Aberdeen Maritime Museum and Working Off-Shore

The Trinity Cemetery building.

While most of the week so far has been spent working, I've managed to explore a bit more as well. Aberdeen is a quiet town whose bustle is focused on the mall and one street, Union St. Here you weave through strollers, business types, the casually-dressed, and a very occasional tourist walking at a snail's pace, map out. Signs welcome you to H&M, Burger King, a plethora of mobile phone shops, £-Stretcher, John Lewis, and a pair of Starbuckses.

Stray any small distance from Union St., though, and you're surrounded by the unyielding stone walls of Aberdeen's flats.

Wandering to Trinity Cemetary

A view from a hilltop over the cemetery and out to the ocean.

Some of you have experienced first hand my tendency to wander, whether or not I'm doing it on purpose. I get lost. And it's a bunch worse when I'm on my own without a schedule since I really have no reason not to go check out a park or a unique building that can be seen just a couple blocks away.

Monday found me lost (again) and I ended up at Trinity Cemetary. Unlike the one closer to city center where I saw people chatting on the benches with a bag of chips, the few people here were paying their respects.

Beside the cemetery was a hill which, from the bottom, looked as though it might have a nice park at the top. Once climbed, the hill was really just that but it was tall enough for me to get my bearings and take a view of the ocean.

The Aberdeen Maritime Museum

A bioluminescent box jelly found in deep waters. Photo by Joshua Lambus.

Eventually I found the Maritime Museum. Entrance was free and it gave you access to three floors of exhibits. They had displays on ship-building, the deep sea, and a lot of information about drilling for oil in the North Sea.

I especially liked the deep sea stuff. The creatures from the dark waters are always so interesting. Especially the ones with bioluminescence.

One video showed computer-generated animations of scavengers feeding off a whale carcass at the bottom of the sea. Apparently a dead whale can sustain its own local ecology for fifty years!

Working on the Rigs

There's a guy in the hostel whom we jokingly call "South Africa," after his place of origin. (It's taken a surprisingly long time for some of our names to be exchanged.) Today he'll be taking a helicopter ride to work on an offshore oil rig for a couple weeks. On top of a nice salary, they pay for your stay and food, and depending on the contract you might work three weeks on the rig and then get three weeks off.

We were discussing the merits of this setup a couple nights back. If you're not one to get bored, those three weeks off would be great since you're completely free from work. (This is in contrast to the "connected holidays" taken by web-based workers.) Of course, for those three weeks on you work 12-hour days and when you're not sleeping you have only the gym, tv, phone, and internet to keep yourself busy.

"Italy," who's in between jobs in the food-service industry, didn't like the idea of being stuck with the same group of people for three weeks. Meeting new people is definitely harder when you're two hours from land.

Do you think you'd like to work three weeks on three weeks off for, say, a year even if it meant being isolated during the "on" period?