Not Barbados again? (NB: That's you talking, not me!)

Yep - I have endeared myself sufficiently to Durham University's MBA cohorts in Barbados to have been sent out for a third time - times one and two are here - and this time I took one of my oldest and bestest friends, Luke Fallon, with me.


And, you may be reassured to learn that, against formidable odds, we had a top time.

There is something life-affirmingly, soul-enrichingly magnificent about starting your day in a grim British airport, and ending it just ten or so hours later in the warm waters of the Caribbean, with a lovely sunset to boot.




We had a couple of mornings free before I went to teach, which were spent naturally on the beach...


When I was teaching - and they were a great bunch of students this year, just as last year - Luke relaxed on the beaches or in the bars. The weather was pretty good on the whole - not too much rain for what is 'hurricane season'.
On the last day, the winds picked up and so did the waves - decent-sized knock-you-off-your-feet ones:


This time we were able to explore a bit more of the island, taking the wonderful Reggae Buses down to Oistins, and to Miami Beach in particular (where the classic pic adorning the top of this piece was set up by timer), which was lovely...







... and we returned there on Friday for the open-air party, which was good fun - especially through the haze of several generously-mixed rum punches. There is a youngsters' stage - not that even the locals can dance for long to the frenetic soca - and the more sedate reggae stage:



We also headed toward Bridgetown, where we stopped off at the apparently legendary Birds' Nest bar for a fine lunch...






Good bars and restaurants that some with our recommendation, should you ever go to Barbados - and we think you should: Mojo on the way to St Lawrence Gap in Rockley, and Tapas on the boardwalk in Rockley. There are plenty of others, but those two in particular worked for us.













All credit to Luke for this action shot from a pool hall on the way to St Lawrence Gap, taken on a mobile phone, too:


But Holetown's reputation as a party capital left something to the imagination - namely, anyone about whatsoever with whom to have a party! - and, for a capital city, Bridgetown itself is weirdly bereft of bars for tourists. When we said we were from Rockley and looking for some good bars, a taxi driver said, "go back to Rockley!" We did stop in one place for a beer, but not for long; enough to discover that the beers in local bars is half the price of the same beer in a tourist place!

Finally - the little crabs on the beach at Rockley are a great distraction. Look carefully into the middle distance of the film below - blink and you'll miss the little fella!

Daddy working in Barbados - honestly (well, for some of the time)

Long ago, some genius at Durham Business School - where I work - undertook careful market analysis and identified a niche opportunity for MBA education in the Caribbean/ gazed out of his office at the unrelenting drizzle of a cold Tuesday in November and thought, "Bugger this, we need an MBA franchise somewhere hot with great beaches and some righteous seafood..."

And so it came to pass, Durham has an MBA in Barbados, where faculty are sent to teach the modules. For five years, I've not been teaching any of the modules, but this year a colleague pulled out of doing his, and I was asked to step in...

Good job I teach a class on the research into effective decision-making, eh? Otherwise, who knows how I'd have reacted?!

So, I downloaded onto my phone all my CDs from (the mighty) Culture, and headed off to teach an elective on 'Leadership'.

I stayed in Rockley, in the Christ Church district of Barbados, 4km from the capital, Bridgetown (looks a lot like Brixton: culturally of course but also - weirdly - architecturally).

Here are four photos of the place, including - for Liam back at home - the groovy little beach crabs that pop out of their holes, scuttle about and, in a fantastic scene one morning, hand out beat-downs to passing wasps. When they sense prey, their little legs kick into top gear! Surely they've got to go on the Deadly 60!



Barbados is a great little island, I liked it a lot, although I didn't travel round much (dedicated professional, y'see) and there are some even better bits elsewhere.

But I can recommend Tapas restaurant in Rockley itself - down by the beach, with amazing 'blackened flying fish' dinners - as well as Pisces restaurant in St Lawrence Gap, which is a fun-filled, DEAFENING REGGAE-filled $1 bus ride from Rockley (we need the buses in Durham fitted with sound systems).

And 4pm football kickoffs are on at the relatively civilised hour of 11am...

Daddy goes to Singapore (April 2010)

In April 2010, one of my colleagues in trust research, Don Ferrin, invited me out to Singapore, where he is based, to collaborate on some research we're doing into the MPs' expenses scandal and the various thieving buggers' trust repair tactics...

In all, I spent a week there, and we had a productive time working out how on Earth we were going to gather the data properly (still ongoing!)

Singapore is an intriguing place - not as pristine and regimented as I had imagined from its reputation, though much cleaner than big cities in the West. It also didn't strike me as obviously authoritarian in atmosphere, either - again, contrary to its reputation. There is a mix of the modern and yesteryear, though the former clearly dominates. In my meanderings, I came upon one or two enclaves of what looked like the older local architectural style, before high finance and tax evasion became the country's economic solution... These pictures try to capture both.






I rather liked the place, especially its legendary restaurants - although there didn't seem much else to do in the city centre than go to the malls. I confess I didn't look very far, though, being there on business, so I'm doubtless doing it a disservice...

