My New Job--the dirty deets

Guys, I hate when people do what I'm about to do. But I can'stop myself.

I work at Qualtrics now. If you don't know what Qualtrics is, you should find out. I used Qualtrics for various graduate products, and I really liked my experience with the product. I also remember really liking my experience with their support staff. Apart from offering an awesome product that is changing how both business and academic research are done, they are a great employer. Just a few of the things I love about working at Qualtrics after only 5 work days: 

Swag. 

The company gives its employees swag like crazy. And people don't turn their Qualtrics shirts into night shirts or work out shirts. They actually wear them. 

Yesterday the CEO told us that if we meet our annual goals (which we will), every single employee gets an iPhone 6 or an iPad. Qualtrics has around 550 employees. That's money the CEO and other executive staff could pocket or re-invest in the company. But they understand that investing in their employees is investing in their company. Happy employees do good work.

Did I mention that all of Brandon's and my health insurance premiums are paid by the company?

Food. 

Guys, I love food. And it's already a problem. There are kitchens all over our building. There's a sweets kitchen with cotton candy, drums of BYU Creamery ice cream, bulk candy, candy bars, fruit snacks...basically anything your body never wanted you to put into it. Brandon is excited that he never has to buy me chocolate again.

There's a salty kitchen with chip bags, goldfish, cheese nips, wheat thins, trail mix, and drawers I haven't even discovered yet. There's a fridge of apples, peaches, bananas, strawberries, string cheese, and celery. 

There's a breakfast (-ish) kitchen with 20 types of cereal, milk, pop tarts, hot pockets, corn dogs, and drawers I plan to explore in the days to come.

Soda/water machines on every floor. 

And to make my life even happier and more stress free, my team gets catered lunch every. single. day. of October and March--our busiest times of year. This week we had Zupas, Honey Baked Ham, Maglebys, and Which Wich. On Thursday mornings we have catered breakfast during our weekly company meeting. This week it was Waffle Love. 

Fun. 

Shuffleboard. Arcade basketball. Massage chairs. An entire band of instruments. A gym. Golf carts. Bikes. Nerf darts (constantly flying over my head and around me). A pogo stick. Foos ball. Billiards. Ping Pong. 

People can also bring their dogs to work. The company dog Barnaby even drinks from the water fountains (hence our soda machines).  

Incentive to work hard. 

Qualtrics is a meritocracy. And a transparent one. Literally. All the conference rooms are all glass. 

They're all named after the Seven Dwarves, other Disney characters, and Ancient Greek philosophers. 

Noone--not ANYONE in the company--has a closed office.

All of our weekly and quarterly goals are posted to our internal system. At any time, we can look up the goals and progress of our colleagues. That means I can look up the CEO's goals as well. 

This quarter, whoever gets the most points on my team goes to Hawaii for 6 days with their +1. And we all know what we have to do to get there. Any day a member of my team hits a certain threshold, he/she gets an extra $20. And it happens all the time.  Today they went around handing out dozens of checks. 

Money and prizes aren't the only incentives to be a hard worker, but I know the transparency of my performance will help me to push myself. 

This is the first time I've been genuinely excited to work for a company and to work my hardest in both their interest and my own interest. 

Do I sound like I'm bragging? I don't even feel bad. Because, for anyone who has an interest in working in an environment like this (doesn't everybody?), Qualtrics is hiring like crazy, and I can refer you. Holler.

