Had the blues for Chicago, I just can't be satisfied...

Been a really busy couple of week, during which time I've been...well, busy...really. Before I flew out of London the company had a consultant networking day where they sat 250 of us in ampitheatre and blew smoke up our arses...golden smoke. Then we spent the day in groups working up proposals for senior execs about policies to improve life at The Company. How can I achieve my career goals and get MSN messenger on my Company laptop? Yawn. How about you drink a nice tall glass of shut the feck up, corporate robot! At the end of the day we had the head of The Company in the UK and 3 of the top execs on stage answering questions from the floor. You know what people asked? How can I achieve my career goals at The Company and how can I get MSN messenger on my laptop? For feck's sake. So when they asked for one last question I put my hand up and asked the following:

"We've heard a lot of talk about values today and the importance of being a good corporate citizen and a good global citizen. Given that our main goal at The Company is to make money, do we draw a moral line about the kind of clients we'll do work for?"

You should have seen them squirm! What annoys me most about this company is the hypocracy. Admitedly, they do a lot of good charity work and free consulting in poor and developing countries, but there's no point bragging about how you're trying to make the world a better place when the vast majority of your gloabl profit comes from oil and tabacco companies. Somehow I don't think I'm on the fast track to partner...

The highlight of the day was that they booked out the London Aquarium and put on free drinks and fish and chips. Oh the greasy delicious irony! I learned two important things that night: 1) my phone takes really shit pictures, and 2) not even a dark aquarium and free booze is enough to make me attractive to english women. Siiiiiiigh...

So I arrived in Chicago on Sunday afternoon. America is such an iconic place, even if you've never been here you kinda know what it's going to be like because you've seen it all your life on tv and movies. And the place definitely meets all of your expectations, but so much more than you could imagine. It starts the minute you get off the plane: everyone in the airport has a gun! The information desk lady, the guy who tells you what line to stand in, the dude in the passport control booth, even the Peurto Rican janitor who sold me some blow...they're all armed (I'm kidding about the last one...he was Mexican). The most unnerving thing about it is that these people are obviously so used to carrying guns that they are completely calm and unfazed and almost blase, which only served to freak me out more. One false move and you'll be up to your neck in flip.

American people are actually a lot cooler and nicer than I thought they'd be. They're obviously very confident and patriotic, but it's not arrogance so much as assuredness; it's not that they think America is the greatest country in the world, they KNOW it is. And much to my surprise, there's actually a lot to like about the place. Seeing as this is my first time in america, everything I do is a unique experience. Whenever I do something significant, I imagine James Brown singing about it in my head to the tune of "Livin' in America". For instance, when I arrived I was busting for a crap so James sang "Shittin' in Ameeeeeeeericaaaaah!" It works best if the activity rhymes with "livin' " but it's kind of hard to find appropriate examples. "Shivin' " is a good one but I think I'll save a prison stretch for my next visit.

The training facility is in a place called St Charles which is about an hour or so west of Chicago. I was hoping to get a limo but the selfish bastards organised a bus for us so I had to go cattle class with everyone else. It was a weird feeling driving out here from the airport. I've seen these landscapes all my life on tele and in movies and even though this is my first time here it feels familiar, like coming home. The wide streets and rows of identical two-storey clapboard houses and flat square treeless lawns are so iconic as to be anachronistic...like life imitating art imitating life. And everywhere you go flags flags and more flags. It's almost like the average american is scared of forgetting which country they come from. Or perhaps, more likely, they're afraid their neighbours will think they've forgotten and blow their heads off for being a communiss or a terroriss. As I sat there on the bus watching this parallel tv universe go by, I imagined myself as a lonely drifter with a chequered past and an uncertain furture coming to a new city where no one knows my name to make a new name for myself. Maybe I'll get a job at the bakery or washing dishes in the diner where I'll meet a strong young woman who quit college to come and run the family business when her dad had that stroke. In fact, with my sexy new khaki coat that I bought before I left, I looked kinda like Bill Bixby from The Incredible Hulk tv show. I could almost hear the theme music swelling as we cruised along the highway towards my destiny...

