Hi, I'm Julia Schindler. I'm working as an Associate Products Manager in the London office. So I went to Costa Rica for five weeks for Working Your World and then afterwards I did a one-week holiday in Mexico and a one-week holiday in Belize. My entire life growing up, my mum's always spoken about when she went to Costa Rica when she was my age, so it just kind of felt right to go to Costa Rica and see what all the hype was about. And then she actually came with me for the first week of Costa Rica, so it felt really special to do it with her.
When I wasn't working, when my mum was still there, we went horseback riding in the sunset together, it was beautiful. We did some waterfall jumping, so that was a special tour. We just really saw Costa Rica and really kind of enjoyed it. When she left as well, I did a lot of activities. I did surfing, I did ziplining, went to the national parks, saw monkeys. Every day after work, you just feel excited to go explore.
So my friend actually also managed to work from Costa Rica for the last week. Together we did kayaking through the mangroves, which was really phenomenal. It was also this kind of eco-tourism area, so they taught us about the land we were on, so that was really interesting. And then we also did scuba diving, so the boat took us out and it took us to this stingray area, which was really, I've never seen so many stingrays in my life, it was an overwhelming amount of stingrays.
My favourite experience with Costa Rica was probably the ziplining. It included this Tarzan swing fall, which was about 450 feet. We were ziplining across this beautiful cloud forest. This just really pushed me to kind of feel a bit out of my comfort zone.
The advice I would give to anyone working in the world is to definitely set kind of expectations with your project before you leave. If you kind of meet up with your manager or whoever is running the project and set expectations. I would definitely recommend working in the world. It's definitely the highlight of my year. I did really appreciate that I could kind of go out and see the world while still kind of having an income and working. It definitely gives you a refresh when you're out there. The new experiences are really amazing and cool, but I still wanted to come back and be back with my friends and work and come back to the space and meet, see Paolo the coffee barista. I definitely loved coming back.