Paris Day 4: Macarons, Museums, and Sparkling Towers

I have some really great memories of the Paris Saint Merri Ward from my internship in Paris and from surprising my brother in the church courtyard with a huge bear hug in 2010. So, when Brandon and I headed toward the church building, we were looking forward to meeting some of the members and getting a spiritual uplift. True to form, we rode our Velibs to the church. I had wisely chosen to bring a pencil skirt for my Sunday outfit, so biking around in that was a real joy.
Church was lovely. The Saint Merri Ward is full of locals, study abroad students, interns, and tourists. I love how they involve the visiting students in the sacrament program. Some attempt to give their talks in French, broken though it may be, but they had a translator for the English-speaking student who gave a talk on this particular Sunday.
After church, I was anxious to shed my pencil skirt for something more bike-friendly, so we returned home and ate some lunch. Our quick trip home turned into quite the awkward hour. Our Japanese host Azusa was with her friend Shimizu. Azusa introduced us to Shimizu and told us that the apartment owner would be coming by to do some quick maintenance. She asked us to pretend we were close friends of Shimizu, even though Shimizu didn't speak English...What we pieced together over the next strange hour was that Shimizu was renting the apartment from a Japanese-speaking Frenchman. She was then subletting it to Azusa who was sub subletting it by allowing renters through airbnb.com. Clearly the owner was unaware of any of this. Awkward.

Next stop: my favorite free museum in Paris--Musée Carnavalet in the Marais. I love this building architecturally, and I love that the inside is such a mishmash of objects. It's a Parisian history museum, and I always notice something else strange and new when I go. The gardens are beautiful, too!

Once we left the museum, the weather was insane! It would rain cats and dogs for half and hour, then switch to bright, sunny skies for a half hour. It switched between these opposites ten times before finally deciding to stay sunny. It was our last chance for Brandon to experience Paris, so I took him to one of my favorite Parisian churches (Saint Germain l'Auxerrois) and then made him bike all the way to Opera Garnier so that we could frequent the Pierre Hermé shop and eat macarons on the Opera steps.

Saint Germain l'Auxerrois

I don't know if Brandon will ever forgive me for making us spend $10 on four strangely-flavored, small macarons. But we had a great time listening to the street performer who was singing pop songs in about five different languages. We enjoyed hearing him sing made-up, jibberish "English" lyrics of American songs.
Even though we didn't take a tour of the opera house, I made Brandon come inside and admire the splendor of the opera's entrance as well as the statues of musicians like Handel and Bach.

After that, we biked our way back to the 1st arrondissement and then to the Champs-Elysées. For those of us unwilling to spend $500 on a shirt, the Champs-Elysées does lose a bit of its classic lure. But there are always great street performers there, and Brandon loved watching them bring in audience members for a dance competition. We walked our way up to the Arc de Triomphe and admired the memorial.

 

We then picked up some bikes and rode the downhill streets toward the Eiffel Tower. We'd visited on our first day, but Brandon hadn't yet seen it in all its glory--sparkling. We didn't ascend the tower--our opportunities to do that were on cloudy days where we would have missed the spectacular view. More importantly, though, Brandon is not a fan of heights, and I forever ruined the possibility of him wanting to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower when I told him that the top of the tower moves in the wind. It's only five inches, but still enough to kill any desire he had to walk up 19 stories of stairs.
We got to spend quite awhile at the Trocadéro, admiring the view, people watching, and avoiding salespeople like the plague. We were also asked to be in a video being made as a surprise for someone. So, SURPRISE, whoever you are!

After watching the sparkling tower (I never get tired of that view), we biked the four miles back home. The bike path that follows the Rive Droite is so great. You pass wonderful bridges, the Tuileries, and  the Louvre. Paris is magical at night.
On our bike ride home, we had to switch bikes and make a pitstop (at McDonald's of course). We accidentally left our tripod next to the bike stand, and when we came back not five minutes later, it was gone. Someone in Paris is now the proud owner of the tripod we bought specifically for that trip. In the morning, we had to prepare for our departure. We said our goodbyes to Azusa and lugged our suitcases through the metro and on the bus to Orly Airport. We happened to depart Paris when the Orly Airport was doing a social media project called #iamtheguest (whatever that means). They took our picture which was later put on the airport facade as part of a huge collage. Pretty cool beans!

Paris Day 3: Sacré Coeur, Chaos, and Dessert!!

Our third day in Paris, I woke up with quads on FIRE. Two days of riding bikes all over the city was taking its toll on my non-biker legs. They were screaming at me. I could feel the microtears in my muscles with every step. Did I mention that I was sick for the duration of our time in Europe? 'Cause I was. I felt so guilty, staying in people's homes and coughing/sneezing/sniffing all over their hospitality. Our plan for the day was to head to northern Paris to the flea market at Saint Ouen and then to Montmartre area. The combination of my quads, my sickness, the distance to our destinations, and the fact that it was raining outside, decided us on a metro travel day.