The facility, or campus as they call it, is like a cross between summer camp and the Overlook Hotel from the Shining. Lots of sprawling, echoey corridors and decor from the 70's. We've each got a room with a single bed and a colour teevee. There's two ballrooms, a huge auditorium, a barber shop, two bars and shitloads of bad carpet. And the food is wicked! Being america everything's a buffet, of course, and there's tons of it, all smothered in processed cheese. I had some chilli cheese fries at the club house , which was an experience. It's extremely difficult to eat something that looks like it's already been removed from someone else's body.

We had lots of planned social activites which were thinly-veiled excuses to get pissed...my favourite kind! We had free drinks at the Tuesday night Enchantment Under the Sea Dance mixer follwed by Irish Car Bombs in the Clubhouse. Needless to say, I struggled to get out of bed on Wednesday morning. Added to my dillema was the fact that on the Comedy Channel at 6.30am they were showing Ski School, so I seriously considered blowing off the day and staying in my room watching bad 80's movies. But I refused to let these american marshmellows accuse me of being soft. Just in case you started to think that my life was no longer a bad 80's moofie, consider this: they play music constantly in this place and the first three days I was here when I hit the breakfast buffet they were played, respectively, the following songs: 'What a Feeling' from Flashdance, 'Footloose' from that moofie with Kevin Bacon in it, and 'Head Over Heels' by Tears for Fears. Radical! So for the rest of the day I imagined we were all in a bad 80's moofie called Consultant School and tried to pick which actors would play our little band of misfits, getting up to all sorts of baudy M-rated highjinks while sticking it to the establishment and trying to get laid. Conveniently, the dudes I was drinking with were living sterotypes so it was pretty easy. Patrick is John Belushi, Amy is Jeneane Garofalo, and Jaye is the korean-american nerdy football playing geek. My character was a little bit harder; I'm the fish out of water who comes from humble beginnings and fought hard to get where I am, torn between denying my working-class upbringing and the lure of new money and upper class prep-school T&A. I struggled to find our antagonists, the preppy stuck-up rich guy jocks who make our lives hell and have all the hot girlfriends, but it turns out it's a guy called Geoff (pronounced "Joff") who has just been promoted to manager, knows everything and only wears Company-branded clothing. Ooooh, that Geoff! Living off Daddy's trust account, driving his Arrock and skiing in Aspen. He's never had to struggle, he's never been an outcast. I can't wait to take him down at the end of the moofie and steal his girlfriend who shouldn't really be with him anyway cos they've nothing in common...she and I are more alike than we think. If only I could find someone to play her role...

As you can probably tell, I didn't get a whole lot of work done that day. But the plot thickened on Wednesday night at the Networking Dinner where I met a gorgeous swedish girl called Elisabet who rides a motorcycle and I knew I'd found my girl. This woman was incredible! She's so far out of my league I'd need binoculars to see the place I'd have to stand in order to see her disappear over the horizon through a high-powered telescope. She's just moved to London so I offered to do the 'Strangers in a Strange Land' thing and have coffee sometime. My new American chums praised me for having "big game" before reminding me that I was punching so far above my weight it was like Mike Tyson fighting a premature baby. Thanks, dudes. Little did they know that she is engaged and very much in love with her fyonsay (selfish biatch!).

On Thursday night a bunch of us hired a limo and went on a road trip. We put the stereo on loud and flashed our boobs at passing cars and I impressed the shit out of everyone with my story of seeing Nirvana live at the ANU. At about 10pm we hit The Cadillac Ranch, which looks exactly the way you're imagining it does. It's a real live American bar, a living stereotype, and when it's jammed packed with drunk people and the 80's music is blaring it's the most awesome vibe ever. Picture hundreds of highly-intelligent, highly-paid, extremely drunk consultants standing in a circle, drinking Captain Morgan Spiced Rum and Coke and screaming along to "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey and "Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi. Jealous? Yeah, you are...you totally are.

I'm reading this awesome book Called 'The Devil in the White City' about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the architects who designed it. It also tells the story of America's first urban serial killer, eerily named H.H. Holmes, who used the World's Fair to lure young women visitors into his custom-built house of horrors where he butchered them and burned their remains in a specially-made kiln. Nice...

Can't believe it, I left my super dooper camera back in London so I'll have to make do with my crappy phone camera. Will try and get pics up soon and send another update from the Windy City.

Ciao, sweeties!