Arrival in Den Haag

6.41 pm

Mostly settled into my apartment in Den Haag. I'm right in the center of the city, about a fifteen minute walk from work. There's a big shopping area about five minutes from my apartment - everything from little food stands (I had lunch at the falafel place) to discount home good stores to designer clothing stores. I'm in a place with a bunch of other student interns, so even though I don't have a roommate, there will be lots of people around.

7.06 pm

Getting here was an adventure. People in the Netherlands are so, so, so much nicer than they are back home. There is no way I would have made it to my room in one piece if it wasn't for all the people who helped carry my massive suitcases and gave me directions. The next time I see someone wandering around looking confused, I'm going to stop and help them rather than just walking past.

I had to take the hotel shuttle back to the airport, get on a train, transfer at Leiden, then go to Den Haag HS. Traveling with two giant suitcases, one smaller one, and a backpack makes getting on and off trains difficult. I missed my stop the first time around, too. I got myself and all my luggage to the train doors as the train was rolling into the station - and the doors didn't open. There weren't instructions or anything, just two buttons - yellow and blue. I pushed the yellow button and nothing happens. I pushed the blue button and the doors made some noise, and then the train started moving away. Then, at the next station, I had to get all the way to the other end of the platform (luggage and all), down a set of stairs, and up another to get into the right place to catch the train. Luckily, a janitor stopped what he was doing and helped me get everything to the other platform. This time, the train I got into had instructions for opening the door. In pictures!

I made it to the rental office, even though the cab driver didn't really know where it was going. The lady gave me the keys and a map of the city, then told me to get on the tram outside the office to get to the apartment. The tram driver was really nice and told me which stop to get off at. I got directions from a girl in a clothing store. Then when I got to the street, I couldn't find my apartment building. I was looking for 257, and the only apartments were 3a all the way to 3m. After wandering around a minute and trying my key in all the doors, a girl came up to me and asked if she could help. She called the rental agency, but they said it was the right street, and they didn't know where the apartment was. So then we figured out that the street turned 90 degrees and continued, sans street signs, another two blocks. And there, at the very end, was my building. I could have hugged her.

So here I am, in a studio apartment with a bathroom and a tiny kitchen that's about 9 feet by 20 feet, not including the bathroom. And there's laundry machines in the building, no charge. So I figure, even though it's way more than I wanted to pay, it's a nice enough place, and no roommates is a bonus.

7:16 pm

Off to find some dinner, and somewhere I can buy tea. It's a balmy 37F here, warming up to 44F by Sunday. Brrr.

Amsterdam

8:22 pm, local time

I got into Amsterdam around 2 this afternoon. It's like the "royale with cheese" scene from Pulp Fiction - it really is the little things that are different. For instance, the bed in my hotel room doesn't have a comforter, and the bottom sheet is flat, not fitted. And the shrimp bisque I ordered for dinner tonight was pretty good, but it was not the type of cream based bisque I was expecting. Even so, I don't think it's quite hit me that I'm in another country for the next four months. I start work on Tuesday, since Monday is a holiday, which gives me a long weekend to get settled, figure out how to get to work, and all that.

Duckie and I had a wonderful fun time in Vegas. We didn't really do that much gambling - maybe only an hour or two at some low-stakes craps tables. Instead we spent most of the first day just wandering up and down the strip. The inside of Paris was way cute. I had expected it to be tacky, but the way it was decorated I felt like we were walking around outside instead of in a hotel. And the Bellagio was stunning, of course.

Maybe I've been in California too long, but I kept thinking, the whole time we were there, about the incredible amount of waste that goes into that city. The light on top of the Luxor, the golf courses, even the fountains at the Bellagio. All gorgeous in their own way, but completely unsustainable. Even Adam got a little upset when we went somewhere and the cups were all styrofoam. Methinks, however, that we will most definitely go back - and next time on a Friday/Saturday night trip.

One at a Time

11.13 am

Mid-semester evaluations for the Human Rights Clinic this week, which meant sitting down with my supervisor to talk about where we are in the project, where we want to be, and whether I'm getting what I thought I would from the whole thing. After establishing that the best time to have that meeting will be two weeks from now, when R and I are frantically writing draft after draft of the handbook, he asked how that whole social justice thing was going.

Social justice? What? I vaguely remembered mentioning something about having gone into law school with the idea of saving the world. Then came OCIP and callbacks and offers - and the truth of the matter is that when you're worrying about whether you're even going to have a job this summer, after you've been counting on said job to help pay for your semester in Europe, you start to forget that there was anything to school besides a mountain of debt and a BigLaw job at the end.

