"You live in the universe, but you never do these things till someone comes to visit."
My career as a tour guide might be over when it had hardly begun. My husband organised a workshop on Material Reconstruction with his job last week. It was a somewhat funny situation because a few months ago in a meeting he said something like "wouldn't it been neat if we did a workshop on Material reconstruction" and they basically said, great idea, tell us when you've planned it.
So many of the people attending the workshop are a part of the internal team but there were a few outside attendees including guest speakers. The internal team had a meeting one day from 9-10 so my husband had the idea that it would be nice for the folks who weren't attending that meeting to walk around the "stadtmauer" which is the old city walls which now is a mostly gravel path that encircles the downtown area. He asked if I might like to take people around (he wasn't asking because there was no-one else, but because he knows that I enjoy being around people and might find it fun). Well I thought it sounded quite fun so I agreed. I tried to solidify all the facts that I had learned about Göttingen from living here, researching, and the multiple tours we had taken (whenever we see a free tour offered we take it, I love learning about the area I live in). So I made some notes on my phone and mental rehearsed the things I wanted to say.
We met up at the hotel and walked to the wall together. For the first half of the tour I had interesting facts about the towns and buildings that we were passing. Then I ran out of facts about the town at about the half way point. There were still a few more interesting buildings that we were passing that I could point out with generous silence in between. When I got to the last part of the wall I was out completely though. There is a portion of the wall between the train station and the University that doesn't really have much beside it. So much so that I kinda forgot about that part of the wall when I mentally prepped for the tour. So basically the last 15 minutes were mostly just me trying to make friendly conversation with them.
An hour really is a long time to be "leading the conversation." I certainly have a greater appreciation for the skilled pacing of a good tour guide and their memorisation of plenty of facts about the area they show. My husband did say they appreciated my tour, I'm assuming it's because they gave me plenty of leeway knowing that I wasn't a professional.
