patience is a virtue

Although I should be working, I just finished an outline of my proposed policy paper and started working on the next phase of this database project so I'm 'rewarding' myself by writing in my blog for about twenty minutes. There's a lot to update on as Chris and I took a four day weekend trip to London, so I'll just bring out some memorable moments below:

• Chris's horrible luck while travelling. As I said before, my good luck cannot cancel out Chris's bad bad luck. We were supposed to leave Geneva around 6 pm for London and get there around 7 or 8ish (there's a one hour time difference, with London being one hour behind). Notice the supposed to part. Turns out we didn't leave Geneva until almost 9 pm due to a bomb threat in London on the plane that was coming in. This necessitated them unloading both all passengers and all luggage in the plane, rescreening everything, searching the plane, and then flying to Geneva. Right. I was grumpy about this since we left downtown Geneva at around 4:30 pm and didn't get to where we were staying in London until past 11 pm.
  
  2. Housing in London. We ended up staying with Chris's high school friend. He will remain nameless but he is an investment banker who went to college in the South. His flat was very nice and I appreciate the time he took to show us around London, but due to my political views I thought he was a little intolerable after awhile. This dude is well intentioned but a little ignorant and sadly conservative. Choice remarks that I tried my best not to react to included:
  
• Regarding our high school experiences, where I talked about attending the All-American Midwestern high school that was ultra-conservative (I used the word 'not very open-minded' about different people) and Chris and him talked about attending a diverse high school close to LA.
• ''We didn't really go to basketball games and football games on Friday nights, but I would've loved to go to a high school like that. I don't mean to sound racist, and don't take this the wrong way, but Hispanics and other minorities don't really have the background in American sports to be successful at them. Like Hispanics and Koreans and stuff, they don't play football, and our football team just sucked.''

• I have no problem admitting that I grew up in a very privileged family but I think this was uncomfortable at first (I definitely figured this part out at Swarthmore) and I've also been confronted with really stark poverty both in the US and abroad. Chris and I used to fight a lot about how he didn't consider himself 'rich' even though he grew up in a 5 bedroom house or something while I pointed out that almost 3 billion people live on less than 2 USD a day. Anyway, Chris is better now and I've had discussions with him and lots of others people on how individuals gain perspective on wealth and status. Understandably, if you've never been exposed (or just deny that you've been exposed to) poverty or people who grew up with less than you (and called out on it) you probably just have the perspective that you're really poor because you don't drive a BMW or whatever. Unfortunately, Chris's friend probably has never thought about these things, and stated,
  
• ''My gf hates London. Part of what she hates about it is it's so expensive and she wants to move somewhere else in Europe. As an American, it would be hard for me to work somewhere else, and you know, in my industry, the financial center is London (everything is fine up to this point). You know, Chris, my family grew up with not a lot of money and we didn't go on all these trips and always had to watch what we spent (Chris informs me he grew up in a regular middle class 3 br house with both of his parents working). If we move and I take another job, we would have to downgrade our lifestyle and I don't think (my gf) has thought about that since she grew up in a kinda well-off family. You know, no more buying belts and purses (Prada was the bag she carried to brunch) whenever you want. Also, I can't imagine going back to a life where I have to balance my checkbook weekly and budget my money and stuff. I'm balling now.''

• When discussing a possible trip to Asia, where he has never travelled:
  "What is poverty like there? Is it all in your face all the time?"
  

While drunk, he also made fun of homeless people as we were walking past them on the way home. I was disgusted.

There were others as well but my twenty minutes just ran out. I will have to update on things we actually did in London later.