We headed out for Saint Ouen where Brandon got to be accosted by sellers of faux-everything. Most of my experiences at Saint Ouen were solo (once solo at night--awful and scary idea), and having a black male at my side definitely decreased the amount of sketchy people trying to force interaction on us. With the history of my Saint Ouen experiences, I insisted we leave our camera equipment safe at our flat. Saint Ouen is enormous, and, since we had no plans of carting large antiques with us for the duration of our trip, we walked a relatively small part of the market. Hunger and rain drove us away from Saint Ouen and on toward Sacré Coeur and Montmartre.

The view of Paris from Sacré Coeur is pretty amazing, not to mention to the basilica itself. The walk up is a workout (for those of us too cheap to pay for the funicular). Thankfully, I had warned Brandon of the aggressive bracelet men who lurk on the steps (so many steps), start tying a friendship bracelet around your wrist, and force you to pay them afterwards, even though it's unsolicited. These guys don't take "no" for an answer. Thanks to my experience in the city, I have developed what I call my "metro face." It's basically a facial expression that would translate roughly to "Touch me and I'll kill you." It's worked wonders for me in throwing off the American stereotype of loud, fat, smileyness, and in deterring the aggressive males that plague Paris.
Don't be fooled by the smiles in the below pictures. I can throw off a happy face faster than you can say "stranger danger."

 

As many times as I've visited Sacré Coeur, this was my first time going inside, and thus, I was unaware of the stricter rules governing behavior inside the basilica. In tourist-ridden places like Notre Dame, cameras are flashing, people are talking, and actual worshippers are in the minority. If you're Parisian, going to worship in silence at Notre Dame would be somewhat like partaking of the sacrament in the nursery. However, this phone shot earned me quite a lecture from the caretaker of the basilica. He also raised his voice to indignantly chastise everyone else in the nave, saying that this was a sacred place of worship, and to put away our phones.

Chastised for an extremely unflattering shot

 Even though I felt chastised, I was actually very happy to encounter such such respect and reverence for a place deemed sacred. It was refreshing to experience that in such a secular-minded country.

Speaking of the secular and material, our next stop was to a mall outside the city. Why would we go to such lengths to shop when there is shopping all over Paris, you ask? Only one response makes sense:
PRIMARK.
Never heard of Primark? That's probably because you live in America. Primark is a clothing store based in Ireland that I became acquainted with during my study abroad in Wales. I don't care to say how much Primark merchandise I came home with from that study abroad, but suffice it to say, I needed an extra bag. This store in Villeneuve la Garenne (Saint Denis area) had opened a month prior to our arrival in Paris, but when we arrived at the mall, there was a line hundreds and hundreds of feet long--looping around, down the stairs, looping around again. I've never seen anything like it. Especially when the store had already been open a whole month.
There was a line for the line. They were only letting a couple people into the store at a time, and the sight inside the store was no less chaotic.

 I wasn't feeling well that day, and our claustrophia-inducing shopping expedition did nothing but aggravate that. Even though I was excited to return to Primark after a wish to do so for the past five years, it made me slightly sick to see the craze inspired by nothing more than fabric. It was like Black Friday times 20.
Once we got back into Paris with our wares, we stopped by the supermarket (my favorite thing to do in foreign countries!). Among other things, I happened upon this:

Banoffee!!!!

 Once again, if you don't know what banoffee is, it's likely because we live in America. Banoffee is my dessert of choice, thanks, once again, to Wales. It's pie made of banana, toffee, and moist graham cracker crust. To help you grasp my love for banoffee, perhaps this picture will help, since it shows how I finished off my own piece as well as three other people's pieces in Edinburgh.

It is a powerful demonstration of my love for Brandon that I let him have one of the two banoffees when I could have easily eaten 4 or 5 alone. We ate them at home while stunning our fellow Argentine housemates with the knowledge that we're married, and Brandon is only 22.
Mormons, amirite?

