very simple

My week:

Flew to London Sunday night, landed 6:30 Monday morning. Was at my firm’s London Office by 10. Stayed until about 10:30 pm. Drank about 17 cups of espresso over the course of the day.

Worked from London Tuesday until about 9 pm.

Flew to Rome Wednesday morning. The plane takes off from Heathrow at the awesome hour of 6:40a.m. Get to wake up at the even more awesome hour of 3:45 a.m. to finish packing, dress in client-meeting appropriate attire, check out of my hotel and meet the car taking me to Heathrow at 4:45 a.m.

Work in Rome Wednesday. Go to very nice dinner with co-workers at restaurant I tried to eat at about 6 times the last time I was in Rome, but could never get a table. Our arriving at the somewhat late (even for Italy) hour of 10p.m. after checking into our hotel seems to do the trick.

Work in Rome Thursday. Go to even nicer dinner with clients and others. After, of course, spending an hour not figuring out how to send a fax from my client’s office and having to go back to the hotel to send it from there. Dinner is at the practically early-bird special hour of 9:30 p.m. I arrive late.

Get back to the hotel Friday a.m. at about 1:30 a.m.. Wake up at 6 to continue working. work right up until I check out at noon, taxi to Fiumcino airport, ask ticket agent to let me check in early so that I can go through security to get to the BA lounge for a 2pm conference call. Explain that if I waited until after the call to come to the airport, I wouldn’t make my flight. When said ticket agent says it’s “absolutely impossible and he will never ever help you”, after doing nothing to check for me, escalate fight with the ticket agent for another 20 minutes until he finally calls his manager (which is all I wanted in the first place) who manages to get me through security in time. Said fight includes ticket agent trying to hide his airport ID so I can’t see his name (classic move of someone who is totally (sarcasm) being straightforward and honest), and then telling me that if I had only smiled, maybe he would have tried to help me, because apparently, instead of actually being impossible (as disproved by the fact that, um, it was possible), his helping customers is contingent on said customer’s willingness to stroke the ego of someone who works in customer service. You can guess how much I just love people telling me to smile when they’re not bottlenecking my ability to do my job.

Work from the BA lounge until 4pm. Then go to catch plane.

Discover that plane has been delayed by 1:15. Remember that time to change planes in London, including going through customs and getting my Virgin Atlantic boarding pass at another terminal from the one I land in, is 1:30. Realize that I will not make the flight in London. It’s the last flight of the day. Spend two extra hours at Fiumicino rearranging my flights and getting a hotel room in London. And calling everyone who I had even tentative Memorial Day weekend plans with that I might be a bit…missing.

Finally fly to London. When the customs and immigration officer asks “how long are you staying in London?” try not to either (1) cry, (2) burst out laughing. Try to figure out whether “Heathrow Airport” is an appropriate destination address for my third stay in the UK in less than two weeks.

Get to Heathrow Marriott. Discover that 2 of the 4 elevators are broken. Also discover that the medical conference taking place at the hotel has just dropped off about 200 participants 3 seconds before I arrived. Finally push some old people out of the way when the 4th elevator I’ve been patiently waiting for gets rushed by said old people while I struggle with my luggage.

Get to room. do more work.

Get work done at about midnight. Decide that it’s time for a blog entry.

I’m really, actually, totally home for good this time.

I think.

Back when i left, in September, I was supposed to be gone for two, three weeks tops. Two months later, after putting myself through the wringer physically, we finally signed off.

And this last couple of weeks was certainly the worst. After I wrote last, when I got to come home for a total of 26 hours (including the extra hour I got for daylight savings time), I went back to London. From the time I left until Monday afternoon when we finished, I billed over 150 hours.

In 9 days.

150 hours is around what I normally bill in a not-crazy month.

Except for the night (I think it was Friday) where I was forced to go home and get a full night’s sleep because we were approaching the "final stretch", The most sleep I got in a night was 3 hours. From 5 pm saturday (when I came back from that long sleep) until 4 pm Monday, I worked straight through. This was by far the most grueling thing I’ve ever worked on, and I can’t even give y’all the details, because of that whole confidentiality thing.

And I lied when I said I’m home for good – but if I travel again, it’ll be for something relatively fun like the closing dinner. Which is rumored to be occurring somewhere fairly exotic.

I’m taking the day off to recover, and then I’m actually happy to be going in to the office. my office. With my stuff. and my colleagues.

I’m home again…

Returned to Rome on the redeye monday night, and worked pretty much constantly until this morning. Including pulling an actual all-nighter last night in rome, working straight through until it was time to leave for the airport, where I proceeded to sit down in my seat and pass out, only waking up for the food service and wondering how I could sleep through the plane actually taking off.

