Doing Charleston - Day One Pictures

 Well let's see how our internet works at 6:20am...GOOD! 

Later this morning...not so good. Worked with the property management company while we were out. They identified the problem and have given us other networks to connect with. So far so good.

We are making use of a very helpful app call GPSmyCity which for a very reasonable annual subscription rate (less than $20) give us access to maps, curated tours, ability to create custom tours, etc.  The GPS underpinning things is very good. Easy to use a quite accurate. 

Charleston is a city with over 400 years of history. It was one of the key cities of colonial, antebellum, and recent Southern history. It had great wealth. And wealth leads to great architecture. It has a marvelous cityscape and is very walkable city especially now in mid-autumn when the temperatures are very pleasant and the humidity is low. You wouldn't be making those statements in mid-summer when it is brutally hot and humid!

You cannot talk about the wealth and history of this city and avoid the history of slavery in the United States. For Charleston was one of the prime cities for the slave trade. I am not intending for this short visit to go into great depth on this subject. But I am not going to ignore it either. As a person who is deeply committed in social impact work now with dealing with modern slavery (via Theodora Africa and the Rotary Club to End Human Trafficking), I obviously have some strong feelings on the subject. But because of my deep interest and ongoing interest in history, I also have some perspectives that might strike one as odd given my current work in this arena. That will be for a later post. For now, let's get on with our first day pictures.

Neo-Classical Architecture at the Hibernian Society

Did I know that Charleston and America's first fireproof building?

St. Michael's, Oldest Church in Charlston

Graveyard by the church with a couple of signers of the Declaration of Independence (we didn't find them)

Charleston City Hall by Washington Square with more neoclassical architecture

Low Country Architectural Repair Scaffolding

Notice the subtle differences from the European repair scaffolding

Misc Stuff walking down Meeting Street

Nathaniel Russell House

(Example of what can be done from the profits of slave labor)

Street Art and Street Scenes

Harbor Scene

Gastronomy

First night after much wandering and gnashing of teeth over $40-$50 entree prices, we found a Caribbean inspired place that was pretty reasonable

Wife had a Fried Fish Sandwich

I had a Chorizo Burger which had the chorizo mixed in with the ground beef. The slaw had some kind of hot chile in it. And look at the ripeness of that tomato!

On Wednesday, we ate (strictly by chance) at a well known local place

We decided to split two starters and one main. But the portions were so huge we brought half back to the apartment.

She crab soup on the left, fried chicken with hoppin' john (black eye peas and rice) and collard greens, mac and cheese. I gave high marks to everything. Even the hoppin' john had good flavor (which is often not the case)

Doing Charleston

That would not be doing THE Charleston. For that would be dancing, not something I do anymore. No Wife and I are traveling! Albeit, just here in the USA. Earlier this summer, faced with the long wait for my new passport and the need to get a new Ghana visa, I couldn't bear the thought of going five months without any travel. (Please no snarky remarks on how five months is not that long to go without travel for most normal human beings. No one has ever said de-I is normal.) So I looked at a list of places in the U.S. I'd been wanting to visit but hadn't gotten to. Hence, our short trip to Charleston.

Charleston has a lot advantages for travelers like Wife and I. There is a ton of history. It has a relatively compact old town with tons of historical buildings and very photogenic cityscape. It is flat! - Good for old folks walking. We aren't even renting a car, just using Uber to get us from our rental to the areas we are wanting to visit. And it is a great eating destination too!

We flew in on Tuesday without a hitch and were in our rental apartment before 5pm local time. We set out looking for something to eat and to get provisions to cook breakfast. As usual we ran into our home country nemesis, USA food prices. It drives me nuts to see a basic main course cost $40 to $50 when just about anywhere else in the world we visit the cost is far, far less. But we finally found a Caribbean inspired place where we had a very good, and reasonably priced meal.

There are no supermarkets in this part of town so we had to settle for corner market (which here because their are SO MANY tourists and other visitors that the main products sold are various types of drinks and snack foods. Yet we were still able to get eggs and butter. 

Today we went for our first trip into the old part of town. Unfortunately, our rental internet is not working very reliably. So Wife got on first and has taken most of the night to get her pictures up. I am going to try in the morning to do so.

Breakthrough!

 There was a time not that long ago when a disciplined approach to teaching and learning was a key factor in developing capability in Theodora. I don't think calling our participants 'lazy' is fair. I think it was more a function of arrested development, combined with a national education system in Ghana that does not encourage critical thinking. Though our participants are in their upper 20's, I felt their attitudes toward learning were more like people in their early teens. Hence the need for a lot of structure. 

Now let's fast forward to today. Just a couple of weeks ago, I saw a proposal we sent out to a new prospect. It had these elements in it.

As per our conversation, we will take over the task of managing your LinkedIn page and creating and distributing newsletters to your contact list. 

 

LINKEDIN

 

·       Profile Optimization:  We'll optimize your LinkedIn profile. This includes using a professional profile picture, writing an engaging headline, and crafting a compelling summary that reflects their expertise and objectives.

 

·        Content Strategy: We will create and curate high-quality content that is relevant to your industry and target audience. This will include a mix of text-based posts, articles, images, videos, and infographics.

 

·       Content Calendar: Develop a content calendar to ensure a consistent posting schedule. We recommend at least 3-4 weekly posts to maintain engagement and visibility.

 

·       Audience Research: We will identify the client's target audience and create content tailored to their interests and needs. This will increase the chances of attracting the right followers.

