agreements (FTA) such as ASEAN free trade area (AFTA), North American free trade agreement (NAFTA) and trans-pacific strategic economic partnership (TPSEP) among various countries and further economic development are the opportunities for global cargo shipping market. Stringent environmental and safety regulations and increasing freight rates are the challenges for global cargo shipping market.
Global Cargo Shipping Market, By Cargo Type (Container Cargo, Bulk Cargo, General Cargo and Oil & Gas), End User (Food & Beverages, Manufacturing, Oil & Gas, Metal Ores and Electrical & Electronics), Country (U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Rest of South America, Germany, Italy, U.K., France, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, Rest of Europe, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Rest of Asia-Pacific, Saudi Arabia, U.A.E, South Africa, Egypt, Israel, Rest of Middle East and Africa) Industry Trends and Forecast to 2027 This cargo shipping market provides details of new recent developments, trade regulations, import export analysis, production analysis, value chain optimization, market share, impact of domestic and localised market players, analyses opportunities in terms of emerging revenue pockets, changes in market regulations, strategic market growth analysis, market size, category market growths, application niches and dominance, product approvals, product launches, geographic expansions, technological innovations in the market. To gain more info on cargo shipping market contact Data Bridge Market Research for an Analyst Brief, our team will help you take an informed market decision to achieve market growth.
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Global Cargo Shipping Market Country Level Analysis:
Global cargo shipping market is analysed and market size, volume information is provided by country, cargo type and end user as referenced above.
The country section of the report also provides individual market impacting factors and changes in regulation in the market domestically that impacts the current and future trends of the market. Data points like down-stream and upstream value chain analysis, technical trends and porter's five forces analysis, case studies are some of the pointers used to forecast the market scenario for individual countries. Also, the presence and availability of global brands and their challenges faced due to large or scarce competition from local and domestic brands, impact of domestic tariffs and trade routes are considered while providing forecast analysis of the country data.
The countries covered in the cargo shipping market report are the U.S., Canada and Mexico in North America, Brazil, Argentina and Rest of South America as part of South America, Germany, Italy, U.K., France, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, Rest of Europe in Europe, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Rest of Asia-Pacific (APAC) in the Asia-Pacific (APAC), Saudi Arabia, U.A.E, South Africa, Egypt, Israel, Rest of Middle East and Africa (MEA) as a part of Middle East and Africa (MEA).Asia-Pacific will dominate the cargo shipping market due to rapid globalization as well as presence of major ports in countries such as China and Japan namely Singapore Port & Keihin Port, the Shanghai Port and Shenzhen Port among others. Further, government initiatives to boost cargo trade and investments in infrastructure are the factors which are further boosting the growth in the region.
Cargo Shipping Market Scope and Market Size:
The cargo shipping market is segmented on the basis of cargo type and end user. The growth among segments helps you analyze niche pockets of growth and strategies to approach the market and determine your core application areas and the difference in your target markets.
On the basis of cargo type, the cargo shipping market has been segmented as container cargo, bulk cargo, general cargo and oil & gas. Container cargo can be further segmented into 20 foot (6.08 m) twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU), 40 foot (12.8 m) forty-foot equivalent unit (FEU), 45 foot (13.7m) and 48 foot (14.6m). Bulk cargo can be further segmented into commodity, materials and oil. General cargo can be further segmented into solids and raw materials.Cargo shipping market has also been segmented on the basis of end user into food & beverages, manufacturing, oil & gas, metal ores and electrical & electronics.
The major players covered in the cargo shipping market report are CMA-CGM SA, A.P. Moller-Maersk Group, China COSCO Holdings Company Limited, Mediterranean Shipping Company S.A., Panalpina World Transport (Holding) Ltd., DHL Global Forwarding, Nippon Express Co., Ltd, Hapag-Lloyd AG, Ceva Logistics, Deutsche Bahn AG, Maersk and DB Schenker among other domestic and global players. Market share data is available for global, North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South America separately. DBMR analysts understand competitive strengths and provide competitive analysis for each competitor separately.
In October 2020, Yang Ming Marine Transport has opened a depot at Port Klang in Malaysia as a part of joint venture with Taiwan Foundation International. This joint venture was named Jambatan Merah Formosa Depot which will carry out container maintenance and repair services while also provide inland empty containers. The establishment of this port will reduce the expenses of the company while increasing profits as it integrates both downstream and midstream business.
In October 2020, International Container Terminal Services, Inc. of Cameroon has allowed Kribi Multipurpose Terminal (KMT) to start its commercial operations. It has been specifically built to handle multiple shipping line services including heavy-lift cargo, dry bulk, forestry products and other cargoes. This contract has a total duration of 25 years which is divided in two phases. This port is strategically positioned in the middle of Gulf of Guinea which is surrounded by-Kribi Industrial Area.
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Laser Capture Cargo Shipping Market report aids in understanding the crucial product segments and their perspective.
Initial graphics and exemplified that a SWOT evaluation of large sections supplied from the Laser Capture Cargo Shipping Market industry.
Even the Laser Capture Cargo Shipping Market economy provides pin line evaluation of changing competition dynamics and retains you facing opponents.
This report provides a more rapid standpoint on various driving facets or controlling Medical Robotic System promote advantage.
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The key questions answered in this report:
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New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/healthtech-startup-psyomics-secures-1-5m-funding/
Healthtech startup Psyomics secures £1.5m funding
Psyomics, a UK-based healthtech and University of Cambridge spin-out, has closed a £1.5 million funding round from existing and new investors to bring its mental health assessment and diagnosis platform, Censeo, to market in the UK.
University spinout specialists Parkwalk led the round, joined by fellow existing investors Jonathan Milner, Martlet, and Cambridge Enterprise.
Built on robust clinical foundations, Censeo mirrors the rich process of a face-to-face psychiatric assessment, guiding a user through a series of adaptive questions. Smart algorithms perform a detailed and bespoke analysis, creating a ‘map’ of an individual’s mental health, providing diagnosis where appropriate and enabling a clear treatment pathway.
Censeo supports GPs and clinicians in getting patients to the right level of support at the outset and provides patients with a stigma-free way to start addressing their mental health concerns.
The NHS is under increasing pressure to meet the nation’s mental health needs. GPs in particular are struggling to manage their increasing workload, with up to 30% percent of GP appointments in the UK relating to mental health.
The Covid-19 pandemic has seen a rise in the severity of cases as individuals initially avoid contacting services for support. Identifying these cases early and referring them to the right treatment is vital.
Global Processing Services secures investment from Visa
Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer Prof. Sabine Bahn says: “Diagnosing mental health issues correctly in primary care can be difficult, due to time constraints and the fact that mental health conditions can be masked by physical symptoms. It’s clear that faster and earlier diagnosis followed by the most appropriate treatment will improve the quality of life of affected individuals, while at the same time relieving pressure on the healthcare system.”
CEO and Co-Founder Dan Cowell comments: “This funding will enable Psyomics to support the UK’s plans to improve mental health provisions for the nation. Through giving patients, clinicians, and caregivers an earlier and clearer understanding of individual mental health needs, we believe we can make significant improvements in patient experience and clinical capacity, with positive impacts throughout the entire healthcare system.
“Our investors share our belief in the opportunity to make a genuine impact with Censeo.
Martin Glen, Investment Director at Parkwalk, added: “Covid-19 has accelerated adoption of digital tools for a wide range of applications, and Psyomics’ clinical and tech-led diagnostic tool can transform mental health diagnosis. We have always felt that what sets Psyomics apart is its deep clinical roots/knowledge.
Brand advocacy platform Duel raises £1.8m
“We are pleased to be a part of this next funding round and look forward to seeing Psyomics continue to grow with its market-ready product”.
Tom Hall, Senior Investment Manager at Martlet Capital, said: “We’re pleased to again be supporting Psyomics as the company now commercialises Censeo, its mental health diagnostics solution, at a time when mental health and wellbeing is one of society’s most prevalent themes and pressing matters.
“Bringing this product to market can bring real benefit to both clinicians and patients through shorter time to diagnosis and better outcomes.”
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This is a piece about me visiting Riyadh, several times, for Formula E.
Formula E is an electric racing series that says OK, boomer to 20th century petrolhead culture.
I am a high-performing, self-absorbed diva who writes about cars for a living.
Riyadh is the capital of Saudi Arabia.
Riyadh. It’s not a place, in the western imagination — which despite my scattershot efforts to broaden my horizons I definitely have — it’s a synonym for the Saudi Arabian state. Which, again, in the western imagination is one millennial and a network of shadowy contract killers.
The name Riyadh inspires fear, like a monster under the bed, something unknowable and threatening that doesn’t say anything about a city nine million people live in. Like most people, I hate admitting I’m afraid of anything real so in my mind it’s never been more than an imaginary metaphor to shield my own delicate ego.
I don’t think about the place much outside headlines. Or well, didn’t used to.
If you asked me if I’d ever imagined going to Riyadh a few years ago, I would’ve had to first work out if I could imagine Riyadh. In my mind — and I have an international relations degree so this is extra embarrassing — it was a mediaeval fortress. Perhaps some heads on spears on the walls. I’d seen some pictures on the Daily Mail or something and for some reason never considered whether this was a bit racist.
This starts in Berlin, 2018. Formula E, a street-racing electric motorsport series, announce the championship is going to Riyadh. Which is a ridiculous concept because Riyadh isn’t even a place with streets, in my mind, because I have not yet managed to stop being racist about this and actually learn anything.
More ridiculous is that I can’t go — I’m one of half a handful of full season journalists in this series that I decided to upend my life for completely a few years ago and I can’t go to the season opening race for the next ten years.
Because of strict Sharia law in the Kingdom, I can’t work in Saudi Arabia without my dad or husband giving me permission. Which at then-31 years old, divorced and resigned to my parents disapproving of everything I do for some time now is extremely laughable. I can’t work in motorsport there at all, classed as a dangerous profession. And how the hell am I going to get in in the first place?
There is some quite emphatic shouting on a street near Tempelhof when a fellow journalist asks me what I think of it and accidentally triggers the nuclear codes on my brain. I can’t do this, are they joking? How can I even continue in the series, I used to work in the humanitarian sector, for crying out loud.
I spend a night stewing in my hostel bed and wondering how all this can be thrown back into my face so hard. And then, trembling with rage and the less hot emotion I don’t like to think I’m capable of, demand answers from then-Formula E CEO Alejandro Agag in a press conference where he’s meant to be passively introducing Nico Rosberg.
The press conference is important because he tells me that there will be women there, that there will be arrangements made, that I can go. Which is the moment Riyadh has to stop being a fictional, mythical fortress to me because if I can, then I can’t not. No matter what else I think right now, I can’t let my male peers go and exclude myself so now even worse than being banned from Riyadh I have to actually go there.
Then my handbag gets stolen on the U-Bahn and I have bigger problems in the immediate, because the British embassy’s closed for a royal wedding.
Why is going somewhere so bad? Especially if you’ve already sucked down the moral serving of working in motorsport, gone the distance and done the deeds to get there.
I don’t want to shy away from the facts, here. Firstly, that motorsport is an intensely conservative world — all sport is. Formula E is by miles and miles the most liberal, even confrontational element of at least the cars bit of it but there are no openly gay drivers at a top level, there are very few women.
It’s bizarre to me, as someone who lives in London’s very leftwing queer scene, to work somewhere where shaving half my head was a bit edgy not just ‘had a breakdown on Tuesday, lads.’ I am more left wing than most normal people and motorsport as a whole is considerably more right.