My supervisor said something that was oddly reminiscent of something I'd heard in one of those summer blockbuster disaster movies. "You can't change the world. Nothing that you or I do can change the world. But you can save one person. And for that person's family, it matters."

My East Coast Interview Tour

10.59 am

After spending a week interviewing in New York and DC, I can definitively say that there are differences between law firms, even in BigLaw. Some of it has to do with size - an office of forty lawyers feels different than an office of two hundred. Some of it has to do with work - one firm I interviewed with did only litigation, while another focused primarily on finance and international arbitrations. What interested me the most was the difference between the people at the firms.

I'd heard some recruiters talk about how firms hired based on "fit" - and I also heard that was a keyword for "we just didn't want to hire you". I'm more inclined to believe the former than the latter now. One of the firms that I was at this week is European based - and it shows. The attorneys I spoke to tended to have a more global view and to look beyond American law when discussing their work. Another firm, this one based in Texas, had more of a West Coast feel - pro bono work counts above the line there, and the attorneys were doing a "wear jeans/donate to breast cancer research" day.

And while I'm trying to sort out which firms are at the top of my list (extremely difficult, given that I only did callbacks at firms I really want to work at), I'm also sitting by the phone waiting for it to ring and reminding myself that it only takes one.

Post-OCIP Bliss

8.57 am

It's officially over. The two weeks of mind-numbing interviews, of sitting by the phone waiting for the firm to call (although I still haven't heard from 14 of the 25 firms I interviewed with), the 6 am alarm clock and the 2 am bedtime. And since I have gone through OCIP and survived, more or less, I provide a few words of wisdom for those contemplating going through the process in the spring or next fall.

1) Do the initial research, especially if there's a particular area of law you're interested in. The search by category field on b-line is helpful, but only to a point. Then, once you've found a firm practices in that area, check out the practice area by office location part of the website. Often, a firm that specializes in a smaller field, like international law or clean tech, will only do it in one or two offices.

2) Do more research before the interview. Find out something about your interviewers from the firm's website. Then talk to fellow Boalties who worked there last summer. If you go into the interview knowing something different and unique about the firm, it will demonstrate that you're genuinely interested, and not just applying because of the fear factor.

3) Remember to keep turning the interview questions around. If you're asked about your experience working with X, when you really want to be doing Y, explain how X led you to/will help you achieve Y. I had some great interviews where the interviewer and I talked about some of the really interesting parts of my resume - but it didn't have anything to do with the areas of law the firm practiced, and I didn't get callbacks.

Most importantly, relax and try to have a good time. You only have twenty minutes to make an impression, but that's plenty of time to connect with someone and convince them you're a good fit for the firm.

10.56 am

Interviews have been going well. It's a bit like speed dating - we sit across from each other at a table that's rather small, in uncomfortable chairs that don't quite pull up to the table, gaze into each other's eyes a moment or two, ask some questions, then go home and breathlessly await the ring of the telephone. Despite that, I've been rather impressed by how not-horrible the process has been so far. I'm enjoying the people I talk to - one interviewer and I talked about the horrible season the Red Sox have been having, and a second interviewer and I compared notes about my favorite professor (she had him when he had just started teaching). Two others asked me what I liked to do in my spare time, noting that they didn't want to hire only the brightest and the best - they wanted to hire smart kids who also know how to have fun. Plus, I got a squishy yellow duck. It doesn't get much better than that.

11.01 am

In non-OCIP news, the boy's sister got married this weekend. The wedding was up in Sonoma, and despite a hellish drive that involved sitting in traffic for almost two hours and a flat tire, we had a wonderful weekend. I think the highlight was watching the best man, the groom, and the bride's father all start dabbing at their eyes during the ceremony. I'm still in shock that I have friends and family who are old enough to get married - two cousins and a college roommate last summer, classmates and the boy's sister this summer, and I'm sure a bunch of weddings after 3L year. As Mr. Woodhouse would remark, it is entirely unreasonable that people should grow up and get married.

Feeders

2.44 pm

The fish tank, which has been sitting in a corner of the room with miscellaneous junk in it for as long as I've been dating the boy, is now set up and going. Last week we went to the hardware store, where he bought some 2 x 4's to make a frame for the tank to rest on. Then we went to the pet store, and spent an insane amount of money on filters and pumps and a heater and so on. Insert gravel, driftwood, some live plants, and the ceramic trees that I made back in college, mix with eco-start and chlorine neutralizer, let sit for a week, then add fish.

