The (un)glamorous life of business travel

I'm supposed to be in shanghai right now, but instead, I'm stuck in Ho chi Minh city. I heard about typhoon mufia so checked the reports before bed and all looked well. My flight was at the ungodly hour of 730, which meant I had to get up at 4:30am. I checked the airline and airport website before leaving the hotel and everything still looked to be on track for departure.

I was a little apprehensive since mufia was meant to be the biggest typhoon in HISTORY! But before I went to bed last night, they said it had calmed down and the brunt of it was going to miss shanghai.

I've never been afraid of flying, I credit it to my first experience on a plane: I was 6 years old and my grandmother had taken me to (then) Yugoslavia for a month. On the way home, a piece of satellite cracked or broke the cockpit windshield and the plane started decompressing and the emergency masks came down. I still remember my grandmother putting the mask on me and everyone crying and praying on the plane. We made an emergency landing in London and I remember feeling like my world had ended because on the way off the plane, my favorite doll blew away (6 year olds and their priorities you know )

Since then I've been lucky, my flight experiences have been less dramatic. The closest I've come in all these years and dozens of flights was being in a propeller plane thru a thunderstorm in south India. I believe it was also the first and last time I prayed!

I love that I get to travel for work and still pinch myself that it's been a perk for the last 8 years. But to say work travel is glamourous, is a big myth (almost in the same proportions of saying Germany is efficient!) crowded airports, swine flu outbreaks where laser thermometers are randomly pointed at your forehead, hotels that take hours to figure out light switches and seeing your life flash before your eyes on an Indian road one too many times are just part of the fun and part of the job.

Even through missed flights, crazy traffic, stressful meetings and 150% humidity, I still love travelling for work and love that it's a perk. But glamourous, it is not!