I got back to Carlsbad, California last night at around 11pm local time having been awake for getting close to 31 hours and completing my third 5 day round trip to Belgium and back within the last 7 weeks.

I`m not doing it again.

The reason for this latest round in insanity was to undergo a medical exam at my new employer’s facility, which is one of the 2 remaining conditions of my job offer becoming formal (the other being transfer of my security clearance).

Having arrived on Saturday morning, slept most of Saturday afternoon and evening, and generally just mooching around on the Sunday I arrived for the medical on Monday morning ready and prepared to receive several large blasts of electric current and starving hungry having been told to fast the previous day as I would be expected to give blood samples. Imagine being stuck in Belgium and not being able to eat the chocolates or drink the beer ….. its a form of torture I can assure you.

The medical started with an eye exam…

this did not go well.

They give the same exam to everyone and so I ended up sitting an eye exam intended for fighter pilots.

Needless to say, I failed.

Fortunately things improved. The general check up went fine and I was told to head on over to ‘the lab’.

Have you ever tried to give a urine sample when you`ve not been allowed to drink anything for the best part of a day? Its not easy I can tell you. I stood there in the toilets for 25 minutes with all the taps going, thinking of waterfalls jumping up and down just hoping for enough to at least fill the pot to half way.

In the end I gave up, and heated up some apple juice in the microwave and gave them that instead.

On to the blood sample. I was taken into a room by myself and the lady who would be taking the samples. I started up conversation. It went something along the lines of:

me - “yeah, not really bothered about blood, I donate between 3 and 4 pints of blood per year when I`m back in the UK”

her - “I cant give blood", long pause and she looked me square in the eye, ” I dont have veins".

There was a deafening silence and no way to describe my fear. I half expected fangs to grow from her gums and to make straight for my neck. Fortunately for me she continued….

“well I have them, but they’re really small”

The rest of the test was done in absolute silence.

Next up they took an x-ray of my chest. I was impressed. I even asked for a copy so I could wallpaper my bedroom with copies of it.

Finally was the ECG - Electrocardiography. A way of recording of the electrical activity of the heart over time via skin electrodes. Firstly they had to shave my chest slightly because the readout was giving no signal thanks to my hairiness, but after that I gave a mighty fine example of how a human male’ heart should behave.

It turns out that I have a standing heart rate of about 60 which is what they would expect to see in a professional athlete.

And that was that. I was back in Mons stuffing myself stupid and downing beer after beer in the warm sunshine making up for not eating or drinking anything the day before.

Now I just have to sit back here in California, avoid contracting Swine flu, and wait until Saturday….

…when I travel to Santa Barbara for a guided wine tour….

Last Saturday I woke up at 6am and very nearly switched off the alarm clock, flipped the pillow to the cold side, rolled over and went back to sleep.

I am very glad I didn’t.

I had plans to go up North to Cayucos and stay at the beach house for a few days. The trouble is I couldn’t be bothered with the 6 hour journey, not with all the travel I`ve done recently.

Plus my mental image of the ‘beach house’ was a shack in the middle of nowhere a good few miles away from any sand or ocean.

I was wrong.

2

The beach shack turned out to be full size 3 bedroom house which costs somewhere between 2 and 3 million dollars.

And for 4 days it was all mine —- ALL MINE!!!!!!!

I mostly spent the days walking on the beach or to either of the 2 nearby towns, Cayucos which was about a half hour walk along the beach and had some awesome seafood ……. and a saloon:

The other nearby town, Morro Bay was a good hour in the opposite direction, but once there was well worth the walk,

and once again had great seafood, but no saloon, although much wine tasting was available. I cannot remmeber walking home.

Which could have been rather dangerous. Take a look at what I happened to stumble across on my travels - just 100 feet from the beach house where I was staying.

A six foot long Blue Shark. Which, according to wikipedia:

…. is one of 20 species of shark to pose a threat to humans

Still, I put ole Mr Sharky to good use:

Nothing better than a bondfire on the beach at night time with a grilled apple and shark fin on the side.

To top it all, the views of the night sky were out of this world.

literally.

On my recent trips to Belgium my schedule was a bit of a mixed bag. There was of course the crazy stressful travel to get there in the first place, then the morning on the Monday and Tuesday were taken up with either exams or interviews. That meant I had nothing to do for most of each day other than to sample the delights of Belgium.

Which of course means sitting around drinking beer.

The thing is that every bar I went into in Mons all had about 30 different beers - of which I had heard of almost none, so I randomly selected my beer of choice by running my finger down the list and picking whichever one my finger rested on.

