The business traveller’s fear of breakfast

White Plains: pancakes and jetlag
 

Feel strangely OK for a 10 hour time difference. Sometime in the next week the permalag will kick in, presumably just before I present the results of a recent user study. The only fun thing about yawning when you’re giving a presentation is watching everyone yawn back at you – the visible manifestation of sleep depreivation.

Spend the morning before breakfast wandering the streets of White Plains – humans aren’t designed to spend 12 hours seated and I need the exercise. Its before 6am and manual labourers are already gathered in front of a local deli waiting for a man with a van to say how much labour he needs for the day. Some of the guys have beautifully weathered and photogenic faces. Nods of acknowledgement. Want to stop and listen, and talk and probably eventually document, but there are times the lens cap should stay on.

The hotel bill doesn’t include breakfast, and anyway hotel breakfasts are a reminder of shared loneliless of the business traveller. Find a local diner half full of cops coming off shift, pick up a newspaper and flick through the sports scores, and photograph various advertisements. Random thoughts from reading headlines: American football is quaint; this country is still at war with itself; the world stops at the US borders.

Only have 122 minutes of battery life to last me a week. Most of the equipment inlcuding the camera chargers are still in Seoul where the user study continues, but grabbed a F828 on the way out. The taxi driver to Incheon airport was a frustrated rally driver and if I’m honest I loved it. The last few months have been a bit of a rush. Looking forward to spending time at home reflecting on what we achieved, what we have learned, revisiting photos, interviews and hopefully getting down to some writing.