Here’s the crazy part though. We’re finally going to London.

Tomorrow.

Everyone in my group came home for the day, and the whole week we were all…"no, no really, we want to go home". Basically we were all so crazy that we felt we needed the mental health break of a day at home. And then on the plane, we were all like, "what the fuck were we thinking?".

At least I don’t have to go back to Rome.

It’s a beautiful city, and I highly recommend spending a week or two there on vacation. Or elsewhere in Italy. but six weeks of poorly air-conditioned conference rooms in an office park halfway to the airport is not visiting rome.

I don’t have to leave until fairly late in the day tomorrow (one of the benefits of London? It’s several hours closer, so the redeye leaves much later in the day). And, I just realized that daylight savings time ends tomorrow, which means that I get an extra hour to my day. And when you’re counting the time at home in terms of hours instead of days, that extra hour is a really great thing.

Anyway, my apologies for not updating more regularly, but I’m obviously distracted. My doorman asked me today why I bought an apartment if I was never going to live there…I told him that wasn’t exactly the plan when I moved in…

I finally got to come home the other day. Got back Wednesday afternoon…

of course, I’m already booked on a plane back to Rome Monday night. So this is more of a reprieve than a pardon. I can’t even begin to describe how much more human I feel though, just being back here. Just getting to see familiar faces. Right after I got home, I ran up to the supermarket to buy some milk, and it made me irrationally happy. And I ran into one of my neighbors (actually, the wife of my lawyer who helped me buy this apartment – they live across the hall), and she and her husband had gotten home on Wednesday after a 3-week trip to…Italy. Of course, they were on vacation, so they had a slightly different experience than I did.

Wednesday night I did make it to Yama for dinner. My stepmother turned it into a giant dinner party, because she had a bunch of friends in from California, and it was pretty fun (even though I was falling asleep at the table). Now, you have to understand that physically, yama is kind of a dive – no decor, in a basement, ridiculously crowded and usually involving a long wait to get a table. So they were all looking at me like, why did you want to come here? And then the sushi showed up. And they understood. When we ordered, we only had 5 people at the table, and only ordered for 5. Then Tano showed up, and there was still enough food left for him to not only eat an entire meal, but there was still sushi left over from that. The place has pretty much ruined me for sushi anywhere else, and even though I don’t live around the corner anymore, I still try to get down there on a regular basis.

But now…I have to go to work. 

I think I’m really, actually, for real, no joke finally going home (at least for a few days) on Wednesday. I may need to turn around and be here again on Monday, or in London, but just to get out of this hotel room will be exalting (and seriously, I’m so staying at the airport Sheraton if I have to come back – I feel confident that they don’t charge 80 euros a day for wireless internet access). I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining too much, and it’s actually not the work that’s the problem (the work has been interesting, if very time-consuming). It’s really all of the circumstances at the margins. It’s certainly the hotel (which…I don’t want to get started again), the apparently totally anomolous rainy weather, that lovely flu bug thing I had last week, missing the entire fall lineup of new TV shows, missing major events in my friends lives, and not even having time to shop for myself, let alone gifts for anyone else (did I mention that everything around here is closed on Sunday?).

Oh, and my back totally misses both my new mattress and my aeron chair. And, while I’m normally a big fan of Italian food, I’ve seriously eaten enough pasta to last a lifetime. I want sushi. I’ve actually had a major craving for about a week and a half. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be heading downtown to yama wednesday night, no matter how tired I am.

On the flip side, I’ve become quite adept at typing out long e-mails on my blackberry. I think tonight I’m going to find a little outdoor cafe, have a glass of wine, and not think about work for a few hours.

So, this was a particularly crappy week. I managed to come down with some sort of flu/sinus infection thing where my entire head feels like it’s filled with cotton balls and I’m nauseous to boot. And it’s been raining for the whole week. And, even though I only worked four days last week because I took Tuesday off for Rosh Hashonah, I still managed to bill almost 70 hours through the end of Friday. Needless to say, I’m a little burnt out.

And the hotel isn’t helping. I’ve had a series of (relatively petty) problems since I’ve gotten here. I admit that most of them are petty, but over time, I’m beginning to think that someone is out to get me. It started with my "business-oriented" hotel having no idea how I could print a document my first week here. It took four hours to get it done, after I spent at least two of those hours moving my way up the chain of command trying to find out where the business center advertised on their website was. So that pissed me off.