On travel and being a Plain Jane

Since returning from my first international experience as a 17-year old foreign exchange student in France, people have frequently expressed to me the same two sentiments:

#1: "You're so lucky you get to travel so much!"
#2:  "I'm so jealous!"

In my head, I always feel somewhat nonplussed and think, "What are they talking about?" Not because I don't understand their desire to travel--only because I understand it too well. Well enough to know that luck has nothing to do with it and that their jealousy is unnecessary.

Let me explain.


A few years ago, there came a time when a lot of my friends started wearing hair and eyelash extensions. Now, my hair has been a constant frustration to me over the years. It's fine, there's not a lot of it, and I have this utterly untameable cowlick/widow's peak combination that really limits my possibilities in the coiffure department. Basically, I already had a frustrating relationship with my hair, and amidst this long, complicated relationship, suddenly all my friends had just raised the bar on the standard of beauty within our group. They all had instantaneous, luscious locks, while mine remained less-than-desirable. I already felt like the Plain Jane/Ugly Betty of my friends. They were always on the Pinterest-pin-worthy side of the spectrum, while I was nearer the side with the people who get nominated to appear on "What Not to Wear."
They wore Anthropologie; I probably wore whatever brand Ross or TJ Maxx was carrying. So given this new situation, subconsciously I sensed that my choices were:

1. Keep my boring, frustrating hair while all my friends looked like women from Herbal Essence commercials


2. Buy some extensions and feel better about myself


I caved. I bought some extensions. Granted, they weren't the really nice, expensive kind--I'm only willing to go so far, guys. I'm cheap. But I put those things in my hair, and it was like I breathed a sigh of relief. I loved how it looked. Longer, thicker hair. Yes! This was what I had always wanted--having hair worth envying. I don't think I necessarily admitted that desire to myself, but let's call a spade a spade, shall we?

BUT

Fairly quickly that lovely reveling in my new hair not only faded but backfired. When I'd take out the extensions, I felt bare and ugly and dissatisfied with myself on a whole new level. I noticed that I was comparing myself with others more and more. And I hated feeling like that. So I chucked that synthetic stuff in the garbage. And along with it, I decided not to spend any more thought and energy wishing I could buy Seven for all Mankind jeans or a $158 blouse from Anthropologie. I wanted to focus more of my energy on making myself into someone people would want to get to know better rather than someone people look at and think, "Ooh, wonder where she got that blouse?!"

"But Martha," you say, "We were talking about travel. What in heaven's name does this have to do with travel?" Believe it or not, for me it has had everything to do with it.
I learned from that experience (and continue to have to learn it from new experiences) that the world teaches me to

-prize beauty and fashion and wealth above all else;
-put them at the tip top of my priority list;
-act like I'm able to afford them even if I really can't or shouldn't;


To the world, I say, "No thank you." I reject those teachings and that indoctrination. We won't take our MAC lipstick and 22'' extensions with us in the next life; we won't take our Lulu Lemon yoga pants or Urban Outifitters jackets; we won't even take all of our natural HAIR with us through this life, for heaven's sake. So what do we invest in?

EXPERIENCES

Take that fortune you spend on material goods that add to your life too little too briefly, and invest it in experiences. I've made the decision to try to prioritize travel rather than fashion, beauty, and other outward indicators of wealth. When I make purchases, I try to think of it in those terms. I don't think I own a piece of clothing that cost me more than $30--I very rarely buy anything that costs more than $15. And I'm fine with that. I'll trade designer outfits for a jaunt in Croatia; a more stylish college apartment for a study abroad in Wales; a pair of earrings to match each outfit for a road trip to the East Coast.  I'll trade this


and this

and this


ANYDAY
for this












this

and this

Fashions fade; technology changes; but experiences stay with you and mold you.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” --Mark Twain

It may take penny-pinching; it may take more time than you'd like; it may not happen as often as you'd like; but you can make it happen.

It has nearly nothing to do with luck and almost everything to do with priorities.

So  
what is your money buying you?