I love my job. I whine about doing it, constantly but I love motorsport. I am obsessed with it, it’s what makes me feel the most and I am fascinated by the tech and I adore my friends in it, this is a job I have worked insanely hard to get — not something I am being forced to do, disinterestedly. But there is a disconnect between the realities of it and myself as a person.
Even motorsport people, however, were shocked by us announcing we were going to Riyadh. Until this event, the FIA (motorsport’s global governing body) had never sanctioned an event in Saudi Arabia, not because there was no interest from the Kingdom (Saudia, the national airline, have been an F1 sponsor for decades) but because until recently, women were completely banned from driving.
That changes, in the months between the announcement and the race — because it had to, as a condition of the event happening. You can view that as the Eprix clearly directing positive change or not if you want but the fact that it had to is important as part of the situation, as part of understanding why people were shocked we were going there.
Saudi Arabia operates a guardianship law for women, who require their husband or male relative’s permission to do things like open a bank account, get a job or a passport. Women are required to wear an abaya (the usually-dark coverup garment that covers you from foot to neck) as well as modest clothing and muslim women must wear a hijab. All Saudi Arabians must be muslim and a religious police force exists to enforce strict adherence to sharia law.
Kissing in public is absolutely banned, as is alcohol and western music. There are no cinemas and media is restricted. LGBT acts can get you imprisoned, publicly whipped or even executed. Human Rights Watch lists the “dissidents” who are detained on long charges in Saudi Arabian jails — they are women’s rights activists, people who have criticised the government, protestors who in most countries would be considered very mild. Torture is documented by HRW as being widely used as an interrogation tool against detainees.
It’s not fully whataboutism to say “well, other countries have terrible records on human rights, too and sport still happens there.” But Saudi Arabia has been off the table for a long time, not least because events like this — people congregating and especially in mixed gender settings — have been banned for a long time by the government themselves.
So is Formula E so financially or morally bankrupt to take the Saudi Arabian money and go there? It’s not like the country has a longstanding connection to electric technology and green solutions — absolutely the opposite, Saudi Aramco is the world’s largest producer of crude oil.
It’s complicated. WWE were the first big sports brand to announce an event in Saudi — but WWE isn’t really a sport and isn’t governed by a sporting body, wrestling a strictly choreographed entertainment product, despite the athleticism. As a consequence, the event in Riyadh could be bent to meet existing Saudi restrictions — no female wrestlers, no women in attendance, etc.
The FIA couldn’t do that and neither could Formula E. The event was somehow going to have to cater to, well, people like me. And they could have done that by spending the Saudia money on ferrying us around so we never saw anything but for whatever reason, they didn’t. They’ve never told me what to tweet or what to write about it. I don’t work for them, they didn’t sign this off and if anything happens to me as a consequence of writing it it’s not their problem.
They’ve got me access to princes to ask questions and put me in front of an exhaustive list of local TV and newspapers to prove that, yes, there is a woman — I’m aware I’m a bit of the PR to all this. And that that’s why people question whether what I think about it is true and why I’ve spent over a year writing this and why it’s so long.
I am incredibly sick of the persistent accusation Formula E journalists do not ask about this. That the media has not had to think about it, that nothing’s been written. So here you go, I’ve written it all.
There’s a view that these big, international events happening in Saudi Arabia is ‘sportswashing’ — that the intention is for Saudi Arabia’s international reputation to be rehabilitated by being thought of as a sports venue. That brief, highly-controlled environments are giving an unrealistic view of life there.
The events are short, for sure. I have made three brief trips to Riyadh and I am not about to pretend that I know about ‘normal’ life there in any meaningful way. This isn’t intended to be documentary about Saudi Arabia writ large, it’s about what it’s like to go there as a journalist to cover the events and what I’ve seen and the people I’ve spoken to. A lot of it’s just about what goes on in my head during the weekends — it’s part travelogue.
I don’t think about Riyadh very much for the next few months because I don’t know what I’m going to do about it, until Formula E call me a few weeks before testing and ask if I’d like to go on a trip. Would I. My entire method of managing my fragile psychology is dependent on going off somewhere every few weeks and the pent up home time is sending me scratchy, I say yes before I’ve even heard where it is.
It’s Riyadh, obviously. They post me some abaya and I read some not very reassuring travel advice, most of which doesn’t make much sense, while trying to work out a way of covering up my confrontationally queer hairstyle.
At Jaguar’s season launch I scope out who else is going — it’s all men but then again, there are not many things like me in motorsport. I contemplate my own death in a mediaeval fortress a lot, because this, for some reason, seems likely to be something Formula E would be sending me to.
The flight over is blandly sober. My hobbies and interests are pretty much covered off by “getting extraordinarily lit on flights” so the self restraint to ask for coffee instead of wine, before we enter Saudi airspace and they stop serving it, is an immense struggle. I also keep falling over my abaya and still can’t do anything with the headscarf to save my life.
My male peers are not having these problems. One of them has a gin and tonic, for a start.
In my head, Riyadh airport is a jail. The entrance to fortress Riyadh, machinery of a despot. In my mind, this is where it goes wrong — where my hastily-issued travel authorisation is judged invalid, where the men are let in but I’m not, where somehow this turns into The Gang All Go To Saudi Prison. Sitting nervously on plastic chairs, we wait for our visas to be done and I try to be sanguine about my upcoming, certain death and consider if I could actually fancy one of the dudes or if I’m just surprisingly horny about my own mortality.
Spoilers: I am not dead.
When we get through customs, the Saudi fixer shakes my hand. My very limited googling has informed me this is absolutely illegal unless we are married and my heart leaps out of my chest because oh here we go, here’s where I die. It’s so stupid it’s unreal, my tabloid-mythological Saudi overlayed like VR on what’s in front of my face.
I’d say it’s the fact it’s 40 degrees centigrade at 1am but realistically it’s just me being ignorant as all get-out and believing whatever I read, especially the most ghoulishly outrageous bits, instead of being willing to find stuff out. Which is a particularly stupid situation for a journalist.
Riyadh is, through the window of the taxi, very clearly not a mediaeval fortress. It has Starbucks. It has Nando’s. Its late but there are people walking around and when we get to our hotel, it’s easy enough for me to buy a coffee, go for a quick wander around the block and then stare out of my thirteenth-story window at a sprawling city glittering with lights. Not as built up with forbidding glass as Dubai, not quite as antiquarian-ramshackle as my beloved Marrakech and there’s something somewhere to it, a little chaos and disorganisation, a little… rule-breaking tendency that twangs on strings tied to Tbilisi.
Riyadh suddenly isn’t a story to scare naughty children with, it’s a place — where nine million people live. And I realise I have been quite stupid about this. Embarrassingly, shamefully so. I don’t get anything like enough sleep, thinking about it because I hate being wrong and I’m not quite sure how I so bullheadedly was so off the truth.
At the showcase I interview some Saudi princes. In the back of my mind lurks a vociferous argument I had with my ex-husband once, where I called him morally bereft for even considering working with the Saudi state. It is funny when you schadenfreude yourself.
My image of a Saudi Prince at the time is very limited. And by limited I mean I can name one.
I have not thought about HRH Abdulaziz bin Turki AlFaisal Al Saud. At this point, he’s the person personally tasked with making Formula E happen and he is vibrating with anxious tension about making it work. In my steady realisation that Saudis are people, too, I clock that they’re as nervous about screwing this up for us as we are of doing something wrong. Maybe a lot more so.
Abdulaziz is funny. I worry halfway through the interview I’m going to get in trouble for flirting with him because when I listen back to it, we laugh a lot. It’s the slightly anxious giggling of people doing something weird they’re not sure will work, at the start and then just genuine jokes. We “do a bit” about everyone telling Saudi they need to make changes for decades and then telling them they’re going too fast when they do.
I find out most Saudis, in fact almost all Saudis, are aged between 15–30 and think about what that means for the life expectancy in this bakingly hot, dry country. 90% of the population works in agriculture, which must be backbreaking in the extremities of the peninsula’s climate and that quality of life is poor, especially compared to the state’s wealth. It is very obvious he is a devout reformer and wants to urgently improve things for Saudi Arabians, starting with what he knows (he used to race in Blancpain GT in Europe) by bringing motorsport and technology to push the country away from the oil enriching — and endangering — it.
He’s not a cold despot, or a charismatic liar — there are plenty of both in motorsport let alone other fields I’ve covered — he’s a little bit thousand-miles-an-hour, talks more like Formula E’s bouncy kiwi Mitch Evans than a politician and with slightly more honesty, not offended when I push things and offering more to ask about than he tries to hide.
If the whole trip has wrongfooted me a little by just bringing Riyadh out of the mythical then this does something else. I do some gormless, rapid recalculations, brain as vacant as that meme because despite my almost unshakable sense of western entitlement it has finally got through that there’s a chance the race in Saudi is not actually about me.
In all my righteous, ask-a-manager fury about having to do this myself, I haven’t thought about the Saudi equivalent of me. Who wants to watch motorsport, work in it, has been denied it right up until now unless she was privileged enough to get to other states — and 90% of the population isn’t. Doing the maths in my head, that 70% 15–30 year olds includes about 13.6 million women my age or younger who’ve just got the right to drive as part of the FIA negotiations for the race. And the right to work at it. And here I am pitching a fit because I have to comply with what might as well be a uniform, to a tourist, for a weekend.
Ok, somehow I have got some perspective. But that doesn’t make this all automatically fine, does it.
Aseel Al-Hamad, a Saudi woman who’s just driven an F1 car at the French grand prix, is there. There’s a flamboyantly camp young Saudi YouTuber or something who is flirting with everyone. I still can’t drink coffee without dripping it on my headscarf.
Everyone keeps saying “it’s just a normal place.” Which is true — it has coffee shops and supermarkets and I eat an extremely salty salad with two other journalists after we get back to the hotel and none of us get arrested for not being married to each other. But also that dumbs it down, to just our own flighty concerns about how to exist here.
I can’t stop thinking about those stats. Saudi, which I’d thought of as ruled by old zealots, is so modally young that I am above the average age here.
There are young, excited Saudis at the showcase. Obviously, because that’s what 70% of the population are. 39 million people live here, who I’ve either thought of as generically oppressed or generically oppressive, drawn on some very primitive gender grounds. When I worked in humanitarianism, no one ever mentioned being humanitarian to Saudis and to my genuine horror, against all my ethics, I’ve casually dehumanised an entire population.
Don’t tell me, sitting from the west and spitting blood on social media at the idea of racing series going to Riyadh, you haven’t done something the same. Because I’m pretty good at this and yet somehow I can get my head around going to New York while toddlers sit in ICE detention, can get on with living in the UK despite knowing full well the horrors my own government is committing but I didn’t know any Saudis, you see. So somehow it hadn’t occurred to me they might want things like entertainment and sports and other things I take for granted and don’t assume I should be denied just because the prime minister’s done a racism again.
Formula E wasn’t taking a compromised event — not like WWE’s male-only show for a select few. It was going to be an Eprix like any other, bar the podium champagne. Not only that, there’d be women on track.
Saudi Arabia was about to go 0–60 by never having had women driving to hosting an event where, during a test, the largest number of women, anywhere, ever would be driving current, top flight machinery alongside men. A statement, yes but not intended to me about Saudi but to Saudi women about motorsport. I mention it to the prince, who thinks it’s quite funny as a statistic — he’s raced in Europe, after all, he knows what the numbers are like in our glorious egalitarian societies.
(If you don’t: they’re atrocious. I can name every woman who’s ever got as far as single seater racing, while I can’t remember which men were in F1 5 years ago, there’ve been so many.)