This had varying degrees of success.

For instance, Hoegaarden rose.

Which at a mere 6.5% is generally considered in Belgium to be childrens booze.

I was given several strange looks.

So I decided to up the stakes and move on to….

BUSH

Which I found quite tart and sour. However I no longer got looks of passers by that made me think they thought I was a big sissy. Now I felt like a man.

Until I finished my second one, stood up and then fell over.

I inspected the bottle.

Indeed - I was happily sitting there drinking several bottles of the strongest beer in Belgium.

Then I got a phonecall saying I`d passed the exam and had to go back the next morning for the interview.

Feeling very spaced out I stumbled back to my hotel and tried to compose myself, but instead just passed out on my bed.

So that just goes to show you….

too much bush can be bad for you

I`m just about over the shock of being offered the job in Mons, Belgium. Keeping in mind that for 2 separate weekends I have to fly from LA to europe, get a connecting flight to Brussels then get a train to Mons, find my hotel, get a few hours sleep, get to the office to take 2 separate 2 hour technical written exams, go home, wait for the results, go back the next day for interviews in front of 5 or 6 people, then fly back to LA.

Add to that the fact I was up against people who already worked there, you can perhaps begin to understand why I was so surprised / excited.

So I think its time to show you some of the places I shall be frequenting when I move.

Firstly, my new favourite restaurant in the world …. La table du boucher.

A place that looks just like a butchers shop, from the internal furnishings, to the uniform of the waiters. Plus of course they only serve meat ….. and some fish.

I went there both evenings I was there.

Both nights I started with the smoked salmon

Then on to the meat courses which are all cooked on hot coals:

I was originally planning on having the duck, because to be honest, I`m not really a big steak person, but after 5 minutes of persuasion from the butcher dressed waiter I gave in and ordered the steak.

I was not disappointed:

This thing was cooked to perfection in nothing but butter. You could have cut it with a soldering iron.

I passed out with jet lag shortly after that, but returned the day after determined to have the duck:

Which was every bit as good as it looks.

I did consider having a dessert, but decided not to bother in the end. After all, surely all their desserts would be made of meat.

A quick but important update.

Here are a few pictures of Mons, the city where I`ve been having interviews for the past few weeks and causing me to massively increase my carbon footprint:

Its a nice city as I`m sure you`ll agree.

Which is good.

Because I`m moving there permanently.

I GOT THE JOB!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Last night I got back from my latest 4 day round trip from Fullerton to Brussels. The route was more or less exactly the same as the one I did 3 weeks ago, albeit this time I was on a BA 747-400 rather than a CARGO plane, but it was just as tiring.

This time it took just under 5 hours to get back from LA airport to Fullerton because LAX security decided to x-ray the suitcases of every single person in the arrivals lounge - and 3 jumbos landed within 15 minutes of one another.

This soured my already extraordinarily grumpy mood.

It turned out that the past 2 interviews I had attended in Brussels had both been a complete total and utter waste of 10 days of my life.

Things had gone pretty well until I arrived for the interview on Monday morning. It was the same as last time. A written exam had to be passed in order to come back the day later and have the interview with 5 members of the board.

Waiting for the exam to start I see the guy who wrote the previous exam I took and also interviewed me turn up and sit next to me. I assumed he was there to moderate the exam.

I was wrong. It turns out that he was taking the exam himself.

Already I smelled a rat. I took solace after the grueling 2 hour written exam and went off around Mons sampling the local beer, convinced that I had failed and there was no point in keeping a clear head for the next day.

I was wrong again.

I got a phone call at 17:15 asking me to go back at 9am the next day for the interview.

I did.

And more or less immediately wished I had not.

The entire interview was full of questions like ‘what software do we write here?’, ‘what tools do we use here?’, and ‘what processes do we use here?’

They ask the same questions of each candidate ‘to be fair’.

Are they kidding?

So the guy who interviewd me last time is going to be asked these same questions?

Sounds extremely fair to me.

It also turns out I didn’t get the other job I applied for 3 weeks ago. They gave that one to someone who had been working with them for the past 13 years as a contractor.

So basically I`ve flown 24 thousand miles and spent 10 days out of my life for absolutely nothing.

Before I left on Saturday I had already sent in applications for 3 other positions in the same company.

I cant wait to reply to them if they ask me to come along for another interview.

It will be a very short email.

Just 2 words in fact.

One of those words will be ‘Off’.