NineToFiveNoMore

I was in Birmingham, England, a month into my first international business trip when I realized I could hack business travel and take it off the beaten path. I was driving Adam, a fellow Canadian to hockey practice. Being the quintessential backpacker he had no car, so I offered to drive us in my company rental. As I navigated through yet another roundabout Adam commented on other side of the road. His comment stopped me though and made me appreciate something. I was fulfilling my wish of experiencing England, creating this amazing hybrid of an experience: part roughing-it type of travel, part doing my due diligence for my company, and part something new entirely.

It was this realization that soothed the existential crisis of sorts that I had been suffering post- college which had come to head a month earlier as I noticed the odd juxtaposition of flip flops, camera, and ice skates, pantsuits and laptop in my suitcase while packing for England.

I realized that even the routine morning pedestrian traffic of uniformed school children and old ladies in skirts and stockings making their way home with the coming day’s groceries was a powerful immersion into the everyday lives of the inhabitants.

This new perspective opened me up to meeting a budding photographer from an online photography forum I found. Rafal became a life-long friend, and also an integral part of my adventures, setting me up with a hidden gem of a hotel and, taking some highly coveted haute couture travel photos of me along the way. He and I shared a long awaited bittersweet parting kiss at the airport as I was leaving.

When my company flat developed a leak, I seized the chance to pick something more my style: an old refurnished church the walls of Witton Cemetery, Birmingham’s largest, remade into a rather trendy extended stay hotel. If, while touring it, imagining the fantastic photos I could take there didn’t clinch it, the young barefoot resident Aussie exploring the bell tower did. Later, after I called them in to help with a spider situation, I learned he and his girlfriend were on their gap year in England, working and traveling. Not unlike what I had achieved.

Just as corporate travel can be molded to one’s like so can life as long as one faces life with authenticity in order to avoid the pigeonholes awaiting. It would be this approach to travel and life that would let me quit my job years later and face the abyss of an unknown future.