I tell someone on Twitter that if other countries wanted to do it they’ve had the preceding 70 years and well, where is the lie?
The flight to Dubai, en route back, is weird. I rip my hijab off in the airport terminal, no longer able to cope with my own inept wrapping and try to stop the side-shaved bit of my hair standing up. A male journalist asks me why I bothered with it in the first place and I try not to give him too much of a death glare because actually it’s becoming apparent things aren’t what I assumed.
I absentmindedly delude myself into thinking I’ve been invited to hang out with the guys, not just tagged along by proximity, for the rest of the journey and it hurts for about half the subsequent season that I’m incapable of learning not to make assumptions, despite the big ol’ wisening experience I just got lavished with. But those are other places.
Jamal Khashoggi is brutally murdered in an embassy in Turkey shortly after our showcase trip and the number of names of Saudis most people can think of increases to two. One deceased.
I nervously ask Formula E, at testing, if we’re still going. We are. It’s fuel for some very gory nightmares for a few weeks and can I really go there? I feel pretty strongly about dismembering journalists.
As the days tick down to going, mythical Riyadh re-descends on my mind. I forget the place I saw in broad daylight and brood on the fact I’ll be arriving at 1am, totally alone. It’s stupid fear, not the healthy respect I have for the fact travelling so much on my own, anywhere, is generally dangerous.
My usual attitude to being presented with a dangerous opportunity is to immediately take it. My sense of self-preservation isn’t impaired but my survival skills are over-developed, it’s left me with some excellent stories I can never put my name to and which I often only tell softened versions of, to avoid upsetting anyone. I can think or… Well, let’s say manoeuvre or lie or cheat or manipulate myself out of almost anything and the things I can’t, I can chalk up to a big bucket of Things That Are Making Me Weirder And Weirder But I Just Can’t Stop Doing Them.
I don’t think that will work in Saudi Arabia. And I’m so incapable of behaving myself. I’ve already forgotten the manifest demonstrations I saw that Saudis handle strict rules the same way everywhere else with them does, ie by each pretending they must apply to other people and look like you’re doing it when it matters, my own MO for everything.
Meanwhile my own unelected leader in the UK nearly tanks us out of the European Union for the first of what will be several, increasingly grim times and I have this vague feeling of unassailable doom.
All the thinking about going to Saudi has stopped me doing any thinking about actually going to Saudi, which because I booked my flights late and am permanently broke, is via two Ryanair flights, a gruelling overnight layover in Milan Malpensa (0/10, do not do) and 11 discombobulated hours in Jordan that I thought I was going to enjoy but it turns out the fear is kicking in.
The silly thing is, the thing that scares me is a taxi driver in Ammam who I throw some Jordanian dollars at while bruising my thumb forcing the lock down at some traffic lights to escape after he tries to essentially extort me. But if I can’t handle Ammam how am I going to handle Riyadh? A lot of me wants to turn around and go home.
I get to the airport for my final flight much too early and when they tell me I can’t check in yet, it all suddenly hits and I unexpectedly sit down on the terminal floor and cry hysterically for ten minutes.
By the time I get on the plane, I’m delirious with panic. The insane idea I am going to get arrested at the airport dominates my entire thoughts — after all, last time I was with Formula E but I’m not normally in the group, the showcase a one-off excursion.
Also, most pathetically given I’m 32 not five, I have not told my mother I’m going to Saudi Arabia. My mother disapproves of most things I do but I feel like there’s a relatively legitimate case for that here and also that I am a gutless coward for not being able to take that on. Gutless cowards afraid of being told off probably shouldn’t be trying to do this.
I cry so pathetically with fear the Flynas staff, who are spectacularly kind, give me a free coffee and one sits with me, thinking it’s the thermal-buffeted take off that has me hysterical, not the country they live in.
It is, obviously, not Formula E’s responsibility to check I get anywhere. Or where I’m staying or in particular I’d really rather they didn’t attempt to regulate what I’m doing because I reserve my right to get up to all kinds of things without them trying to stop me. But sometimes there are moments when I think anyone would quite like to think there’s someone who’ll know if they don’t make it to their hotel and I’m having one, feeling much too vulnerable to be able to do this. The monster under the bed is scaring me, mooom.
Needless to say, it’s fine. Uber is very well-regulated in Saudi Arabia and the process of transferring to my apartment hotel is extremely straightforward and despite my sudden inability to do maths convincing me it costs three times more than it does, really cheap from a London perspective.
The guy at the check-in desk thanks me for respectfully wearing Saudi-compliant clothes; my hair at this stage is still difficult to not look aggressively asymmetrical and I’ve finally learned how to do a hijab but it sort of unnerves me. Am I either appropriating or colluding with something, here? After all, I’m not muslim. I’d be a terrible muslim, I already miss wine.
I really need to sleep but don’t, which turns out to be basically what I spend most of my time in Riyadh doing because my brain won’t stop turning over and there’s not enough hours before I have to get up and go to the track anyway.
Here is where things get interesting, of course. Because I’m not staying in a hotel full of Formula E people, I’m not staying with anyone else at all, I’m just any old regular person in Riyadh, staying in the kind of place an average-income Saudi might if they were visiting from Jeddah.
Formula E don’t have my address, I didn’t have to put it on my visa application (handled by the championship so I have no idea how difficult it would be to get one as a journalist otherwise) and unless someone very carefully trailed me from the airport then I’m just out here alone. I’m staying in Al-Aqiq, which is a neighbourhood sort of near Diriyah and as decentralised as the whole of Riyadh seems to be.
Riyadh is a weird city, from my perspective — it seems to have no centre and there’s motorways everywhere. In any 500m walk, you can find at least two demolished buildings with the rubble in situ and another one under construction, a petrol station and a kebab shop. Every road feels like a dual carriageway and I don’t understand the shops.
Not for the reason I assumed I wouldn’t understand the shops, which was more specifically cultural issues. I don’t understand the shops because they sell things that make absolutely no sense to me whatsoever — I’m staying in an apartment hotel and there’s a petrol station nearby, a coffee shop on the forecourt.
That’s reasonably sensible to me. I can also get my head round the oddly Roman-themed kebab shop and the phone shop the other side — fine, that’s how modern life works right?
What I do not understand is the stationery warehouse that also sells party gear and interior design trimmings that seems, by all accounts, to be the big shop in the area. It’s sized for a DIY shop and stocked by the crazy crap aisle in Lidl and although it sells me an exceptionally good pencil sharpener that I’ve jealously guarded ever since, I cannot work out what the heck its deal is. It opens at like 7am and has supermarket trolleys available but every time I go in everyone’s buying like one box of paper plates?
There will be no answers. Some elements of Riyadh, I have to accept, I will not fully understand.
But I find myself going in a lot. I buy some weird new stationery that doesn’t really set me up for the season, because Al-Aqiq doesn’t have much else going on. I get really invested in trying every type of latte flavour the petrol station coffee shop does because it sort of gives me a sense of direction in my attempts at exploration that are otherwise coming up short because I can’t find anywhere to poke around, sleepy residential and mosques the main features of the area.
I assumed it was because I was sort of on the outskirts but this continues to puzzle me a year later. I’m used to cities with centres, high streets — I don’t know if it’s the heat or just a different, dispersed way of doing things or because (and I definitely have noticed this) Saudis don’t really have a culture of congregating places, turning up in crowded scenarios or what. But the structure of the town kind of makes no sense to me, and maybe never will.
There’s, seriously, no public transport on the enormous roads and coming from London that confuses the heck out of me. Contrary to the imagined SUVs of gulf state, most of the cars on the road are old and Japanese — Toyota Camrys and Hyundais, clearly proudly cared for but long in the tooth on mileage. There are almost no European or American cars and the ones that exist look weirdly out of place, a Renault Megane looking like an undersized curiosity in a line of Honda estates.
From that, you can probably gather I walked around a bit. I actually walked around a lot more than I initially intended to, especially on the first day I was trying to get to the track.
This is where it gets a bit technical about the business of motorsport, which is that for the first and only time this year, I need to get to the accreditation centre and pick up the pass that will let me into the circuit — and the rest of the season. This is a very minorly stressful process — and only so because I haven’t been to the circuit before so there’ll be a degree of wandering around trying to find the right place.
What happens is that I initially book a taxi to the wrong place, as it turns out there are several bits of Riyadh called Diriyah. Then I rebook a taxi and it goes to a different version of the wrong place, including having to get through several military checkpoints that my taxi driver is increasingly confused why I think I should be going through — and to be fair, so am I. There wasn’t any of this last time.
I bail out when I see some Formula E hoardings on the basis I must be nearby. This is a stupid idea. I’m the wrong side of the track and have to walk through it to get to the thing that will let me get the lanyard that says I am allowed to go through it but there doesn’t seem to be any other sensible way of making it there.
This feels like the sort of thing you could get into a lot of trouble for. It feels more like that when I get to some catch fencing that hems me in so totally I realise the only thing I can do is walk a long way back, to possibly not be able to find a way through or to climb it. Reader, despite the clothing situation and the fact I am carrying a rucksack full of precious scarred Macbook, I climbed it.
Jumping down the other side, I realised one of the reasons was because it was next to what looks really like a military compound and there’s a bored-looking dude with a gun staring at me. To quote Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye: ok, this looks bad.
There’s a sort of weird thing that happens when you are in a genuinely bad situation. Like, this is obviously not what I am supposed to be doing and it’s hard to guess whether the FIA or the Saudi government will get angry at me wandering into places I am clearly not meant to be first — or most severely. Technically I haven’t signed my behaviour waiver with the FIA for the year yet and also they probably have fewer guns.
As you can probably guess by the fact I’m writing this a year later, the next 45 minutes are quite stressful but ultimately end up in the accreditation office with extremely smudged eyeliner but no permanent damage. And for the record, the Saudi soldier I end up speaking to through Google Translate is nothing but helpful.
Which should probably be the end of me getting lost in various places in Riyadh except it’s kind of only the beginning. I very rarely get lost, I’m great at yeeting myself round the world and reading cities from their layout alone — I don’t know if it’s just that Riyadh is so decentralisedly alien to me or if it’s just the same thing that happens where I cannot stop myself trying to read Arabic the wrong way round and it’s just that I’m too stupid to understand it.
Whatever it is, I get lost a lot. Nearly continuously. I have to develop an uncharacteristic level of chill acceptance for not knowing where I am or when I will next be able to work that out. For sometimes wandering at length down motorways, in the rain, trying to hope that there’s a point on the horizon where GPS will work and maybe I won’t run out of road before then. It’s never that horrible, as an experience — Riyadh actually has fairly decent pavements — it’s just slightly bizarre and adds to my sense of being constantly wrong-footed and out of my depth, which is the kind of on-the-edge-of-fear feeling that makes me crotchety and unobservant and the whole problem ten times worse.
Anyway, that’s for later.
Occasionally, people call me inspirational. How inspirational of me, pursuing a career in a male dominated field. How inspirational of me, tootling round the world on my own and with no budget. How inspirational of me to not have ended up dead given all that.
It’s a weird feeling. I am outrageously flattered by it but I don’t feel very inspirational; I’m broke, I have a professional respect level probably best described as ‘tolerated’ (and barely that) and I’m hardly out here getting awards. When I finish a season I mostly feel a crushing sense of disappointment at myself for not having done that better.
Which is the kind of thing, when the drivers say it, you feel moved to say something encouraging. But it’s true — I’m frustrated by the number of times the titanic effort to get to a race limits the ambition of what’s possible there. And I’m kind of breaking myself a bit and in denial about it.
