I'll have been in Copenhagen one full week as of 1pm local time.
It's such a wonderful process of disassembling and reassembling to travel, and to move to another place. I am here semi-temporarily, semi-permanently. I'm here long enough that I need to learn how to live. I'm not here long enough that I'll be able to ever get very settled.
I've made some progress though. Today I am sitting at my desk in the very modern, very Danish room where I will be working, at the Centre for Design, Innovation, and Sustainable Transitions on the second floor of the Copenhagen-branch building of the University of Aalborg. I have a monitor and a keyboard, a whole lot of desk space, a key to the coffee machine, and a guest key card.
I am a guest researcher! Neither I nor anyone else seems to know exactly how this happened, but mostly it seems to be due to the influence of a professor at the main campus, in Aalborg, who has worked closely with UW students and professors in the past and put in a simple request for an "internship" on my behalf.
I still have not found housing, I still don't have the visa I need, but having a work place where I can leave my things, with people that accept me as legitimate, is enormously reassuring.
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
Electioneer
I have been working temporarily in King County Elections' Accessible Voting Center in Union Station in Seattle and reading Skid Road, a history of the early days of Seattle by Murray Murphy.
Union Station is one of Seattle's two train stations. The other is King Street Station. They were built in 1911 and 1906 respectively, about a block apart from each other between the Pioneer Square and International District neighborhoods. King Street station continues to serve trains: Amtrak and Sounder commuter rail. Union Station, though adjacent to the city's light rail tracks, does not itself support any trains.
Union Station and King Street Station have both been renovated in recent years. King Street Station was renovated by the City of Seattle and King County, providing Amtrak customers an improved experience which hearkens back to the glory days of rail travel. Union Station was renovated in 2001 to serve as the headquarters of Sound Transit, the regional transit agency, with the financial backing of Paul Allen. The station had sat vacant for several decades before being renovated. It is now in impeccable condition. The building contains the executive board room for the agency, the agency's business offices, a reception desk, and publicly available bathrooms, but the gorgeous great hall remains mostly empty.
While we are working at the Accessible Voting Center people constantly ask us if this is the Amtrak station, if they can get on the train here, what is this place? We say no, you need the train station across the street, the one with the clock tower, the one that actually has trains.
When it was a train station with trains, the great hall in Union Station served as the waiting room. Today there are still giant wood benches and metal tables and chairs. People still wait there, but not for trains. Union station is perhaps the most peaceful and beautiful building open to the public in Seattle. When we arrive at 9:30am there are people on the benches, at the tables. It has nice clean bathrooms, so that is nice too. People there are waiting because they have nothing else to do. They are waiting until the shelter opens up again in the evening, waiting until they can draw their safety net benefits, waiting until they can find some kind of job, waiting until they have some other better safe place to be.
The great hall has a mosaic tile floor and a great vaulted roof, with ornamental gold mosaic patterns imprinted above decorative floral nested arches along the walls of the chamber. Light filters in through translucent overhead windows and arching windows on the south wall which frame a clock-face and the inaccurate lettering "To Concourse".
~
There was some confusion this morning about our break schedule. Today we were on the clock eight hours, and therefor were entitled to a "dinner break" in addition to our lunch break. We also got a 15 minute break in the afternoon. The people that work at the AVC tend to communicate in a reptitive, nonconfrontational style. With our unfamiliarity with eachother and the short-term nature of our work, there are always many more of us than there is any knowledge of what we are talking about, so it takes a little while. Several coworkers attempted to find out if we should also have gotten a 15 minute break.
While this was occuring I was reading in Skid Road about the general strike that took place in Seattle in 1919, the first general strike to take place in a major city in the United States. It went on peacefully for three days before unraveling, and the strike committee ensured that the lights stayed on, hospitals could stay in operation, and riots did not occur.
Later I read about the dominance of the Teamsters union in the city lead by Dave Beck in the 30's, 40's and 50's. He developed an effective corporatist economic engine in the city, based on cooperation with business owners, violence against rival unions and price-cutters and strike-breakers, and rabid anti-communism. He was convicted in 1957 for embezzlement and labor racketeering.