Paris Day 2: morbid places, beautiful gardens, outraged cops, and the Louvre

France has a very distinctive feeling for me. As an exchange student in Chateau Gontier in 2004, an intern in Conches sur Gondoire in 2007, and a tourist in Paris in 2009, 2010, and 2014, I always wake up feeling the same way in France. Everything feels different there to me--from the beds and sheets to the showers and bathrooms. Apparently, things felt different for Brandon, as well. But their effect on him was to cause an allergic reaction. He broke out in hives while we were exploring one of my favorite Parisian haunts: Pere Lachaise cemetery. 

I have a somewhat morbid fascination with foreign cemeteries, and Pere Lachaise started it all. Aside from being the resting site for famous people like Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Jim Morrison, Felix Faure, and Moliere, the cemetery is aesthetically fascinating. I feel somewhat ashamed to admit this, but on my study abroad in Wales, I did my daily jogs in Cathays Cemetery next to our flat. And I loved it, even though it might have been insensitive of me to enjoy it as much as I did. There's something about patchy sunlight, small cobblestone paths, creeping vines, and green moss that makes me feel like I'm in another world. I was relieved that Brandon appreciated the morbid beauty of Pere Lachaise, even amidst the discomfort he was in. I could've spent hours there, but we had to rush to the pharmacy. Good thing there's a pharmacy on every corner in Paris.

Are you allowed to smile in a cemetery? 

After our trip to the pharmacy, we grabbed some bonbons (pretty typical of the trip) and headed on an aimless biking journey, content to explore the city. Biking around Paris is pretty thrilling. The streets are narrow and the drivers much more daring, but they are also much more aware, so I feel much safer biking there than in the U.S. We biked from the 20th arrondissement through Bastille area, around Ile Saint Louis a couple times, and into the Latin Quarter. We passed the Sorbonne and reached my favorite street in the city--Rue Mouffetard. I love this place.

The street is full of artisan shops--fromageries, poissonneries, creperies, patisseries, charcuteries, boucheries, boulangeries. I love it. So much. We stopped at a my favorite creperie. Five euros ($6.75) for a nutella crepe, a panini or a savory crepe, and a drink. Unbeatable. And so delicious.

 From there, we biked to the Jardin des Plantes where we were whistled down by a gendarme for trying to bike through the gardens. Run-in #1. 

Walking around was lovely though! 

Turns out there's a zoo in the gardens, so we peeped through the gates to see wallabies, red pandas, and other animals that seem completely out of place in Paris. 

   We left the gardens on our Velibs and headed out. Direction: le Louvre. We had only been riding for about 60 seconds when another gendarme started whistling and yelling at us. "DESCENDEZ DU VELO!" The French gendarmes have really nailed the outraged shout, I tell ya. Obediently, I stopped riding and dismounted my bike. I realized, however, that Brandon was blissfully unaware that he was being yelled at by the French police and had kept on pedaling his merry way down the street. The officer was less than pleased. I yelled to Brandon to get down from his bike and explained to the gendarme that Brandon doesn't speak French. "Well I hope he can read street signs!!" he said, pointing to a circular red sign with a white bar. He was going to charge us the going rate (90 euros) for riding down a street in the wrong direction. Thanks to our penitent attitudes and obvious American ignorance, he let us go. 

Here we are, shortly after our run-in with Javert, happily riding in the correct direction. 

The Louvre was lovely. It truly is a behemoth. I spent every Friday night of my internship there (thanks to free Fridays evenings  for students 26 and under) and didn't even scratch the surface.

Brandon hates museums, and he was itchy and tired already, but I insisted on taking him through Napoleon III's rooms and browsing the large galleries at the very least. 

I have an obsession with decor, culture, and fashion of the 1800's, so I love Napoleon's rooms!

We spent a good half hour in front of this statue. Originally it was an excuse to sit, but the more we looked at it, the more we were amazed at the sculpture.

And a typical shot of museum Brandon. 

 Wonderful day! It was so difficult for me to take all the incredible experiences I have had in Paris over the years and to imbue Brandon with them as best I could in just four days. But day two was amazing!