Anyway, should I really be an inspirational figure for dragging myself to Saudi Arabia on budget flights and white-knuckle bracing to hang on for another season? Probably not. After all, the whole reason I can do this sort of thing is because I’m an overpaid London media professional with a devastating sense of entitlement about travel.
It gnaws at me a bit, because all weekend when I’m in the Riyadh paddock young women keep coming up to me. They grab at my media pass, newly-minted and full-season heavy in the folds of my abaya and we stagger through conversations in Arabic via google translate or if they know enough English to talk.
It’s very exciting and inspirational, seeing a woman journalist succeed. I know because a few months previous to this event, I got amazingly drunk and embarrassed myself telling Suzi Perry how much she inspired me. I look up to the broadcasters and the journalists I find digging through old magazines and suddenly realise that’s a woman’s byline, often from a point when I assumed there weren’t any.
To be honest, I think most people just assume there aren’t any of us either way. Women in motorsport are grid girls or PRs — at least, in that same spooky, popular imagination where Riyadh’s barely a map location but you definitely have an opinion about it even so.
As far as the young women grabbing at my pass are concerned, I’m as ludicrously mythical as I can’t seem to stop myself thinking about their city if I let my mind wander for even forty seconds. A female motorsport journalist, travelling around on her own and from their perspective the most extraordinary thing, which is that I’ve apparently come to Saudi Arabia of my own volition. In fact, I’ve had to work really hard to do so, when I could have just… not.
This is kind of incomprehensible, to the Saudi teenagers. They’re excited by the idea I’d do it but when I live in London and can go anywhere, why would I? And on my own? I must obviously be the kind of incredibly celebrated and important person who thinks they can get away with that sort of behaviour and I don’t have the heart to tell them I’m actually panicking a bit about whether I can get anywhere to even take my coverage this season.
Riyadh’s one of the problems, actually. Editors don’t want to be seen to be endorsing it and the ones I can get to take it say they have to include critique of the situation, which is maddening when they won’t let me write about anything I’m actually seeing.
Ok, yes. Here is the situation: the Saudi government has paid for the race. Someone, somewhere, always pays for a race — championships sustain themselves on hosting fees and Formula E doesn’t go for the scalp like F1 but ultimately ‘who is willing to pay’ is a major persuasive factor to an events’ viability. Not to peel back the final veil but this is how big sporting events work, everywhere.
It’s proved controversial in the past. Montreal paid extra to host a season-ending double-header over several seasons, then it turned out the (I’m compelled by journalism standards to write the word ‘allegedly’ here) corrupt mayor had made promises the city wasn’t willing to keep.
It put Formula E in a position where, contractually, they had to sue the city for a settlement — not the most popular thing to do but FE itself can hardly just wave away a contract or they’d look like mugs everywhere else. Also probably, you know, needed the money for something because no one knows more about how much doing all this costs than my Ryanair-seat-shaped arse.
And why? Why wheel and deal to make a global car racing championship happen. Well, I don’t know — there’s no actual point, is there? There’s not a moral at the heart of this, a heartwarming lesson for humanity that’s perfectly illuminated by the chance to watch one millionaire athlete smash another millionaire athlete into a concrete barrier in a shower of carbon fibre.
You’ve got to tell yourself something to sleep at night though, right? There’s got to be some reason you’re doing it. We make it up for any job, the reason you’re logically doing these things. Here’s mine.
The planet is dying. That’s not hyperbole — the seas are emptying of whales drowned by plastic as fast as they fill with Antarctic meltwater. We can’t put either of those things back, there isn’t a fix except prevention.
The sky is choking, we’re shutting off the stars with satellites and smog and after a few hundred years of building a world dependent on massive — and mass — mobility, we’ve realised we can’t use the types we’ve been reliant on. We talk about the screaming, hurtling destruction of the only place we can live in bland, corporate terms, these words like ‘mobility’ and ‘transitive economics’ neatly editorialising the end of the world as the closing remarks of a conference on disaster mitigation.
It’s terrifying. It’s so incomprehensibly, mind-crushingly fearful that even if you can somehow get yourself together enough to think about it, it’s really hard. Scientists say the risk numbers are into the bit where human minds actually don’t understand them because we just can’t really be that scared.
Which is a problem, because the last thing we need right now is numbness. A few years back, I’d slipped a long way into it — not really specifically the planet but more that some very immediate things were going very wrong in my life and the only way I could continue to get up and go to work instead of lying down and screaming was to just not feel anything. Which isn’t very sustainable, you need a cathartic ability to make sense of things even if they’re terrible.
There’s lots of crutches people use — alcohol (a generally reliable and disastrous one for me) and other mind-altering distractions, getting overinvested in box sets, obsessively hyperfixating about your OTP, pinning your emotional wellbeing on the success of a sports team.
I went for pinning my entire psychological and professional future on Formula E being the thing to dive into right that moment. In the moments where I couldn’t think of a reason to carry on, there’d be another race on the horizon. In the long nights where I didn’t want to live anymore I could motivate myself with the sheer, stubborn desperation of throwing myself into getting in.
Frivolous, yes. But Formula E does also have a point: on this dying earth, amidst the keynotes on the end of transport, we need to do something. Just stopping flying or transporting or using the massive systems we’ve rigged to plug the earth in won’t work. Same as we can’t put the whales back in the barren sea, we can’t just pull the brakes on a tangled juggernaut we’ve spent decades chaotically assembling because as much as we urgently need to, to save lives, if we do then people will literally die.
It’s complicated. It’s those things too big to think about and we needed solutions before I was born, are living through the dying moments of panic while we scrabble for a fix that makes things least-bad. The trolley dilemma between apocalypse and slightly mitigated endtime.
We’ve got to be brave. We’ve got to do things like say ‘we actually cannot use oil anymore’ — for fuel, for plastic, for millions of things that keep us alive in abstract or direct ways. The 20th century was built on such a proliferation of oil products it’s hard to imagine extracting them from your home, you can’t even extract them from your supermarket trolley without making a very contorted list.
And there’s so little time. There’s so much to do. We’ve got to fix cars and planes and medicine and supply lines and food and it’s really hard to think about it all because there’s nothing you can do, you need some sort of thing to rally around.
Yes, it’s cruder than a barrel to say that Formula E can be that thing. It’s a racing series, it’s a day out, it’s entertaining sport — but it’s also a test of shame for automakers caught out in dieselgate, it’s an on-track annoyance that says actually it is possible to make electric cars populist, you can do this.
If all the absurd, awful things we have to deal with now were built in the panicked competition of the twentieth century, then welcome to the 21st edition of that scrap. There’s no time to tear into the companies and people that have orchestrated it — half of them are dead and none of them care but if you can make a system where to succeed, they have to do what you want then that’s something else.
There’s never been and I hope there never is again a moment where motorsport, as inch-grabbing competitive hot lab for transport, has had such a crucial moment. All the years of F1’s development need to be drowned out in the next half-decade by the wind-up banshee howl of electric technologies making up for decades in absence.
And you can’t politely do that on the streets of Monaco as a nice little spectacle. You have to go where you’re not wanted and explain that, actually, you are what is needed. You can’t disrupt anything without causing a little chaos and you’re gonna have to do some stuff that scares you and other people might not approve of.
So for all that, I’d better be fucking inspirational. If I’m the in, I’d better live up to it. If I’m, somehow, the lens that someone can see something worth getting excited about through then I’d better wipe off the grime and get on with it. If I’m how someone can see themself being part of this, across whatever incomprehensibly vast gulf, then I’d better not be churlish about it.
Yes, I am a colossally privileged westerner. Yes, I am ignorant and disastrously naiive — no one looks at me in a paddock and takes me seriously. Formula One journalists consider my curious electrical proclivities like discovering the intern is into something kinky and I’m never going to get a Pulitzer.
But in a paddock in Riyadh I’m a thing people haven’t seen before because all that colossal western privilege means I get to do things they’re not allowed to. And things people have never seen before are inspiring, whether they’re race series screaming round a UNESCO world heritage site or grandstands where women sit with men or Jason Derulo’s shiny jeans.
And the government paid for it, yeah. It’s a little incomprehensible. Why would the Saudi government pay for an event that’s hardly aligned with an oil state’s economy?
One answer is the propaganda. A greenwash over ARAMCO’s continued production of the majority of the world’s crude oil. But New York has an Eprix and no one looks across the Atlantic and says ‘well, the US is green now’ any more than anyone thinks of Oman as the home of football.
So if you talk about greenwashing, you either think the Saudi government is hopelessly naiive or that the entire world is, stricken by lack of knowledge about the place. Formula E is part of a plan, though — the Vision 2030 programme of reform and transformation, which includes a focus on opening Saudi to visitors.
Saudi Arabia has a lot of visitors per year, to Mecca. But visas for non-Muslims were very hard to come by until recently, with tourist visas not at all and a lot of the country restricted.
The first year, lots of journalists were flown out by the Saudi tourism board and taken on an ultra-luxury, whistlestop tour of the Kingdom. I obviously wasn’t one of them. This doesn’t come from a place of delusion where I think those lovely people from Saudia took me on such a nice trip, I learned so much during the cultural briefings between private jet flights…
The thing about being the unexpected element, that weird thing no one expected to see in a paddock anywhere let alone Saudi Arabia, is that no one notices what I am doing most of the time because they assume I’m just recording a Vine or gazing wistfully at a drivers’ hairline or something. I don’t really get fussed around by teams or pushed out of garages or moved away from conversations because despite it being pretty obvious by this point that I do know what I’m looking at, I am also still the comedic relief.
It has turned into a bit of an act. If I actually am I tremendous dumbass then I can’t get mad when everyone treats me like one.
And no one cares what I do or where I go. As soon as I leave the circuit I’m a black shape as swaddled as any of the others. Which is why I think I can trust what I saw and what I think about Riyadh, why I don’t think anyone there was trying to impress me.
The teenage girls, after all, were there for the Black Eyed Peas concert. It was purely incidental that they discovered nice western ladies women could be motorsport journalists in the process, that my big, heavy permanent pass drew so many eyes because I couldn’t get the lanyard to bend to sitting right yet.
One of the women I speak to wistfully says she’d like to be a journalist herself but she’s been arrested before and couldn’t face it happening again. Which is where the teenage excitement melts away.
The reality is that I’m seeing Saudi Arabians get to do stuff they haven’t been able to previously which I take wholly for granted. I’m not inspirational, I’m just an exotic glimpse of someone who, for all my bleating and crying about going to Riyadh, is in absolutely no danger whatsoever.
And when I blend away into the night the only thing that stood out was I have no cocking idea how to keep an abaya out of the puddles from the unseasonal downpour. But going to Saudi is not about me.
I don’t think you can fake teenage girls. You can fake loads of things but you can’t pretend it’s plausible a restrictive state faked teenage girls’ enthusiasm. (the next year I’d get in a mosh pit with them but that’s later)
I meet a really lovely, wonderfully dedicated Saudi journalist out there. She’s a credit both to her youth and frankly to motorsport and I don’t think she even half realises how great she is at making both internet content and quality traditional journalism.
(I’m not putting her name here because this is a reasonably low-risk piece for me, I think — but I wouldn’t force anyone else’s name to be put to my words, any more than I was willing to let my own be edited)
So there are Saudi women doing this. And you should listen to them about the race far more than me and what they say is obviously the same thing I say about the London Eprix; of course you want the sport you love in your city.
Boris Johnson’s an odious prick and I’m allowed to say that. I don’t have to express gratitude to him for facilitating the event, when it happens next year. He didn’t have anything to do with it and I can be British without having a single miligram of respect for the people running the place.