 

·       Engagement: Actively engage with your LinkedIn community by commenting on, liking, and sharing relevant posts. This will help your page get noticed by others and build connections.

 

·       LinkedIn Groups: Join and participate in relevant LinkedIn groups and communities. This will help in expanding your reach and connecting with like-minded professionals.

 

·        Networking: Connect with industry peers, thought leaders, and potential clients. Building a robust network on LinkedIn is crucial for growing followers.

 

·       Analytics and Tracking: Regularly monitor your LinkedIn page performance. We will track key metrics such as post engagement, follower growth, and content reach to ensure that we are on track to meet the 1000-follower goal. 

 

·       Reporting and Evaluation: We will provide regular progress reports and suggest adjustments to the strategy as needed. This will ensure that we are continuously working towards the follower growth goal.

 

 I did a double take reading this. I didn't know we did this. Content curation? We've been totally staying away from content writing. Audience research? Analytics and Tracking? Where did all this come from? The answer? They took it upon themselves to learn all this stuff because their clients were asking them to do it.

 

So where did this change in attitude come from? When did they move from people who had to be convinced to learn, to people who of their own volition took it upon themselves to learn, and learn big time? I don't know. But it is exciting to see. 

 

What to hear about this right from the women themselves? Listen to this 25 minute presentation they recently gave to a virtual conference about business learning in developing countries. 

Travel Webspinning Coming Together

I gave a business talk today. That is a subject of another blog post altogether for I'd not done a physical presentation in over a decade. But my sponsor, my good friend, fellow traveler, financial advisor, sadly rooting for Chelsea, but now finding the bliss of Hessianhood, the Count, and I related to each other that while others thought travel planning was a chore, we felt it was one of the most enjoyable parts of the travel adventure. I am happy to say that a significant number of our planning issues have started to come together. 

• I think we are going to be able to use frequent flyer mile to cover the first leg of our journey to Taipei, Taiwan. That's going to save us big bucks.
• We've decided on the location (Krabi, Thailand) for our post Empress Pu Li Sha adventure in Shanghai, and have booked our Airbnb there.
• We've established communication with our teenage grandchildren 2.2 and 2.3 on what kind of living quarters we should get in Taipei.
• Wife is now looking at the Ghana part of the trip.

Progress is being made and our trip is starting to come together.

Back To What I Love Best

To get into China, I need a visa.

To get a Chinese Visa, I need a round-trip airplane ticket. 

Do I want to buy a ticket from the U.S. to China hoping to get the visa?

We are going to meet Grandchildren 2.2 and 2.3 in Taiwan for a make up trip with them that was cut down by the pandemic. What if we purchase a round-trip refundable from Taipei to Shanghai? Will that fulfill the requirement?

But when we are done with China, we are on to Thailand. Is Taipei the best place to do that? Once we have our visa for China, we can change our plans without it affecting our visa status. I think.

And what do we want in Thailand? A pool? A view? Access to the beach?

We're going to Ghana to take Wife there for the first time as our next stop. Do we do this in stages to ease the wear and tear from a long flight? 

How do I organize Wife in Ghana. So many people want to meet her. But she wants a vacation.

Travel planning.

BLISS.

Maybe Transition Is Not An Event But A Constant State?

I wrote last February about being in a weirdly consistent state of joy. As I have contemplated the latest bizarre twist in my post working full-time life, I have asked myself, "How many transitions can a person have?" Shouldn't one or two be about right?

Evidently not. The latest shift of Wife and I deciding finally to not relocate out of the country has provoked other changes. It has had me getting a bit more focused on the stub of my consulting practice. Not that I'm going back to working full-time (God Forbid!) but I do need to feed that lie-flat business class seat habit and fund the remodel. For crying out loud, I am even giving a talk/workshop in a couple of weeks to a major family business succession forum (It's on Applying Human Centered Design to Business Exit/Succession Planning. Thanks for asking.). I haven't given public presentation in over a decade!

And, Theodora is continuing to grow and develop. I made a decision to start another major fund raise to support its growth (despite having said just 4-months ago I would do nothing of the sort). Add to this, two major trips planned for this year and it seems like I've transitioned back to where I was in 2015-17. 

After all this change, one would be foolish to make even the slightest statement that one has 'finally' transitioned. In fact, as the title of this post posits, maybe there isn't 'A' transition at all? Maybe there is only a constant state of transitioning?

Wine Tsunami

 With the decision to stay where we are, I had a rather horrible realization a number of months ago. My wine inventory had dropped to distress levels! 😵‍💫 (Of course, everything is relative. My 'distress level' is very likely most people's over inventoried level!) I had been consciously working my inventory down over a couple of year period on the idea that we'd be moving out of country. But with that off the table, I realized I could go back to my rather expansive wine purchasing addiction levels. So that's what I did.

I started acting on the various wine offers that fit my profiles as good deals. As a reminder, I buy virtually all my wine from two online retailers who send tens of offers to me daily. I have very specific types of wines I like. When I see an offer that meets my criteria, and I have space to put it, I buy. 

However, the location I buy from most, doesn't like to ship the wine if it is too hot. So they will hold on to it unless you are willing to pay for faster shipping or take the risk of the wine getting damaged by heat. I opted to wait. Except I started to forget how much I ordered. When I made another purchase a couple of weeks ago it came back to my consciousness. It was cool enough now so I authorized the wine to be shipped. 

Thus last week three cases of wine, 36 bottles, showed up. Good thing I didn't keep buying, I only have room now for another case. I bought some very interesting wines. They need to rest about a week after shipping so this weekend I can start sampling them.