I didn't realize setting up a fish tank was so much work. The fish we have in it now are "testers," which means that in a week or so they die and we bring the water into the pet store to see what went wrong. I am resisting the urge to give them names, but they're so cute it's hard. In another week or so, if they're all still alive, we'll pick up some cichlids. The only downside about the fish tank is that it's on top of the dresser right next to my side of the bed. Which mean that a) I don't have a nightstand now and b) if there's a you-know-what in the middle of the night, I'm going to get woken up with thirty gallons of water and some very unhappy fish in bed with me.

2.49

OCIP is coming. It's like that scene in the movie, where you hear the scary music starting up in the background, and you say to the heroine, "don't go down that dark alley all by yourself," and she does and then the monster comes out. Well, maybe not that bad. But the scary theme music is definitely starting to play. I'm narrowing down my list, especially since boy might end up with a job that would require us to be in the Bay another five years or so. Now I'm trying to figure out how much detail to go into in a cover letter, and whether (and how much) to tailor them for the firms I'm really interested in.

And it would be awfully nice to know what my schedule's going to be...

Hills are Fun! (the 5 stages of bicycling)

11.09 am

Denial: No way am I getting back on that bike.

Anger: %@#! this bike!

Bargaining: Just let me make it up this hill.

Depression: I ride so poorly, what's the poing?

Acceptance: Hills are fun! I wonder if this is like runner's high...


11.24 am

I went for a ride yesterday, after sitting at the desk copy editing for eight hours. The plan was to take a spin around town and start to learn where everything is, so that I don't end up so hopelessly lost every time I leave the house. Instead, I ended up biking along Seven Hill Road and then to Lake Chabot. I discovered that hills are kinda fun, especially if there's a bunch of them in a row. Getting up the first one took work, but after that I could coast downhill and use that speed to get almost all the way to the top of the next hill. It reminded me of that golf-ball room in the Children's Museum in Boston - the one where you climb up the stairs, start your ball on the top of the wooden track, and try to drop it so that it makes it over all the hills into the milk crate at the bottom of the run.

6.05 pm.

I woke up this morning to an explosion of cilantro. We had started seeds in one of those little greenhouses, then transplanted the basil, thyme, and watercress to a window box and the tomato to a pot of its own. Then we put down more seeds (especially watercress and coriander, since those hadn't done well at all in the greenhouse). The watercress has been shyly poking its head up for the past two days, but the coriander/cilantro was nowhere to be seen until this morning. Overnight, six or seven shoots came up, and more have come up today, growing so fast I could almost hear them. I wasn't sure any were going to survive, as I had placed the window box on the front porch, where a squirrel found it and happily dug up all the seeds.

It has been an interesting summer. I use interesting in the same sense I would use it if you told me you were going to open a "muffin bottom" shop and wanted to know what I thought. Interesting. We leave the Berkeley house on Thursday. I have mixed feelings about that. One the one hand, I'll miss being so close to school, and the house is gorgeous. On the other, I won't miss waking up at 5am every morning to feed the dogs.

Work is going wonderfully, although since I'm not sure exactly what parts of it I can talk about, I won't talk about any of it at all. Suffice it to say that I am working on a wonderfully challenging memo interspersed with more academic types of things like syllabus writing and article editing. I also got a chance to go to a conference in Dallas, where I met a young lawyer from Argentina who knows several languages and runs a small printing press, a few grads from Boalt who lead eerily parallel lives, and a professor who decided to get into teaching because she realized halfway through a litigation that the case, although intellectually fascinating, was going to lead to the bankruptcy of a developing country. Which proves that not all lawyers are sellouts for the big money (something I was beginning to wonder about).

11.11 am

The assignment has finally arrived. That one. The memo which will consume most of my working hours for the next month, at least. The big one. The one that helps us figure out if we go ahead with the case or not. And I have absolutely no idea how to do it.

This, I think, is the prime example of why force feeding us the information we needed to write the memos/briefs in LRW/WOA is problematic. Sure, I know what the structure should look like. I can CRuPAC with the best of them. Which means I've got a great skeleton outline, set up all pretty with headers that will feed right into a table of contents. (It only took three hours of frustration on the brief assignment to figure that one out.) The problem, I fear, is that I'm not entirely sure what to put in between those headers.

It doesn't help that there really isn't any applicable law. So I've got to write a memo gunning for the law that's most favorable to our client. Not an interpretation of the law. But the actual law itself. Which, theoretically, would make this a breeze - just go through the books and pick the law I want. Not so easy. Because although the law we don't want to use (municipal law) is written down, the law we do want (international law) is not. There isn't even stare decisis in international law, so whatever cases I do find that are favorable to my client are persuasive at best.

It's going to be a wickedly exciting memo to write.