I can’t tell you what Saudis think about their own leaders because I don’t know — but the attitude is definitely quite different. The situation is different, the structure is different. I don’t want to say that people are lying when they say they’re grateful to the leaders for bringing sporting events there because I don’t know that they are.
The politics of anywhere is complicated. There’s not a requirement to engage, except when there is. When you have to go somewhere the issues loom in massive print or your prime minister keeps straight-up lying about things that will get people killed.
People think we don’t ask about this. But what is there to say? I can tell you what was said in a press conference, I can tell you what I inferred from the total disregard for a lot of the stricter rules that’s obviously running through Riyadh.
Saudi Arabians like being Saudi Arabian. Much more than I think most British people like being British but that’s kind of cultural. It will come as no surprise that a young population finds strict religious law grating and wants reforms, that the handful of cinemas that have opened in the past few years are popular, that people like being able to go on dates and go out for dinner without being strictly separated into male and female and they love to party. Some of them probably wouldn’t say no to a beer.
If I tell you that Saudi Arabians (largely) approve of the race, will you approve of the race now? If I tell you that there’s young Saudis, especially women, getting the chance to do stuff they really want to do because we bring the circus to Riyadh, are you onboard? Not if you weren’t before.
I would say: why do you think you deserve the opportunity to go to things and they don’t? What are you gonna tell my friend, ‘hey, an accident of your birth location means my politics ban sport from your country?’ I don’t know if that sits right with me, personally.
Here’s some tea: the Riyadh paddock, in that first year, is the nicest motorsport paddock I’ve ever worked. As a woman. I mean, I always work in paddocks as a woman but like in terms of me being there, womanly, it was the nicest.
Within the Formula E paddock, people behave pretty much like they do in a lot of the rest of Riyadh, from what I can tell. Western women uncover their hair and some fully do away with the abaya, by year two that ratio increases to pretty much everyone but me shedding it as soon as they’re through the gates.
Women have never been banned from motorsport, in liberal western Europe. We make up 1.5% of race license holders — over the course of 125 years of motorsport events — and it’s conventional for men in racing to be able to say wildly misogynist things without it affecting their careers but we’re not banned and never have been.
Women always have been in motorsport, working and as pure fans. Most people in it start as one, end up as a combination. It’s a passion field, you can’t commit to the schedule otherwise.
But we’re a minority. And people quite often either forget we’re there or forget that any group who are so completely marginalised actually kind of needs some extra catering-for. You get used to it after awhile and kind of forget but you will never be one of the boys.
Riyadh isn’t like that because this is a totally new event. They have to make sure that it caters to a population not used to attending these kind of events at all and also that it specifically advertises to and makes itself welcoming to women, because otherwise they’re at risk of getting in trouble with the FIA. The organisers here 100% have to prove how liberal and reformed they are.
Which means everything includes me. People add “and ladies” every time they say “guys,” everyone asks for my opinion about things, I get brought to the roundtables and possibly actually given more time with people than the men.
It’s so strange and flattering, it gives me not a weird impression of Saudi Arabia, who I completely understand the motivations of about this and yes I know it’s PR and an act. But it’s an act that’s working, I do feel welcomed not specifically to Riyadh but to motorsport in a way I simply never have back home. It makes me a bit genuinely hysterical about having to go back to normal paddocks.
I don’t think Riyadh deserves a medal for it or anything — but it makes me think a lot about the ‘regular’ motorsport events.
Back to that first year; it’s fine. I distract myself by looking after one of my friends, who is finding it all much harder and who I designate myself the food and drink carer for the majority of the season.
By the time we’re leaving the circuit I promise to come back for a week next time, to see more of the city. I’ve already made myself a playlist for the way home and although I’ve been cheerfully, relentlessly convincing myself I am coping fine and the kilometre and a half down a dark motorway I’ve walked every night doesn’t bother me and I feel perfectly safe, there’s a cathartic reason it opens with the Pet Shop Boys’ Home & Dry.
But it’s done. We’ve been to Riyadh and nothing bad happened and I ate some really great falafel. Also had one of the best experiences of my life when I walked up to media pen on the test day and there was a near-equal number of female to male drivers due to a test stunt where teams were allowed to run a second car if a woman drove it.
Yeah, it’s a stunt. But it’s the one that means Saudi Arabia has now had the most women driving in a mixed-gender, top flight motorsport series, simultaneously, of any country ever. If anyone’s mad about that then motorsport has been happening for 125 years and somewhere else could have done it first. I mean, this is just sport. Somewhere could have done that. Somewhere could do it now with a larger number. In the interim, well played HRH Abdulaziz.
I decide maybe I don’t want to drink any wine in Cairo airport on my way back, for roughly the amount of time it takes me to get off my plane, walk to a place that sells wine and immediately order some. It tastes so good, I have a little cry.
Thus ends year one of what’s going to be ten years of me taking myself to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as a lone woman and trying to get around.
Something weird happens the day after that season’s final race in New York, which is that I go to a lunch with a load of other journalists. They’re all F1 and important and cool, I probably shouldn’t have even been invited. Especially given I’ve just got off a heavily delayed overnight flight from JFK and I am not feeling it.
Anyway, I inevitably mention I’m from Formula E and this guy goes off at me about Riyadh. Then when he discovers I actually go, he goes even more in on me and my moral decay. I’m genuinely shocked by the ferocity of it, especially from a group of people who go to Bahrain.
I’ve got used to having to explain myself but this guy just won’t let it lie, says I’m dancing on Khashoggi’s grave and and mocking the idea of journalism, supporting crimes against women. I kind of think, privately, that that’s a bit much coming from the lofty podium of working in, uh, famous humanitarian agency Formula One but then at the time I also do that so perhaps that’s not a great stone to start throwing in a room full of people who do too.
I don’t manage to get my brain together enough to sell it to him. I mean, I don’t know if I want to sell it? Do I actually think it’s good that we go, not just survivable?
You know what, I do. I think it’s difficult and it stresses me out and every year it makes the season opener tough and you know, people shout at me over lunch and things. But look, if you just close the door on Saudi Arabia then how’s there gonna be reform? How is freedom of the press and rights going to improve if you don’t know anything about anything that happens there? Or anything about the country? The people that live there?
It’s 2019; the same way that Saudi Arabia can’t stop the flow of information as a young, internet-savvy population gets extremely online, you can’t stand in the way of things
My most succinct summary of why I think we should go, though, is simpler: Formula E getting paid to race in the home of oil and sit there going ‘that’s bad’ without getting censored is the biggest middle finger move.
Ah, Riyadh alone: round two. Now, surely, I would be armed with enough knowledge to not screw up constantly by disappearing into my own bizarre alternate reality.
Guess what? I absolutely do not. If anything else I’m even worse. I get really, really anxious in the runup — partly because this year my mother knows I am going and oh boy am I getting told off. Which is pathetic, what the hell, what kind of tiny, baby child am I?
I booked my flights really early this time, before testing. They were way better flights and I was excited to be going home via Beirut because apparently I am a lot better at inventing fictional versions of countries that sit in my brain like mirages than I am at reading the news.
Anyway, great life choices aside (it’s not like this is even my worst one) I, in theory, should be really chill about this. Except I miss the FIA email to apply for a visa and end up doing it late and it doesn’t turn up for ages and I get really stressed and then also ill and I start a new job and everything is really full on and I want to throw up.
I don’t do my packing until the last minute, then prepare by drinking too much wine and sleeping through my alarm so I have to book a last minute Uber to Stansted. Which isn’t ideal because I’m not sure if I’ve been paid but better than missing the whole thing.
Anyway, my point-blank refusal to ever check my bank balance is very much a me thing rather than anything directly connected to Saudi Arabia. So, off to Stansted and I have to re-buy everything I need and obviously forgot in the airport but again, this is pretty standard behaviour for anyone who’s as much of a total mess as me.
This doesn’t seem like the way to do it. I can get most places half-cut and sloppy but this is not most places. Nevermind — also it turns out Pegasus serve surprisingly pleasant in-flight wine and by the time I get to Istanbul I’m feeling quite relaxed; I have hours of stopover for it to wear off in, don’t worry.
I don’t want to go. It’s got into my head. I’ve been getting all these weird emails with hate-filled fantasies about me getting killed and I keep thinking about the guy at that lunch and also about the texts from my mum and the way I don’t feel cavalier enough to be doing this.
Why am I going? Because it’s my job to go. Because I have stuff to do. Because I have this endless compulsion to do it and it’s a massive privilege. I don’t know. It’s all weighing on my brain, am I an instrument of state PR now? I wouldn’t put up with that from anywhere and besides, I don’t think I am. I’d probably be on a fancier flight if I was.
But getting onto my late-night flight in Istanbul, I know it’s descended again. The fictional, fearful Riyadh is in my head and every radical thing I’ve tweeted from the past year is haunting me. What the hell am I doing going to Saudi Arabia?
And the thing is, I can’t (at this point) recognise it’s the VR. Yet again, I’m expecting to get arrested at the airport, to get trailed, a million paranoid things that won’t happen. But now they’re incredibly real in the sort of simulated reality everyone’s told me definitely exists and is more important than my own memories.
I’m not normally like this. I haven’t been sleeping enough (I’ve had ten hours sleep over five nights) and it’s really starting to show.
Still, on the plane now so better live with it — obviously I get to Riyadh without incident and am through the airport with a warm bag of falafel and a coffee, into an Uber where I manage to stagger through a mostly-Arabic conversation and send a selection of my wilder and more enthusiastic tweets about politically safe but morally questionable topic: Lando Norris is really hot lately.
I know I said I’m never going to win a Pulitzer but with that kind of bold reporting, I really should.
Finding my hotel takes a bit (it’s another, different dubious apartment hotel) and by the time I’m in and arrived, it’s like 3:30am so I just pass out in the massive bed. By which I mean, look at memes on my phone and rewatch the camping episodes of It’s Alive and wonder at which point I stopped just writing about semi-teenage idiot sportspeople and actually became one.
Nevermind, anyway, soon enough it’s time to revisit ‘finding the accreditation centre.’ This year I am determined not to have to climb any catch fencing so pick my Uber dropoff point VERY carefully. It is to absolutely no avail and I end up lost in the enormous Diriyah Season compound down near where Ruiz and Joshua will be going at it in a few weeks but certainly there are no electric cars currently.
Because I’m still freaking out and only managing to psychologically sustain myself by internally commentating on the situation it gets steadily worse as I wobble across the paddock on a combination of caffeine, adrenaline and inadvisable 4am hotel tap water. Once I actually find the place, collect the thing and get in the media centre things feel less out of control, except that I need to write two season previews before anyone wakes up in the UK still.
At least there’s fruit and coffee.
Thursday is a bit of a mess, for me. I don’t eat enough (I’m vegan and it’s a genuine problem in paddocks) and I’m so sleep deprived I’m really not coping very well and keep having to watch Calming YouTube Content to get a grip on myself and churn out another thousand words. To be fair, all of this is just the business of being me, doing journalism so can’t really be attributed to Riyadh or anyone there.
A team are doing an event later where I’m meant to be interviewing someone who I inevitably don’t get to interview because scheduling is a nightmare and also it’s really obvious that I am about one second from falling asleep on the floor and considerably over my stress limit. Another woman in Formula E asks me why I’m letting the side down by wearing an abaya (most team personnel are taking them off the second they enter the paddock) and I just snap.
