Run out of Town on Rails – August 15

Finally! After many, many days of stress and worry, my financial situation in a foreign country has been about 95% solved. I still don’t have cash, and I won’t be able to get it until I find out what my PIN is for my corporate card, but at least if I have to buy something I won’t have to worry about my card being declined. Now that I’ve said that, Amex probably doesn’t know that I’m traveling – although they’re the ones that sent my card over here – so they’ll probably start declining my transactions after just a few. I would have eaten much better the last couple of nights if I had my Amex card. Don’t leave home without it.

Noticed today that the blog looks a bit weird. Specifically, there are no spaces or indentations to indicate a new paragraph. Looks bad, but there’s nothing I can do to fix it right now. You’ll have to muddle through somehow.

Tonight, and until Friday morning, we’re staying in Leeds. There’s some big horse race thing going on in York this week, and the hotels are booked solid. I guess it’s a big annual event because the cab driver this morning said that some people book their rooms a year in advance. So we’re stuck staying in Leeds this week and taking a cab in to York all week. Apparently, it’s not cheap; 50 pounds both ways, and boy are the bosses grumbling about it. Don’t know why. It’s not like it’s coming out of their pocket. That’s what expense accounts are for. I guess they’re probably just bothered by how much cash they’re having to take out all the time. I don’t know. One of them suggested that we take the train from Leeds to York and then catch a cab from the train station to the office. Could be fun. The English countryside is actually pretty nice to look at. At least they have the occasional hill to and some trees to break up the grass monotony.
The morning actually started off fairly rotten, as is appropriate for a Monday. I got up early (who knew it was so bright at 6:30. Looked like the sun was all the way up.) and tried calling DHL to get my package re-routed. Customer Service doesn’t open until 8:00 though. So I read in bed for a little while until it was time to shower and shave. Then I tried calling customer service again. They said they could re-route the package, but I had to fax a request to their office in Leeds and it would take an additional 24 hours for it to arrive. I needed that package (credit card) tonight! So I arranged for the very friendly girl at the front desk of the Marriott to accept the package and call me when it was delivered. Then I sat in the lobby waiting for the boss. He never showed. I waited until 8:50 before I figured out that this was going to be a solo cab ride to the office. So much for not using the 20 pounds I borrowed from the friendly guest-auditor. Very nice of her to offer. I’d planned on not even touching it; it was my emergency stash in case someone declined my credit card. But the taxi’s over here don’t take credit cards, so it was time to break out the emergency fund.

The good news is that once I got to the office everything got a bit better. I was able to finish one of my parts of the audit program, until the boss gets ahold of it of course. Just before lunch the nice front desk girl, Emma, called to say my package was delivered, so at least I knew exactly where it was now. I tossed around two serious ideas about getting it. One would cause me to go hungry, the other would cause me to worry. Option A was to take a 10-minute walk to the bus station, hop a bus to the train station, transfer to a new bus to my destination, grab my package, and then do the same in reverse. Or, I could have Emma call a taxi and have the taxi driver deliver it. You see why I was worried about it though, right? I mean, can you think of any cab driver in America that you would trust to deliver something like that? Let’s be honest, there are a lot of people that would be very tempted to take a peek inside and then decide whether to deliver it. I’m not saying the English cabbie wasn’t like that, but it had an effect on my decision. So did my hunger. Fortunately, he was a trusty cab driver, and, as I said earlier, my card has finally arrived. Now I actually can go to London next weekend.

We left the office and squeezed into a station wagon type cab for our trip to Leeds. Four people (one of generous proportion and one of a lesser but still significant size), five large suitcases (I overpacked and brought two – it’s my first European business trip. A little latitude please.), briefcases, computer bags, and backpacks. And we’re driving twenty four miles to Leeds. Fun, fun, fun. It was a nice drive actually; not as bad as I expected nor as bad as it could have been. I saw an old red bus on the side of the road that had been turned into a café. I thought that was interesting.

Leeds itself doesn’t inspire much confidence on the outskirts. All the buildings look like the stereotypical ghetto apartments that you see in New York on TV. They’re just kind of ugly and run down. The city got better once you got into the city centre. It reminds me of New York somehow, although obviously much smaller. The cab driver said it was four or five times the size of York, which makes it about 500-600 thousand people. Doesn’t really compare to Dallas or Ft. Worth. The hotel is nice. If you didn’t know exactly where you were going, you wouldn’t be able to find it. You have to turn in to this little alley off one of the main streets to get to it. There’s allegedly a sign out front, but I’ve been out there twice and still haven’t seen it. I’ve got a couple of days though. Maybe it will jump out at me.

Dinner was something new for me. I had sushi. I’ve never partaken of raw fish before and I was surprised to find that I really liked it. I’d eat fish all the time if it always came like that. I’m told that the place wasn’t a very good sushi place since it only really offered tuna and salmon. I guess that at some of the good places you can get squid and other types of fish as well. However, the sushi connoisseurs that I was with assured me that although the menu was a little pathetic, what they did they did very well. I liked it either way.