My room key stops working every 2-3 days – they tried to use the excuse that if I keep it in my purse near a cellphone, it can become demagnetized. OK, fine. I won’t keep it in my purse. And then I noticed something – about two weeks ago, I was getting it fixed (again), and even though my reservation at the time was through October 3rd, they only reactivated it through September 30 (I watched the guy typing on the computer). I actually didn’t say anything at the time, because, who knows, I could have been wrong, but sure enough, September 30 arrives and my card doesn’t work again. So that was another thing that pissed me off.

Two Saturdays ago, I went to get breakfast at the hotel. Get a table in the courtyard, and sit there. and sit there. and sit there. I didn’t want to eat the buffet (frankly, I wanted an omelet), but I eventually (after about 20 minutes) got up and went inside to get some food because no one appeared to want to take my order. When I got back to my table, I then had to go find the maitre d’ in order to (finally) get a cup of coffee. Then the bees showed up. Needless to say, I got up and walked out of the restaurant without signing for my bill. This was the point when I went to the guest relations people and started to complain. Where they told me, a full week after my printer problem, that they were going to get me a printer in my room (first I had heard of this). I pointed out that it probably would have been more useful, like, 7 days earlier when I actually needed to print something (mind you, I still haven’t seen this mysterious printer).

They also, at that point, offered to change my room to one with a nice big patio (not a bigger room, mind you, I still trip over the furniture and have to work pretty much from bed). The patio is really nice to look at through my window and the pouring rain.

They also informed me at that time that the reason I couldn’t "find" the business center was because they had to close it. Apparently the Italian police have decided that there needs to be fairly significant security at any public access point (ID requirements and whatnot) because terrorists were using these public sites to plan stuff. OK, fine. But this hotel decides that they just need to close the entire business center (at least temporarily). Instead of, you know, just sitting some low-level staff member at the front door to make sure that anyone who wants to use the center has a hotel room key. Mind you, they don’t bother mentioning any of this when you make a reservation.

Ah.

So everything goes fine for another week, largely because I pretty much ignore everyone. Until Thursday, when I get back from a very long day of meetings at about 10:30 at night. I’m actually worried at this point, because I’ve been sick all day, but I’m now starving, and I know the restaurant closes at 11. So I run upstairs and call room service at 10:45 to order some plain pasta (because I’m pretty sure it’s the only thing I’ll be able to keep down). But according to the room service guy, the kitchen is closed, even though the book of information clearly says 11 p.m. So I call the front desk and ask to speak to a manager. The girl downstairs says she’ll have someone call me back right away. 10 minutes go by, and I don’t hear anything. So I go down to the lobby, book in hand, and find out that she’s gone home for the day, and there is no manager on duty. So I demand that the concierge call the manager at home, where he apologizes profusely but doesn’t actually do anything for me. I point out that the could send someone out to a restaurant that is still open (if I wasn’t sick I would have gone myself). Or, you know, let me into the kitchen and I’d cook myself dinner. I argue about this for 45 minutes, with everyone apologizing but not actually doing anything. When finally one of the guys says he’ll send someone out to get me some food (I’m pretty sure that they realized that I was just going to continue arguing about it until I got my way, in full view of all of the other guests, so they gave up). So I finally got some plain pasta at 12:45 in the morning.

OK. manager meets me on Friday to apologize, makes a joke about how they should just sell me my room at this point.

Great. Ok. At this point, nothing else could go wrong, right? I mean, I’ve had enough problems that now the manager is looking out for me personally, right? Plus, I’ve paid my bill to date, so that my office could reimburse me and I’d still have room on my credit card, so the hotel has almost $10K of my money already….

So let’s see what else happens….

Oh yeah, there was today. When I sent my laundry out.

And then got a call from the manager at 6pm saying that the laundry service had "damaged" my clothing. And not just once piece, but most of it. By pouring bleach into a load of laundry that pretty much consisted of black clothing (socks, underwear, cotton shirts). And some of it might have been shredded.

Now, of course they were happy to reimburse me. And that’s all fine. But now I needed to go out, on a saturday night, in the rain, with the goddamn flu, in order to have underwear to wear on monday to work. So I dragged a hotel employee with me, made them drive me around, and made them pay for everything up front because I refused to spend a dime. I was kind of a bitch.

While I was sitting in the lobby waiting to be taken around, I of course sent a very long e-mail on my blackberry to the hotel’s american headquarters, and made them all sit there and watch me write it. The manager thanked me for being so calm (i.e., not yelling). I actually had to point out that my anger had gone past the stage where I was even capable of yelling. I mean, this is supposed to be a 5-star hotel and they can’t even figure out how to wash a pair of socks.