It’s because I’m on my own. Because I arrived at 1:30am. Because everyone’s spent the last month telling me how stupid I am by going here and how certain I am to get killed and it turns out even I have a limit to self-determined risk enthusiasm. Because if anything happens to me, no one knows where I am and Formula E don’t look after me -
This comes as a surprise. They don’t? Surely no one lets me run round Saudi Arabia totally on my own?
Oh, they do. And being alone is psychologically testing and I feel so pathetic at how pitiable it all sounds. One of the drivers sympathetically tells me that sounds “really fucked up, to be honest.” It, err, doesn’t help.
By the time I get back to my hotel the absolute most I can manage to do is go to a shop and buy the ingredients for a big night in in Riyadh. Which is to say, some crisps, some mystery thing in a jar that turns out to be definitely not vegan kind of fake cheese with the consistency of mayonnaise that tastes amazing on crisps (food waste is bad) and one of everything from the drinks section.
I love foreign supermarkets. Full of weird stuff. This one is crucially full of men who are understandably surprised to see a western lady wandering around shaking like she’s on a billion drugs and trying to find the hummus (I can’t) or work out which colour of water is fizzy in these parts.
Obviously there’s no beer in Saudi Arabia but there is a wide selection of like beer-adjacent malt drinks that have weird fruity flavours and also cider-adjacent things with frightening coloured labels. I go for a beer-adjacent thing in flavour ‘original’ and a threatening can of Mirinda which poses the question about itself: watermelon or cantaloupe?
(my investigative powers don’t stretch that far, it mostly tastes of heavy-handed corn syrup)
I’m freaking out, though, because when I was in the supermarket the guy packing my bags gave me a present. It was just a chocolate wafer thing and I was concentrating on understanding what number I needed to pay so didn’t really pay any attention until I left and suddenly thought: what if they’re setting me up to be done for stealing it?
There was no evidence for this at all. Every Saudi I’ve met has been genuinely helpful or openly friendly, the worst reaction being a kind of morbid curiosity about why anyone would do what I am doing. But instead of using all 10ft-across of my weirdly gigantic hotel bed to get the sleep I really, really desperately need I obviously just send myself insane googling ‘setup to be arrested Saudi shops’ and variants thereon. It’s so stupid and I am only getting stupider as I waste precious resting hours on doing the opposite of that.
Now fully convinced I will be in jail before the end of the day, it’s time for the Friday race. Either you’re into motorsport and therefore know how race day works or you’re not and so don’t care but basically a lot of things happen all at once and I have to stop writing worryingly thirsty things about drivers in other series and do some work for once.
I’m really in the toilet, brain-wise, by this point and have to cry in the loos three times during the day. Which is difficult when the loos keep being closed because of some kind of water supply issue (Formula E uses temporarily-built paddocks so these things happen) and requires quite a lot of timing effort.
Also people keep interviewing me, which actually now seems to happen more than I interview other people and the whole thing feels completely ridiculous. Why are you interviewing me? I’m an idiot and I can’t remember my own name or feel most of the left side of my body because I last had ‘adequate sleep’ about three weeks ago and for some reason I forgot to bring any socks with me so I have these really aggressive blisters and I’m probably going to go to Saudi jail over a chocolate bar.
A lot of stuff is happening to me and very little of it is conducive to doing anything useful. Which then gets in my head more and this is how every weekend goes, except with an added, imaginary carceral threat.
I relay my woes to one of my friends who advises that maybe it really would be a good idea to eat something that isn’t crisps and get more than three hours’ sleep and like ok, I can believe that.
My Saudi friend notices I am having a meltdown and says she’s worried I hate her city. It finally kicks me into functional gear — I can’t be coming over here, making people feel bad about the fact I have a wholly imaginary version of their country down over my head like a visor.
So that night I first go to the concert after Formula E and purchase ‘potato,’ the most vegan thing I can find to eat. This helps somewhat and gets me into the mindset where when my taxi drops me off, I head off to the malls near where I’m staying (which are not the grander, designer sort you find in some of Riyadh) to complete the incredibly trivial task of buying socks and ordering stir fry.
Socks it turns out are easy, as there’s a shoe shop nearby and I could’ve saved myself a world of pain really easily. Which is pretty much the moral of this entire episode: stop making your life really hard and driving yourself insane and instead of just doing things like a normal, woman.
Dinner is also easy in that I get an absolutely monumental quantity of stir fry vegetables from a mall food court place and eat them in a sort of blissful semi-coma while listening to the sounds of Dr Dre’s seminal album 2001, over the mall tannoy. I seem to be staying in a very Asian district this year and most of the restaurants seem to be authentic Indonesian places.
This helps the sleeping problem enormously. It turns out just ‘not being scared’ is really key to getting six straight hours in bed and so being able to operate normally. And that’s the thing, what am I even scared of? Myself?
(to be fair, I am definitely the biggest danger to me)
It feels better. But I’m still relieved when I leave — it’s all the things: my own stupid ideas, the judgement from other people, the pressure of trying to make sure I’m doing it right.
Before I do though, I go to the last concert with a group of Saudi young people who I’ve tagged along with. Everyone is covered in glitter and dancing suggestively and jumping on each other and starting mosh pits. It feels like being at a gig I am about 15 years too old for in any other country, except that unlike if it was in London no one sloshes a pint of Tuborg down my back at any point.
It definitely does not feel like government collusion when at the end of his set, a Lebanese rapper does a dubstep version of Bryan Adams’ Everything I Do (I Do It For You) and I, an old person, absolutely lose it in front of this surreally gigantic stage, surrounded by excited young people.
For me, I could go to a gig like that every night of the week in London. But this is one of a handful. The first western music concerts were played at the Eprix the year before and there’s something there that feels big. You can claim the sport is a distraction for the rest of the world but you don’t televise concerts, these are for the Saudis.
(The concerts actually caused a really problematic ticketing situation this year where people were buying them, looking like the Formula E numbers were good because it was a combined ticket and then not turning up — when the organisers were asked they admitted they screwed up and would be trying to fix it next year)
This is what it comes down to, about the race. It’s a good track, it’s one of the best ones we have in fact — it’s produced two exciting races this season and despite torrential rain making the first year difficult, it worked then too. And yes, we have done all the bits about turning up to torrential rain in Riyadh; it snowed on the Sahara when we were in Marrakech once, too.
Climate change doesn’t really deal in imaginary metaphors.
So it’s a good track, the drivers like to drive on it, it produces a genuinely good sporting event. It takes electric racing and green principles, confrontationally, to one of the homes of oil. It has forced some small changes — which should not overshadow the achievements and struggles of Saudi Arabians themselves in getting those.
If you think it is just sportswashing then that’s too simple, it isn’t. It depends if you think the Saudi 2030 Vision plan is for you, probably sitting in the west and still thinking of this as some distant horror theme park, or for people there.
There’s an open PR angle, but those stats — the ones from way back at the show case, about how low life expectancy is in Saudi Arabia and how generally Saudis have a poor quality of life — well, a lot of this is not about how you see it. It’s about things like the massive investment into grass roots sport (especially motorsport, a nice upside to the now-head of the Sports Authority being an ex-racer) might improve things for regular Saudis.
You want to know what going to Riyadh is like? It’s a bit boring. People want stuff to do, same as you. And to meet people — each other and weird, jetlagged British women who can barely hold a coffee without tipping it down themselves.
So long as we acknowledge the other stuff (and we should do it everywhere) then I think you’re taking the wrong side, if you believe your opinion trumps their right to access that.
Ok here’s some more tea: Riyadh is covered in rubbish. If you want proof I’m not lying, here it is: the whole place is absolutely bedecked in trash.
This happens a lot in places with poor infrastructure, which Riyadh absolutely has. Because making life easy for people to get around and to meet up and to get places hasn’t been a social or specifically political priority, Saudi quality of life suffers in more ways than one. Who cares if the streets are filled with garbage if you never go out?
But people do now. Young Saudis go out in big groups and nearly all Saudis are young. Stepping around overspilling rubbish becomes the first thing I get the hang of keeping my abaya out of because man, it does not smell ok.
Rubbish in a city is a pollutant and I really hope, for the people living there, that Riyadh sorts this out. It’s all the ‘being a metaphor’ thing, isn’t it? Metaphors for governments don’t have extensive municipal recycling programmes.
I can’t tell you to unconditionally support Formula E racing in Riyadh. I don’t think you should unconditionally support anything, really, apart from maybe Lando Norris but we’re all just having a big one about that at the minute.
But anyway, this wasn’t to tell you what to think. It was slightly just to write about going there because not many people do and slightly because everyone keeps insisting no one in the Formula E media is thinking about this stuff when I have tortured myself for weeks with it. Also some of the anecdotes are funny. I could write a lot more, from my run-ins with ‘rose Lattes’ to the time I bought a lime juice and recklessly refused extra sugar in it only to discover I’d got an actual pint of just undiluted lime.
But this is long enough and it’s already much too much about me, for something that really shouldn’t be. We all have to live in our own heads.
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OPEN CALL:
KUNST KEBAB: Exploring food and contemporary art in social space
We are searching for artists to participate a site-specific project that focuses on the relation of food and art. The exhibition will take place inside a Kebab restaurant, which is run by a Turkish immigrant in the Museum Quartier underground passage. We are open to different mediums: painting, drawing, printing, installation, digital media, photography, video, sound and performance. It is recommended to visit the place or check out the photographs and information about the place, as it is a site-specific project. It is possible to make small interventions, modify objects that belong to the restaurant, if it is asked in advance and explained in the proposal in details.
Although there are many examples that use food as a form of art, to taste is the one of the five senses that the contemporary art gives the minimum interest. But; eating is not only about senses, taste and pleasure; it is a vital biological activity and a cultural practice. Eating together is a cultural gesture that gathers people together and different cooking methods create traditions, which are part of the local identity. Common features of the cuisine and eating habits have the power to connect societies. A certain type of food gain different meanings when it is exported: A local food of lower classes in a distant country might become a signifier of a sophisticated palate in another country. Migrants, Gastarbeiter don’t only bring their own food culture to a different cultural context but they also transform their food to adapt to the different tasting habits. Food connects us in a way but it also separates because of religion prohibitions, rituals, different palates, different traditions, ethics and mentality. Food may signify much more than simple nutrition, it tells about where you come from, where you live, what social class you belong to and the condition of your body.
Some of the topics that can be inspirational for the artists are written below:
Food, resistance and solidarity Food, consumerism and capitalism Food, local identity, exoticism, globalism and tourism Food on social media, ‘food porn’, exhibitionism on food Food as a signifier of social status Migrant food, food and labour Cooking as a creative activity, kitchen as a laboratory Food and Body: Healthy, diet and organic food market: body politics, fat shaming, eating as a vital activity Food and ethics: Veganism, vegetarian food, food industry, and exploitation Food, rituals, customs, tradition, religion Food creating social relations: place-making, relationality and food in public space Food and hospitality
Co-curators: Deniz Güvensoy and Deniz Beşer Deadline for the applications: 15th September, 2017 Adress of the venue: Museumsquartier U2 Passage The exhibition will take place in Mid-November, 2017 More details: (Dimensions of the space, plan, etc) kunstkebab.tumblr.com
Applicants should send a short biography, three -four examples of latest artworks, a short statement, the description of the proposed artwork and links of the website, portfolio, exhibitions .. etc (optional)
If you have more questions please write to us:
//
OPEN CALL:
KUNST KEBAB_ Eine Begegnung von Kunst und Essen (im Speiselokal, im Sozialraum, im sozialen Raum….) KUNSTESSEN
Übersetzung: Anna Watzinger
Wir suchen KünstlerInnen, welche sich im Rahmen eines ortsspezifischen Ausstellungsprojektes mit dem Thema Kunst und Essen auseinandersetzen oder bestehende künstlerische Arbeiten dazu einreichen wollen. Die Ausstellung KUNST KEBAB findet in einem von einem Türkischen Zuwanderer betriebenen Kebab-Lokal im Untergeschoss des U-Bahn Zuganges der U2 Station Museums Quartier statt. Alle künstlerischen Medien sind willkommen solange sie einen Bezug zum Ort oder Thema aufweisen. Somit besteht die Möglichkeit an Ort zu intervenieren oder kleine Veränderungen im Ausstellungsraum vorzunehmen. Erste Informationen zu den räumlichen Gegebenheiten befinden sich online. Weiteres wird es einen Besichtigungstermin geben, bei dem alle Fragen vor Ort besprochen werden können.
