I have to remind myself occasionally that I’m not on vacation. The traveling around and staying in hotels feels like vacation but this is currently my life and I still have to work to be able to eat. Today I’m camped out in the hotel lounge drinking complimentary baby sized cokes, eating chocolate (thanks work), and revising an animation project. Being that I’m in Europe the Vuelta Espana bike race is playing on TV rather than people fighting each other. I like it here.

Even though I’m working I am still enjoying being a tourist in a big city on another continent. I took a break to walk around and found myself in the Nieuwe Instituut museum. It bills itself as a museum of architecture, design and digital culture but I didn’t exactly get that from my visit. It had a lot of small exhibits that ranged from hard to understand high art to simple and striking visual overload. They didn’t particularly seem related to architecture, design or digital culture though I guess they all had elements of that. It seemed more like little rooms filled with concepts that only loosely touched those themes. All very interesting. I left feeling very thoughtful. Museums usually make me feel that way. The layers of meaning and depth of thought put into the work flood my brain with more ideas than I can process all at once. My mind does not go that deep when working on my goofy cartoons and I am impressed by the minds of those who do.

At the moment I’m churning that brain food around while doing some fairly mechanical work changing out a logo and music on an animation project. It’s a gray day outside with spells of light rain which means it is a perfect day to be thinking deeply and comfortably sitting inside.

On a practical note I figured out a handy thing for my phone while traveling. Newer USA iPhones use an eSim and can have two of them installed at once. I bought a 30 day data only eSim from Maya Mobile for $10. I don’t know if Maya is the best way to go but it seems to be working very well and was as easy as scanning a QR code. This gives me data in Europe/ UK while still keeping my USA plan active. It’s not hard to find wifi but while out walking or riding I can pull up maps or sit on a bench and read through the 100’s of wonderful birthday messages y’all sent. Thanks for that!