Each night I walked down to Clarke Quay down by the river, and can therefore recommend Brewerkz, a micro-brewery serving passable nosh too, and Khmer Delight, a Cambodian restaurant that worked for me.

Best bit of the trip - definitely the sailing excursion on Don's own boat, with Professor Gary Johns and his wife as well. Don plainly had a rush of blood to the head, and decided he'd let us have a go at steering, which was excellent fun, if bewildering.

The basic process is to take the tiller [the rudder stick thing at the back] and wiggle it about, while looking at the 'tell-tales' (red and green strings stuck on the sails). If they are flapping wildly, this indicates you're sailing against the wind and hence may encounter turbulent resistance and struggle to progress, but if they are in blissful repose - as these are (well, sort of) - then you're sailing optimally with the wind, and you can really pick up speed when you do so. You can feel it in the tension on the tiller, too: it's looser when you're with the wind.

You might glean from the startling angle of the boat in the picture below that while I hadn't fully mastered the technique, I nevertheless felt confident enough in the swimming proficiency of my crew members to pose recklessly for the camera.

A great week...

Daddy goes to India

As the imminent Director of MA programmes for Durham Business School, I was dispatched to India for a week in late May 2007 to recruit Indian students to our programmes - much like the Taiwan trip in January.

A typical India street scene.

I had feared going to India ever since I was a teenager, when the story went round our village of a very bright lad bound for Oxford, etc etc, who travelled round India, saw the horrendous poverty and ill health and came back an emotional and mental basket-case. I had harboured apocalyptic visions of the street scenes in Mumbai and Delhi ever since then, and despite the enthusiastic reviews from one of my best friends, Paul, I had never wanted to come here. So I was apprehensive about this visit, and had resolved - in part informed by this fear, and in part from knackeredness from my workload - to treat this as a business trip, and to keep the sightseeing to a minimum. Staying in 'posh international hotels' helped, of course.

India is impossible to describe really without resorting to cliche, and of course I've only seen three of its biggest cities, but the scale of the humanity - so many people milling about, so much chaotic traffic - and the variety in faiths on display in that mingling is overwhelming. Perhaps as nowhere else on Earth, in India in any given five minute walk along a busy street you will pass people representing every possible faith: Muslim women in burkas and hijabs, Sikh businessmen in turbans, shaven-headed Buddhist monks, and the secular and Christian of course... It's dizzying.

First stop was Delhi, where I had my first, what-I-could-call-'authentic-Indian-experience'-if-that-didn't-smack-of-"aren't-the-locals-crazy?'-racism' moment... My taxi driver took a wrong turn in central Delhi and reversed up a main road straight into a beggar, knocking him over and under the car. The sound of the bumper thumping into the poor man's legs was nauseating. I was shocked and worried for the guy, of course. I also worried about getting mired in the bureaucracy of Indian traffic accident reporting for the rest of the year. But that just showed how naive I was. The driver, suitably contrite it has to be said, stepped out, dragged the fella from under the car over to the side of the road, made sure he was OK, asked me for 10 Rupees (80p) to placate him, and then drove off. The thirty or so witnesses watched impassively.

That night we had a top curry - I mean, authentic Mughlai cuisine - in Karim's restaurant (here's another pic), down an alley in Chandni Chowk, the rabbit warren of alleys and bazaars near the Jama Musjid mosque in old Delhi. It took me back to the Bradford curries of my undergraduate youth - and there can be no higher praise from me than that. We then walked into the bazaars, which was thrilling: a riot of sights, sounds and smells from the hundreds of tiny stalls that line the streets (we weren't so stupid as to try the tastes). The walk was capped by dodging a few wandering cows and ending up confronted with a lorry full of animal remains outside the local abattoir.

Next stop was Mumbai. We stayed in what to me is an uncomfortably opulent hotel, the Taj Mahal (see picture): by some distance the most fantastic hotel I've ever seen, let alone stayed in. And, the old India cliche held true: literally outside our doorstep lay whole families asleep on the pavement - though round the back as, doubtless, it's not tolerated near the front, as it might upset the posh guests. (If you were homeless, of all the locations in the city you'd choose to sleep rough, just outside one of the best hotels makes a grotesque kind of sense).