Einzureichen ist: Kurzer Lebenslauf und Portfolio Kurzkonzept und eventuell Foto zur geplanten Arbeit Beschreibung des Vorhabens bzw. Skizzen/Visualisierung
Obwohl eine Vielzahl an künstlerischen Beispielen existieren wo das Thema Essen eine Rolle spielt, scheint die zeitgenössische Kunst sich wenig mit dem dazugehörigen Geschmackssinn auseinanderzusetzen. Essen ist aber nicht nur ein Geschmackserlebnis und ein gustatorischer Genuss, sondern (über)lebensnotwendig. Essen kann als kulturelle Praxis bezeichnet werden und umfasst einen wesentlichen Bestandteil sozialer Begegnungen und Aktivitäten. Verschiedene Zutaten entsprechend der Region, die Art zu kochen und zu essen, bedingt und kreiert spezifische Gerichte, welche Teil der lokalen Identität werden, wie z.B. das Nationalgericht eines Landes. Auf der anderen Seite können ähnliche Zutaten oder Essensgewohnheiten fern nationaler und sozialer Grenzen Menschen miteinander verbinden. Auch kann der Export von bestimmten lokalen Gerichten in ein anderes Land Einfluss auf dessen Zubereitung und Bedeutung haben, wie das ein schlichtes, regionales Gericht plötzlich zu einer gefragten Delikatesse im Gastland wird. Oder Einwanderer und Gastarbeiter modifizieren im Rahmen eines Gastgewerbes ihre heimischen Gerichte entsprechend der Essensgewohnheiten in der neuen Heimat. Das Thema Essen kann auch Menschen voneinander trennen wie verschieden religiös motivierte Essensrituale, Nahrungsmittelverbote oder Fastenzeiten, sowie moralische Vorstellungskonzepte hinsichtlich Nahrungsmittelproduktion und unterschiedliche Bildungs- und Einkommensschichten, die sich auf Konsum- und Essverhalten auswirken. Somit weist die Bedeutung von Essen und Lebensmittel über die reine Nahrungsaufnahme hinaus. Das Thema Essen ist somit so vielschichtig, dass es über die Gesinnung bis Herkunft, Lebensstil über Einkommen bis körperlicher Verfassung einer Person oder Gruppe erzählen kann.
Themenvorschläge: Essen, Konsum und Kapitalismus Essen, Handel, Wirtschaft, Globalisierung, Tourismus, Exotik Essen als Identitätsstiftung und Statussymbol Essen auf Social Media, 'Food Porn', Exhibitionismus Essen Essen als Hinweis des sozialen Status und Statussymbol Essen von Zuwanderer in der Gastronomie Kochen als kreative Tätigkeit, Küche als Labor Essen und Körper: Diät -und Ernährungsstrends, Biolebensmittelmarkt, Körperpolitik, Körperzwang, „fatshaming", Essen als Lebensnotwendigkeit, Essen und Krankheit (u.a. Magersucht, Bulimie, Adipositas) Essen als Dienstleistung: Gastronomie, Essen auf Rädern, Zustellservice, Großküchen Essen und Ethik: Vegane und vegetarisches Ernährung, Lebensmittelindustrie und dessen Bedingungen, Brauchtum und religiöse Sitten Essen im soziale Kontext: karikative Ausspeisungen im öffentlichen Raum, gemeinsames Essen im öffentlichen Raum (Picknick, Grillen) Essen und Gastfreundschaft
Kuratoren: Deniz Güvensoy und Deniz Beşer Deadline: 25.09.2017 Veranstaltungsort: Museumsquartier U2 Passage Ausstellungszeit: December 2017
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14 Startup Tips From Small Business Pros
New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/14-startup-tips-from-small-business-pros/
14 Startup Tips From Small Business Pros
If you want to start your small business right and reduce your chances of failing, you’re in luck. All across the country, there are experts who have seen firsthand what business owners often do wrong—and right—and can help you avoid similar mistakes.
Experts from the nation’s 63 Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) are more than happy to share their advice for starting and growing a business successfully. They work with entrepreneurs every day, providing free and low-cost consulting. Collectively, SBDCs help a new business launch every 31 minutes, and provide more than 1.3 million hours of consulting services to entrepreneurs annually.
To get you started, we’ve asked some of these advisors to share their best tips for new businesses.
Experts from the nation’s Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) are happy to share startup advice.
© mooshny – Fotolia.com
Startup basics
“Know your customer,” advises Lee Lambert, director of the Alameda County SBDC in Oakland, Calif. “To succeed as an entrepreneur, you must know your customer and what they want; it’s the key to success. Spend time doing some grassroots marketing, and go out to talk to your customers before you start the business, and continuously solicit their feedback after that,” he suggests. “Doing this will help you build stronger, longer-lasting customer relationships.”
While you are doing your research, make sure you analyze the competition, says Tamela Darnell, management consultant for the Kentucky Small Business Development Center. “Many entrepreneurs think they don’t have any competitors and that is not the case,” she says. “You have direct and indirect competitors.”
Some business owners will launch with a distinct vision of their unique niche, but for others the path to success may not be so clear. If you’re in the latter group, remain open-minded and cast a wider net, suggests Enrique Romero, regional director of the University of Texas of the Permian Basin SBDC. “You will eventually find your niche market by working through as many customers as possible, and find a certain customer base that will stick.”
Do your homework before you launch, recommends Robert Bahn, lead business consultant with the Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center. He sometimes sees clients who think that they can launch a business as long as they have enough money to cover rent and opening costs. “Then they wonder, Where are all the customers?” he says. Whether it’s market research or information on how to prepare for and get business financing, there are plenty of resources available to help you prepare before you start your business.
What if your problem is that you have too many good ideas? Beware of spreading yourself too thin, says Marelena Sandy, program manager for the Illinois SBDC at College of DuPage. “Trying to make all of your business ideas effectively work at one time is simply not attainable,” she says. She recommends you use a feasibility checklist to figure out which one works best for you. “What’s the market like? Your competitors? Do you have experience?” These are just some of the questions you need to ask. “Make one idea successfully work, and then decide whether you want to take on another venture,” she recommends.
RELATED: The Secret Behind One Small Business’s Success—Hint: It’s Free!
Money matters
Start with as clean a financial slate as possible before you launch, urges Romero. “Begin to get your ducks in a row,” he says. That includes reviewing and working on your credit, “saving money and [getting] up-to-date on your finances, including your taxes,” he says. “Why? Because as a new business owner it will be a tough road ahead and you don’t need a lot of baggage holding you back.”
And speaking of money, you need to start with enough funds to cover expenses until you break even, and you’ll want to make smart decisions to protect your finances and your business credit.
If you get financing—whether from a credit card, bank, or family member—be careful, warns Bahn. Being “stupid with your own money” is one thing, he says, “but when you have members of your family giving you money to start a business, then treat it as someone else’s money.” It’s the same as getting a loan, he explains. It needs to be paid back.
He also says it’s important to project the path to profitability. “Most business owners want to make money, but you need to know when you expect to break even,” he says. “This way when you do not meet the timeline, you have to make some big decisions, one of which is to shut down.”
“Spreadsheets are your friends,” says Sandy. “Make a list of startup and operational costs, keep track of what you are spending, organize your contacts, and by all means keep them up-to-date,” she urges.
As you market your business, remember everything you do has a cost. An example: social media. It’s not free, warns Darnell. “You pay with either your time or money,” she says. “It takes time to build a social media presence as a startup.”
Ask for help
Know when to get help. Too many entrepreneurs try to do everything themselves. “You will have a tremendous amount of responsibilities” warns Sandy. “Time management will be key to accomplishing the majority of your tasks, (but also) take a step back and determine if it is time to hire someone and/or individuals onboard to assist.”
Find mentors who can “help you to navigate the myriad challenges that come with being a business owner,” advises Lambert. Research from the Small Firms Economic Development Initiative found that 70% of small businesses that receive mentoring survive more than five years—double the rate of non-mentored businesses.”
A great place to start is with your state and local SBDCs, which offer free and low-cost training and consulting on a variety of business issues. And this 14-step checklist can also help you set up your business the right way.
And, above all, “Be open to learning, learning, and learning,” Romero says. “You will make mistakes—lots of them. Learn from those mistakes, move forward, and improve on those mistakes.”
RELATED: 3 Big Ways the SBA Helps Small Businesses (That You Might Not Know About)
Read all of Gerri Detweiler’s articles on AllBusiness.com.
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Fraport and Deutsche Bahn to Test Artificial Intelligence at Frankfurt Airport
The robotic head smiles at the passenger and greets them: “My name is FRAnny. How can I help you?” FRAnny is an expert on Frankfurt Airport, and is able to answer a wide range of questions – including the correct gate, the way to a specific restaurant, and how to access the free Wi-Fi.
The robotic concierge is a cooperative project between Fraport AG, the operator of Frankfurt Airport (FRA), and DB Systel GmbH, Deutsche Bahn’s dedicated IT service provider. Travelers at major transportation hubs, such as airports and train stations, are very often in need of guidance. In these scenarios, digital assistants and robots can support human personnel by fielding routine inquiries, thus enhancing the customer service offering. A six-week trial at Frankfurt Airport, Germany’s largest aviation hub, will help evaluate FRAnny in terms of functionality, customer acceptance and its practical usefulness in everyday situations
FRAnny is based on an artificial intelligence and a cloud-based voice-user interface (VUI) that can be deployed in a variety of forms – including in chatbots, voice assistants and robots. This digital customer service system was developed by a team of Deutsche Bahn IT experts. Using data drawn from the airport’s information system, FRAnny is able to understand and answer questions relating to travel, airport facilities and more. In addition to providing flight information, FRAnny is well versed in small talk and can communicate in German, English and seven other languages.
Fraport and Deutsche Bahn have been jointly exploring the potential of artificially intelligent, voice-based customer service systems since 2017. The first pilot took place at Frankfurt Airport in spring 2018 using FRAnny’s predecessor: the four-week field trial was very successful. After approximately 4,400 interactions, 75 percent of passengers rated their exchange positively. Based on the feedback received, both the artificial intelligence (AI) component and the robot’s user interface were further improved. The more recent trial underscores both companies’ commitment to ongoing innovation in artificial intelligence and robotics. Moreover, it puts the implemented improvements through their paces under real-world conditions.
In June, the AI-based service is to be tested at Berlin central rail station – which has approximately 300,000 travelers and visitors every day. Human customer service agents at Deutsche Bahn’s information center will receive smart support from FRAnny’s sister, SEMMI.
Travel News | eTurboNews
Original Article
The post Fraport and Deutsche Bahn to Test Artificial Intelligence at Frankfurt Airport appeared first on Tripstations.
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World Book Day Meme
From @hikingofthenoldor (who tagged me): “Today (23.04.) is world book day and @pansytheleia came up with these beautiful book related questions.”