I am just so ready to be back in new york. But I’m stuck here for at least another week. I’m hoping that I’ll at least get to go home for a few days at some point…I think even my boss, who was in town this week, recognizes how stressed out I’m getting. And it’s not just the work. Sure it’s frustrating and I’m working a lot of hours, but there are plenty of times when I’m home that I work like this as well. But there’s a support system I have in NY that I just don’t have when I’m four thousand miles away from my office, my family and my friends. Argh.

It’s officially been three full weeks since I left for Rome. Which, I would like to point out, is about the same amount of time that I actually got to live in my new apartment before I left on this trip.

I’m starting to feel like I’m missing things…sure, the only channels on the TV that I understand are CNN International and BBC World News, and I have relatively unfettered internet access, but something is, just, well, off.

I’m somewhat of a loner generally – there are times when there’s nothing I enjoy more than spending an entire weekend by myself, running errands, not making any "plans", just, generally, taking it easy, but I generally don’t go for three full weeks without seeing either friends or family. And I’m certainly speaking to them less on the phone because, well, it’s not exactly a local call, even if it is on a work-provided cellphone. That, and the relative alienation of not understanding anyone around me.

Maybe I’m just feeling out of it because my friend had her baby the other day (everyone’s doing great!), and I’m not going to get to see any of them for at least a few more weeks, and I know that if I was home I would at least be calling her every day to check in (as opposed to once a week) for at least the first little while…

And that’s not even taking into account the weird political shift that’s happening, like, all of a sudden in my home country…and again, I can read about it, but I can’t spend a half an hour in a co-worker’s office or on the phone with a friend just trying to wrap my head around the things that have been going on lately. When I asked my dad to send me my mail the other day, I had to tell him that I really needed my back issues of the New Yorker, and not just my bills, because I need some cultural touchstones. I almost cried when I read the cover story in this week’s NY Times magazine, and it was just a story about NY politics. But it so captured so much about why I love New York, the idea that everything that happens, happens in New York first (for good and bad), and that we’re one of the only places that was founded as specifically commercial, with no time to waste on petty puritan religious "stuff"…it’s a reason a lot of people hate New York, but it’s a reason why I love it. Ric Burns captured that essence really well in his documentary history of New York, and this article does the same thing…I know that I’m not the only one who gets sentimental when I hear phrases like "cathedrals of commerce"…

Wow, now I’m getting off track. Can you tell that I’m a little bit homesick? That, and it’s getting significantly colder and rainier around here, making it just a tad less "fun" on the rare days when I’m not working around the clock…

I so shouldn’t have had that last espresso…

…that make you realize that traveling for work is actually not the same as being on vacation. Like spending an entire, beautiful, rain-free Saturday never getting further outside than your interior courtyard-facing patio because you have to work all day. And when I say "all day" I mean from when I woke up at 10 in the morning (oops! slept in!) until 11 p.m.

All meals? courtesy of room service. My one spot of inspiration involved getting them to hook me up with extension cords for both the power and the internet on my computer, just so that I could sit outside all day. So, while I run the risk of tripping over said cords and breaking my neck, I think it’s worth it.

Anyway, I finally had time this morning to upload my photos from last weekend, when I went and stood on line at the Vatican for, like 3 and a half hours in order to get in and see the Sistine Chapel (note to readers – when you come to Rome and hear about how the vatican is both open and free on the last Sunday of the month, don’t get sucked in – go on another day and just pay the $20 to get in). I ended up standing on line in front of a bunch of horrifically obnoxious contiki tour group teenagers, who thought it was perfectly appropriate to (a) continuously try to cut the line and (b) dress like britney spears when visiting the pope’s house. I learned such fascinating insights while waiting such as "hipster jeans are, like, totally out this year!". I wanted to shoot myself after about an hour.

In other news, we did finally hear back from my brother, who is abso-fucking-lutely the luckiest guy around – he’s getting the best assignment in micronesia for the next two years – working in the small business development office in Koror, Palau. I’m already researching scuba resorts. And here he was worried that he’d end up in a place with no electricity.

ciao for now…I think it’s time for a nap…

[Update 2015] In an effort to reduce the number of holdover pages on the blog, I am slowly (very slowly) integrating these albums into the appropriate historical posts on the blog itself. As such, photos referenced in this post now appear below.

week 1:

week 2:

It’s been unusually rainy here. It’s rained at some point almost every day that I’ve been here. For the most part, it’s been at times that are OK (like 2 in the morning, when I’m asleep), or tonight, when I only had minimal exposure jumping from my taxi to the hotel doors, but on Saturday night, right at the point when I made my way to the bottom of the Spanish Steps to scout out a place for dinner, the skies opened up and just poured. I got drenched from head to toe in about 30 seconds. At which point I started making my way back up the steps.

