Day 0: Hello, London!

How I decided to go to London, how I got there

Hello everyone! I’m planning to write a series of blogs about my experience moving to London and going to a full-time circus program as an adult (turning 27 next week). This first post will be a little bit longer to cover some background and introductions. I’ll generally try to divide my posts into sections so you can skip around if you’re less interested in the technicalities of an aerial move or my “I’m an American and it’s my first time in London” revelations.

Who am I and how did I get here?

I’ve been working for the last 5 years as a software engineer at Applied Intuition. During most of my time there, the company focused on providing tools to help other companies develop self-driving cars. Before that, I was at MIT studying computer science. My background doesn’t exactly scream “circus”, so for a lot of people, my decision was out of left-field. A few of my colleagues went out of their way to remind me that circus doesn’t pay as well as writing code. (Not many things do.) Even after arriving, I’m constantly reminded that I’ve done a 180 with my environment—while I’m spending time with some of the best aerialists, acrobats, and coaches that I’ve worked with, I’ve also been tasked with basic tech support across the gym and house: Excel, wifi, anything else computer-related. Good thing I have that master’s degree!

I loved my job at Applied. I love writing code, I got to work with an amazing team of talented and passionate engineers that I could learn from everyday, and I felt that the technology we were building had the potential to change the world. But there are downsides to working in tech too. My primary gripes include spending 8-10 hours per day staring at screens for work and spending those same hours in mostly stationary positions. My gripes about the Bay Area are similar: lots of people working in tech, using their phones and computers all of the time; the lack of good public transportation and the requirement to own a car to get around; the focus on economic productivity or fame as a measure of one’s value. My list for an ideal break included traveling abroad, doing something different and active, and spending a majority of my time learning.

I’ve always loved doing things that straddle the line between arts and sports. I grew up figure skating and then started pole dancing right after university. There’s a pervasive idea in traditional sports like ballet or gymnastics that you’ll never be any good if you didn’t start at 4 years old, but the pole community helped me see that my adult body was still capable of learning incredible new things. After starting pole, I’ve dabbled in almost every aerial discipline, including hoop, silks, rope, hammock, straps, and even a little bit of hair-hanging. In the past 2 years, I’ve cross-trained in ballet, contemporary dance, gymnastics, partner acrobatics, swimming, running, lifting, and more. At some point I was training 20+ hours a week along with my full-time job (mostly on weekends). So I do think that the circus might have always been in the cards for me.

Where am I going?

I spent a lot of time on Google looking for an appropriate place to train circus. SF Circus Center certainly has many top-notch instructors and a large facility, but it didn’t satisfy my criteria of leaving the Bay Area and would have been prohibitively expensive for me to take classes close to a full-time load. I also wanted to have more structure to my training—without an end goal, I’d probably get bored or lose motivation.

Another requirement for me was that the school would not only accept adult students, but that it actually had instructors who specialized in teaching adults. In circus, the learning style and injury prevention varies significantly between older and younger learners.

Simply after narrowing down by full-time structured programs for adults, I was down to fewer than ten options that I could find. I wrote off a few schools in Chicago and Seattle because I wasn’t excited about the location, and the timing wasn’t good anyway. There was a school in Berlin that I was excited by, but it was ten months long and didn’t provide support for a visa.

In the end, I applied to the 16-week full-time course in circus arts at Aircraft Circus Academy in London. As the name implies, it’s a full-time program from 10am to 4pm, Mondays through Fridays, for close to four months. There’s a lot of circus disciplines out there, but the academy primarily focuses on acrobatics and aerials, which are mostly my interests as well. On Christmas Day last year, I had half an hour of free time at SFO before a flight to Taiwan. With the spirit of an early New Year’s resolution of “Why not?”, I cobbled together a circus “CV” and cover letter and emailed them in. Two weeks later, I had jumped on a call with someone from the academy, verified that it was a real place, and read through the information booklets. I was certain that it was the opportunity I had been looking for.

How did I get here? (my trip to London, physically)

<Insert beautiful picture of London that I did not take. I do not live near here and I also have not seen this in person yet.>

In my initial funemployment, I erred towards saying “yes” to as many things as possible. So, I ended up with a packed travel schedule out of California including one week of visiting my parents in New Jersey, two days of rest, one week at Burning Man, one day of rest, and then a flight to London arriving 5pm with the first day of circus school the next day. (My original travel plans featured no days of rest, a >50% chance that I would miss my flight to London, and even if I made it, an arrival time at 6am on the first day. My friends convinced me that this was too crazy even for me.) Although I had a great time traveling, I wasn’t in the best shape to start circus school. I came back from Burning Man having lost six pounds, mostly due to dehydration and partially due to a bout of food poisoning, so I was trying to recoup the weight on my way to London. I took some melatonin pills to try to combat jet lag, but they ended up being too strong—I have some hazy memories of dropping a full cup of water onto the floor, and then successively knocking more and more items onto the floor while trying to pick things up. I was too drowsy to care, so eventually I just went back to sleep with most of the items still on the floor.

After arriving at the airport, I took the Elizabeth Line to Woolwich, and then a bus. Unfortunately the line was almost entirely underground, so I didn’t get to see any sights. At the bus stop, I was impressed at how many buses came per hour. I missed at least five eligible buses in ten minutes before getting on one, as each time one approached I would double-check Google Maps, and then it would be gone before I’d had the time to pick up my two suitcases and make my way over.

I’m staying with the family that owns the circus I’m attending. They typically have room for one or two boarders that are doing the full-time course in a lovely home that’s fifteen minutes walk from the academy. I was nervous about showing up because we hadn’t coordinated at all what time I was coming in, and I figured it was too late to send an email by the time I got to the airport. Luckily, someone was around to let me in, and I found the rest of my living situation to be surprisingly streamlined. The room is clean and comfortable, there’s a set of clearly stated rules, and all of the common spaces have organized, set-aside storage spaces labelled by name for each housemate.

At least arriving a single day before starting allows me to number it “Day 0” in London and my first day at circus school as “Day 1”. I’m excited to see what comes next!