1. Who is your favourite author - from your country! / mothertongue I honestly can’t think of one? I mostly read in English or translations into German (from Russian, mainly), so, I don’t have anyone coming to my mind. Sorry, I guess. (Also I dislike most of “the classics” like Goethe or Kafka, so there’s that.)
2. Your favourite children’s book (it’s hard, I know) The first book I remember adoring when I was like, idk, between nine and twelve, was the Eragon series by Christopher Paolini, although I lost all interest in them after I read the third book. I also enjoyed “Die rote Zora und ihre Bande” (The Outsiders of Uskoken Castle) by Kurt Kläber/Held. It just had my imagination flowing like whoa. A series aimed at children that I profoundly like but did not read when I was in fact a child would be Heroes of Olympus by Rick Riordan (the follow-up of the Percy Jackson books) or “Coraline” by Neil Gaiman. Great reads, both of them.
3. A book that changed your life? Probably the first time I read “American Gods” by Neil Gaiman, mostly because it got me hooked on his works and gods, do I love them. His books as well as the various visual novels/comics are so, so great. His imagination and ways of building up a world inside things we consider familiar but end up being so fascinatingly strange, as well as his attitude as an author and creative being help me pick myself up and get inspired. I can’t help but collect everything Gaiman I can and might have forced some people close to me into reading them. (I just can’t help but want to share these magnificent works.)
4. The best book you read this year? I did not read nearly as much as I would’ve liked this year, but I enjoyed Brent Weeks’ “The Black Prism”. As well as Kameron Hurley’s “The Mirror Empire” (which I read last year or it would have made the cut) it shows a very refreshing approach to those old and same stories and characters you always end up finding in Classic Fantasy, and I can’t thank them enough for that. (Although I recently started Joe Abercrombie’s short story collection regarding his First Law books and I know they will just end up being the best read I’ve had so far when I finish them.)
5. And the worst book you read this year? Okay... I don’t remember reading something and thinking “this was so bad” but I recall finishing Drew Karpyshyn’s “Children of Fire” and being, disappointed? It wasn’t bad, it’s just that I looked forward to reading it for quite some time and after having read it, I don’t know why. It was entertaining, but I strongly dislike two of the protagonists’ tropes and don’t like the other two’s as well, although I ended up more or less liking three out of the four protagonists.
6. Which book is totally overrated? Oh boy. This question would be far easier if it concerned comics, movies or series. Or movie adaptions. But as it stands, I’m going with Stepheny Meyer’s “Twilight” etc, because while I think they were well written, the plot and many, many characters were, well, not nearly as interesting as they could have been. And I actively dislike all the hype, especially with the movie, they are just not that great. But I am mostly listing Twilight because I am completely oblivious to most hypes regarding books and this is the one book I clearly remember prompting me to roll my eyes several times at several people.
7. Randomly recommend a book. For whatever reason! Please, please, if you enjoy Classic Fantasy and the like, read Miles Cameron’s Traitor Son Cycle. The characters are witty, intelligent, fallible and extremely badass. The protagonist is an arrogant dipshit who you are going to love. The story is oh-so-complex and thoroughly thought-out, the worldbuilding (including magic and non-humanoids!!) is exciting, the conflicts are shown from several perspectives and very human, even if they include non-human creatures. I would literally kill to let Desiderata step on me, as it stands. I honestly can’t name all of the times I send some of my friends lines/paragraphs from these books because I had to laugh, to share. I also read the first book when visiting a friend living a fourteen hour train ride away and stopped reading only to eat and call my parents about the immense failings of the Deutsche Bahn.
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Sorry for my absence this last week, resulting in the lack of a weekly round-up. On Friday I set off for a short weekend with CraMERRY and Suzy in Hamburg. We had lots of fun, and Suzy already posted pictures and a summary of our meet on her blog. I have nothing to add to that – it was great, a welcome change of scenery away from it all – and since my Macbook refuses to recognise my card reader, I can’t even add post any pictorial evidence of the trip here.
However, after I said good-bye to CraMERRY and Suzy, I travelled on to Berlin. For no other reason than cheaper flights back to Ireland from Berlin. And the opportunity to visit my RLRA friend D___, as well as spending time in the German capital, which has fast become my favourite German city not counting my home town of Bremen which will forever remain at the top of my list. To justify the three-day absence to myself, my bosses, my family and my friend, I had also scheduled a few business meetings in Berlin. Enough to merit a longer stay, but not too many to seriously impact my free time *hehe*. So besides meeting my public relations contacts, I had lots of time to wander around Berlin, tick off a few shopping requirements, and simply enjoy being there.
The first couple of days, I was not specifically tracking Berlin Station in the city, but time and again I came across locations that I remembered seeing in the show. What both the makers of the show and the actors emphasised, namely that the production had made a point of filming the show predominantly at original locations rather than in studios, became pretty clear as I kept bumping into recognisable locations from the show. I pulled out my iPhone and documented them as I went along.
On the way to my first business meeting in Leipziger Straße, I exited the S-Bahn on Potsdamer Platz. Instantly recognisable, albeit taken from a different vantage point, in my case.
Whenever I am travelling, I make a point of getting at least one photo exhibition into my schedule. This time, an exhibition on record cover art caught my eye. It was organised by C/O Berlin in the Amerikahaus just opposite Bahnhof Zoo. C/O is a charitable foundation which operates exhibition spaces and organises a lively cultural programme in the sphere of photography and visual arts. The cover art exhibition was not quite as good as I hoped, but it had this little gem in store for me:
A nice discovery, incidentally. I suggest you put this on as a soundtrack to this post.
Anyhow, it was only once I was sitting in the C/O’s rather nice café that I suddenly thought things were looking familiar. A long row of windows with a table along the whole length. Amerikahaus? Suddenly rang a bell. To be on the safe side, I quickly took a couple of surreptitious photos outside in case my hunch proved true. It did. (You can click on the images in order to open a larger, swipeable version of the gallery!)
Not least since I had been travelling in New Zealand, I knew that there are worse ways of exploring a city or country, than tracking the locations of a film you have enjoyed seeing. I am under no illusion that what you get to see, will either demystify the film in question, or will be so small and often insignificant, that non-fans wonder why you are making an effort at all. But here is the thing: Location sightseeing often takes you into parts of a town that you would otherwise have ignored. Along the way you get to see interesting places you would never have noticed. Just because you are following in the footsteps of Daniel Miller, so to speak. It is a fabulous way to pass the time when you have no other plans or when you don’t know where to go.
And there is no better companion when it comes to touring the Berlin Station locations, than our fellow fan MatildRAs. Last year, MatildRAs agreed to meet me twice, and each time she had a tour organised in her head, to take me on. This time, our third meeting, was no different. Or even better – she came with various tour options for me to choose from. Blasphemously I opted for a tour that took us to a non-Daniel place – just because I wanted to have a look at Karl-Marx-Allee, a 1950s boulevard built by the East German regime as a prestige object.
Along the way, we went through Alexanderplatz S-Bahn station – those turquoise tiles are ubiquitous in the Berlin underground, but you can see the station sign in the screen cap:
On Karl-Marx-Allee I had an irrepressible urge for food. After a substantial breakfast in the quirky Café Sibylle, we wandered towards Alexanderplatz where MatildRAs disclosed a sneaky plan. The Berliner Zeitung high-rise is just on the edge of the square, and MatildRAs suggested we simply go in and take the lift up to the top for a view across Berlin. No one stopped us, so up we went.
Incidentally, Berliner Zeitung has since moved out of the building even though the newspaper is still on the lift buttons. But we sneaked a peek around the corner on the 14th (?) floor and peered into the old editorial offices. The view from up there was restricted by opaque windows that only opened a small crack.
We managed to make out the roof top of Joker’s company building where Daniel unsuccessfully tries to establish a computer link to the company server. It’s the modern building with the dark windows in the centre of my picture below.
Just a few paces up from Berliner Zeitung is the Lutheran cemetery where Daniel picks up the mobile phone with which he contacts his boss Gemma Moore. cemeteries are always interesting to visit. We walked in Daniel’s footsteps… (The tombstone does not exist, btw!)
It was getting late and I had a plane to catch, but the last place on MatildRAs’ itinerary for me was just too good to miss. We jumped on the tram and S-Bahn to Wedding, to sniff out Daniel’s abode. In the end we came across it because we opted to take a stroll along the river Panke – which came out right beside the disused factory building that Daniel made his sparse home in. We walked around a few corners and I took a number of photos until we figured out where the set must have been, but the four characteristically long windows were the clue…
In photo #3 above, Daniel’s flat is on the third floor (fourth, if you are speaking American English), the two windows on the left. In the last picture you can see the flat from the side, with two characteristic small windows and a blocked up larger window in the middle. You can very clearly see the arrangement in the following screen cap from the show.
Seriously, people, you were meant to look at the window arrangement, not the incidentally captured body that is crossing through the view!!! Here’s some more Daniel and the view from his windows.
Finally, I concluded that the roof top scenes were not filmed exactly on top of Daniel’s flat but on an adjacent roof which is not visible in my pictures. For completeness’ sake, I am including the pictures from the recently surfaced Berlin Station Style Guide.
The whole complex looked like a fabulous location, btw, and it is a typical example of the Berlin courtyards which have living quarters towards the front and several courtyards behind for storage, factories, workshops etc. The original advertisements were still visible in the covered gateway from the street.
Having tracked all these locations, I really have to hand it to Berlin Station’s production design team. They found fantastic locations which are – surprisingly – centrally located and pretty close to each other. Moreover, they look very “Berlin” to me, authentic, normal, realistic. They were places that are *real* – used by the people/institutions that the show is depicting in their context. And they are interesting in their own right, whether it is a busy central square such as Potsdamer Platz, a high-rise with a view, a quiet cemetery in the center of the bustling city, or a cool loft apartment in a funky part of town. You could do worse than to trace the various locations on a tour of the city, even as a local. Speaking of which, without the help of local MatildRAs I would not have spotted many of these locations. A big thank you to her for entertaining and educating me on Berlin topography. Our meetings have almost become a tradition at this point, and I am already looking for reasons why I need to travel to Berlin again…
With season 2 due to shoot in late spring, I am already curious what the producers and location scouts have in store for us. First of all, it will be brilliant to see Berlin in spring/early summer. So far, due to the filming schedule of BS season 1 set in the middle of winter, Berlin has looked rather grey and depressing. Yet, in the summer, Germany actually gets really hot and sunny – a fact that a lot of foreigners are not aware of. I have had really hot summer days in Berlin in the past, with temperatures of up to 30°C (86°F). Life happens on the street – with vendors, cafés and people busy outside, the trees in bloom and the metropolis buzzing. Secondly, there is so many more interesting places in Berlin to use for covert operations and action-laden drama. WW2 bunkers, idyllic lakes, reclaimed land, busy markets and so forth. And mostly, I am really hoping for Richard to experience Berlin in nicer weather when the city really looks much less depressing and muted than it does under grey winter skies.
Lastly, if you have enjoyed this and would like to see more, here is a suggestion. If you are on Twitter, you may already follow the German RA board account. They are doing much better what I have attempted here – they have tracked many (all?) locations and they pair the images from Berlin Station with their own location shots. If you are not following them yet, you really should. Here is a link to their Berlin Station location posts which you can also find under the hashtag #DanielInBerlin.
On Armitage Road in Berlin Sorry for my absence this last week, resulting in the lack of a weekly round-up. On Friday I set off for a short weekend with CraMERRY and Suzy in Hamburg.
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