King County temporary election workers are covered by the local Teamsters union.
~
Union station sits at the heart of the city's transportation networks. Bus lines, streetcar, light rail, heavy rail, freight rail all pass within a block of the building, and I-5 is only several blocks away.
As I walked back to work after my lunch break in front of the station waiting for the light was a modern, bus-looking streetcar, a bus decorated in green, brass and wood panneling to resemble a historic trolley, and a "trolley bus" (a bus running on overhead electric wires) which replaced the historic network of streetcars and trolleys in Seattle in the 1940's and 50's.
Union Station is one of Seattle's two train stations. The other is King Street Station. They were built in 1911 and 1906 respectively, about a block apart from each other between the Pioneer Square and International District neighborhoods. King Street station continues to serve trains: Amtrak and Sounder commuter rail. Union Station, though adjacent to the city's light rail tracks, does not itself support any trains.
Union Station and King Street Station have both been renovated in recent years. King Street Station was renovated by the City of Seattle and King County, providing Amtrak customers an improved experience which hearkens back to the glory days of rail travel. Union Station was renovated in 2001 to serve as the headquarters of Sound Transit, the regional transit agency, with the financial backing of Paul Allen. The station had sat vacant for several decades before being renovated. It is now in impeccable condition. The building contains the executive board room for the agency, the agency's business offices, a reception desk, and publicly available bathrooms, but the gorgeous great hall remains mostly empty.
While we are working at the Accessible Voting Center people constantly ask us if this is the Amtrak station, if they can get on the train here, what is this place? We say no, you need the train station across the street, the one with the clock tower, the one that actually has trains.
When it was a train station with trains, the great hall in Union Station served as the waiting room. Today there are still giant wood benches and metal tables and chairs. People still wait there, but not for trains. Union station is perhaps the most peaceful and beautiful building open to the public in Seattle. When we arrive at 9:30am there are people on the benches, at the tables. It has nice clean bathrooms, so that is nice too. People there are waiting because they have nothing else to do. They are waiting until the shelter opens up again in the evening, waiting until they can draw their safety net benefits, waiting until they can find some kind of job, waiting until they have some other better safe place to be.
The great hall has a mosaic tile floor and a great vaulted roof, with ornamental gold mosaic patterns imprinted above decorative floral nested arches along the walls of the chamber. Light filters in through translucent overhead windows and arching windows on the south wall which frame a clock-face and the inaccurate lettering "To Concourse".
~
There was some confusion this morning about our break schedule. Today we were on the clock eight hours, and therefor were entitled to a "dinner break" in addition to our lunch break. We also got a 15 minute break in the afternoon. The people that work at the AVC tend to communicate in a reptitive, nonconfrontational style. With our unfamiliarity with eachother and the short-term nature of our work, there are always many more of us than there is any knowledge of what we are talking about, so it takes a little while. Several coworkers attempted to find out if we should also have gotten a 15 minute break.
While this was occuring I was reading in Skid Road about the general strike that took place in Seattle in 1919, the first general strike to take place in a major city in the United States. It went on peacefully for three days before unraveling, and the strike committee ensured that the lights stayed on, hospitals could stay in operation, and riots did not occur.
Later I read about the dominance of the Teamsters union in the city lead by Dave Beck in the 30's, 40's and 50's. He developed an effective corporatist economic engine in the city, based on cooperation with business owners, violence against rival unions and price-cutters and strike-breakers, and rabid anti-communism. He was convicted in 1957 for embezzlement and labor racketeering.
King County temporary election workers are covered by the local Teamsters union.
~
Union station sits at the heart of the city's transportation networks. Bus lines, streetcar, light rail, heavy rail, freight rail all pass within a block of the building, and I-5 is only several blocks away.
As I walked back to work after my lunch break in front of the station waiting for the light was a modern, bus-looking streetcar, a bus decorated in green, brass and wood panneling to resemble a historic trolley, and a "trolley bus" (a bus running on overhead electric wires) which replaced the historic network of streetcars and trolleys in Seattle in the 1940's and 50's.
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