Now, you have to understand that Saturday night was supposed to be this big festival in Rome – La Notta Bianca (white night). All the shops were staying open late, and they were having music and parties in all of the squares, including, obviously, mine. So the place was teeming with people. Wet, wet people. One group of whom started yelling at me while I was trekking up the stairs, soaking wet and still getting rained on, about why wasn’t I wearing a white shirt…(I should point out that these were not Italian guys, but definitely of the british hooligan variety). Oy. I thought I had reached the age where I no longer attracted (or whatever you want to call it) the youthful oglers, but apparently no age is too old, and no weather too unpleasant, for some segment of the male population to think it’s an opportune time for you to show them your…*ahem* (no need to encourage dirty google searches!).

So that was Saturday night. needless to say, I ordered room service when all was said and done.

I should say that I’ve been compiling a list in my head of all the things I swear I will never complain about when I get back to NYC (and which I will promptly forget about 3 seconds after getting back there)…

• the condition of the paving of the streets and sidewalks
• the width of the same
• the "out of control" drivers, including the drivers of the taxis that I am in
• parking
• traffic (did I mention that I got to experience the wonders of a transportation strike today?)
• street vendors
• tourist trap scam artists
• the size of my apartment (which is a palace compared to the ‘european sized’ hotel room I’ve been in for the past week
• the channels that I get on my TV when I stay in a US hotel (seriously – I have the CNN International lineup memorized at this point)
• the size of my office (ok, I never actually complained about it before, because I have one of the biggest associate offices on my floor (it’s a quirk of the building layout – basically they couldn’t fit another office in, so each of the two "end" offices on each side of the floor, right next to the giant corner partner offices, are a little bit wider than everyone else’s), but I appreciate it all the more after working in a cube for all of 3 days)
• the speed of my home/work internet connection
• the clearly defined rules for walking down the sidewalk, crossing the street, driving, etc.
• red lights and don’t walk signs
• elevators that are big enough for two people
• the price of diet coke (my hotel seriously charges 6 euro for one – that’s, like $9 for a can of soda – needless to say I’ve switched to espresso, which might be why I haven’t fallen asleep until 2 in the morning every night I’ve been here)
• the fact that my office stays open 24 hours (I worked at the client’s office late last night, and when I got downstairs discovered that the building had been locked, with me inside, but with a "visitor" ID card that only works during regular business hours, and no one in sight – luckily, after about 10 minutes, someone else who actually works there, who spoke english helped me out)
• public transportation

I think of new things every day too…this isn’t to say that it isn’t absolutely beautiful in this city (it’s frankly one of my favorite places I’ve ever been), and I’m in awe of the sheer amount of history everywhere I go. And I could compile a list of things the Italians do better than us as well (I so want a smart car), but right now I’m craving sushi, bagels, diet coke and HBO. And traffic lights (really – there’s one point on the route back to my hotel that involves a major four way intersection, where the only way to navigate is for my taxi to basically push its way through the continually streaming traffic going perpendicular to us – no stop signs, traffic lights, or anything – my heart ends up in my throat on a daily basis).

So I’ve been here for almost a week, and I’m starting to get used to it. I’ve been working a lot (that is why I’m here after all), but I did get the chance to do some exploring this weekend. In particular, I went to the Pantheon, the forum, Palatine Hill, and the Domus Aurea. And I took lots of pictures.

On Sunday, before I settled in to do some work, I did manage to find my way to the Prada on via del Condotti (It’s right at the bottom of the spanish steps, my hotel is right at the top). I was forced to buy a new pair of shoes thanks to the cobblestones that destroyed one of the two pairs of heels I brought with me. So clearly I needed to replace my ~$60 dead aerosoles with a pair of prada ponyskin loafers with the comfy driving moc bottom. The worst part about it? with the dollar in the toilet, I’m pretty sure I could have bought the same pair in NYC for less money. But there’s something about being in Italy, and not having to pay for any of the ordinary stuff (hotel, airfare, meals) that makes buying obscenely expensive shoes seem perfectly reasonable. And they are really comfortable.

Anyway, it’s 11 at night here, and I’ve got to be at the clients’ offices fairly early tomorrow, so I’m signing off….enjoy the photos.