One night I saw a whole family asleep on the pavement (a Mum, teenage sister and brother, and a little girl Liam's age - no sign of Dad, perhaps he'd gone, perhaps he was working?) The girl was in just a vest and shorts. No shoes, no blanket, no cushion, her head lay against the rough pavement. None of them were awake to try and beg, all of them were asleep... The sight of that little girl was hard to walk past, though I know you're supposed to. Something welled up inside that short-circuited my supposedly superior organ, the brain, and passed all decision-making over to my heart. I just had to slip 100 Rupees (the equivalent of 12 quid) under the sleeping little girl's head. As I walked off I saw her sister wake up, so I'm sure they got it. I hope it helped, and it might have; it will certainly have given them a few options they wouldn't have had otherwise. Or, of course, it might just have perpetuated their dismal situation: "hey, look! If we sleep here we get given loads of money..." Who is to say which will have happened this time for this family? But as a parent it was all but impossible to walk by, and from my observations this week these kids' lives seem so bereft of hope that perhaps gifts like this are the best response, and walking by, though 'intellectually satisfying', isn't. Perhaps we shouldn't give to beggars, but secret gifts like this are somehow better? Or am I just trying to make distinctions to justify myself to myself? ('Posh international hotels' in such environs should also give their guests the chance to donate to street charities, I think. I'm going to suggest it....) Apparently now you can even go on tours of Indian street kids... That smacks of what the Sex Pistols once called "a cheap holiday in other people's misery..."

But India is exhilarating and delightful too. We had a great meal at Chowpatty Beach (pictured), where families come to sit out under the stars. There is a great funfair on the beach, including a manually-operated Ferris wheel (pictured), where two lads stand on the axis in the middle and pull the wheel round on its hinges, faster and faster and faster and faster - and then execute a marvellous dismount hanging off the scaffolding. Wonderful to watch.

Next stop, Bangalore.

Daddy goes to Taiwan (January 2007)

In January, Daddy was sent to Taiwan on a recruitment drive for the Business School. (In common with most UK Universities, a huge percentage of our Master's students now come from China or Taiwan...)

It was a fun, but demanding, week: up for breakfast early, into a minibus, driven 2 hours or so to the next city, shower, get suited-and-booted, 5 hours of interviews with prospective students, back to the hotel to change to go back out again for dinner and networking (and - let's not be coy - a few beers), then into bed for 1am-ish to be up the next day to repeat all over again somewhere else... It felt a bit like what I imagine Elton John's life must be like - except on a budget.

So I didn't see as much of Taiwan as I'd have liked, but it is as you would imagine it: bustling commercialism in the cities and acres of industrial estates elsewhere, with not much countryside to speak of...

OK, I'm being unfair, as apparently the interior has a spectacular hill range, and there are some good beaches in the south - which we never got anywhere near. But, for example, the celebrated Peace Park in the capital, Taipei, is pretty enough (see picture), but not life-affirmingly wonderful - like, say, Brockwell Park in south London.

Taiwan was interesting in a disorientating kind of way - being surrounded by a wholly impenetrable language that didn't even allow guesswork - yet also Westernised enough for things to be familiar and yet different (see my 'Pulp Fiction' moment below...)

The ginormous building in the pictures is the 101 tower, once the tallest building in the world (508 metres), and Taipei's compulsory tourist destination. As I approached it, I thought, "come on, it's not that big..." It didn't, for example, have the presence close up of the old World Trade Centers in New York City. But, as hopefully you can see from the blue-ish picture taken from the observation tower at the top, even the skyscrapers with helipads on the top of them are a very long way down! And they light it up all all pretty come the evening, don't they?

Best thing about Taiwan? Undoubtedly the pedestrian crossings. The signal post not only has an animated green man who speeds up walking as your time to cross comes to an end, but also - in a moment of such simple and effective genius that I couldn't help but wonder why the Dutch hadn't thought of it already - the pedestrian crossings feature a digitised countdown of the number of seconds you have left to cross the road. Now, if you know you have 34 seconds to cross (especially if you are merely approaching a crossing), and hence need not worry whether the slavering maniacs coiled behind their wheels are going to be given the signal to mow you down at any moment, this seriously chills you out on them mean city streets. You don't even have to break your stride to be sure of getting across; you can practically saunter. It's genius. London should introduce this immediately.

But [going into 'Pulp Fiction' mode here - work with me, people] you know what the funny thing about Taiwan is? It's the little differences.

(Example?)

You know what they put on French fries instead of ketchup in Taiwan? Parmesan cheese...

(Goddamn!)

I seen 'em do it, man, they f*ck'n drown 'em in that sh*t!

We had some good nights out. Best of all, I found on a website about 'nights out in Taiwan' that in the fair city of Taichung there was a bar called Pogo Dub. Now, in my book that is close to unimproveable as names of bars go. I mean, pogoing and dub. Like you could do both at the same time... Brilliant. Well, we had to go. Our host, the excellent Tim of UKEAS, hadn't even heard of it, but eventually he tracked it down. I was expecting banging Lee Scratch Perry and Prince Far-I dubplates shaking the spirits bottles out of their holders, and people moshing somehow to the bass ! But it had changed its piggin' name to something rubbish, and we were the only people in it. So, this is us, in The-Bar-Formerly-Known-As-Pogo-Dub...

... and here's me looking suitably awe-struck and yet slightly disappointed at the same time! (Note: the Chinese inscriptions on the wall behind me may or may not read "Rewind selecta!", but the odds are against, sadly.)

The pictures of the 101 Tower are by me, and the rest are provided, generously, by Emma Mylett, International Officer at Bristol Uni who was out there recruiting as well... Thanks Emma.