Travel fatigue

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I always thought it strange that we get tired during air travel. After all, there is no heavy labour involved in it – just sitting in a chair, mostly. Today, I think I figured out what the most exhausting aspect is. It is worrying about missing a connecting flight, losing a passport or forgetting some other small detail. Generally, it is the amount of new information that comes our way during travel, all of it new (for which we don’t have routines refined by everyday practice) and requiring immediate action (e.g. Your gate has changed – go there now!)

Also, there is inevitable frustration when our mental models of how things should go don’t match the reality. On our way back to Canada, for example, it took us more than an hour to pay the extra luggage fee at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport. So even though we came to the airport well in advance, we were in a rush not to miss the flight.

Having said this, I believe a healthy dose of stress every now and then is needed to maintain flexibility and openness of the mind. At least, that’s the only way I can put a positive spin on being tired at the moment.

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Jogging in Maiori

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Two years ago in Genoa, or more precisely in a neighbouring village of Boccadasse, I was surprised by how many people were jogging along the seashore in the middle of the day. It was contrary to my stereotypical expectation of Italian lifestyle of everybody taking long siestas in the afternoon. If I squinted hard and blocked out the views of hilltop villas and “Genova rosso”-coloured houses, I could imagine that I was in California.

Things are completely different in Maiori. Maybe, it has to do with the Southern Italian mentality. Maybe, I am seeing things differently in vacation mode. But during our first two days here, I din’t see a single person jogging on the street. There are also not many model-like bodies in the latest-season swimsuits. The general impression is not of an effortless visual perfection that people in Milan project. Instead, the tourists here (majority of them Italians) seem to be very relaxed about their physical conditioning, healthy eating and fitness.

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Still, I was determined not to drop my running routine, which took me a good portion of the past year to establish. So in the morning two days ago, I woke up early and set to explore the town. I ran East long the Amalfi Drive and in no time found myself outside the town limits. The road was narrow and winding, and I thought that it was good that we didn’t rent a car during this trip. Even at the early hour there was some traffic, and even being on foot, I had to watch out for the oncoming cars and hug the cliffs to let them through. My average pace on that run was quite poor, because I stopped at every corner to snap a photo with my phone – another thing that would have been impossible if I was driving. The “scenic point” parking spots are few, far between and tiny.

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Handling luggage

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We are on a high-speed (Frecciarossa) train from Milan to Naples. It’s the first day of our vacation. The display under the ceiling says that our train is moving at 296 km/h. It feels as if I am sitting still for the first time in the past several days.

Going to and coming from a six-months sabbatical feels less like a vacation trip, but more like moving the entire household. The amount of luggage we are taking with us is overwhelming. In our defense, we have been away from home during three distinct seasons, so just the clothes take up a lot of space. In fact, our five-year-old grew out of a good portion of the wardrobe that we brought with us. We knew this would be the case, so we didn’t even make an attempt to travel light.

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Claudia, who was checking us out of the apartment, asked how we would manage all these bags at the train station.

It went like this:

I called the taxi and asked them to pick us up in a van. We took down the bags in three trips by elevator (again, in our defence, it’s a tiny one). The driver helped us load the bags into the van. At the train station, there were two types of porters, who helped with the luggage. First, an “unofficial” porter loaded the suitcases on a dolly and carried them to the platform level of the building, but he could not go to the actual platform (only passengers with tickets and the station employees can go there). From the ticket checkpoint, one of the official porters (i.e. an employee of the train station) took us to the train. He had a tablet, which showed the platform assignments for the trains a couple of minutes before the announcement was made on the monitors. This was the crucial advantage, which by itself made hiring a porter worthwhile, because getting to the train early gave us some time to figure out how to store the luggage before the rest of the passengers poured in.

We were in the “2nd standard” class coach, where the seat rows are located close to each other. The designated spaces for luggage on the floor between the seats can accommodate the “large” suitecase, but not the “extra-large”. The XL bags, surprisingly, can fit on the overhead shelf, albeit with some effort. The hard shell suitecases, which are very popular these days, are actually more difficult to fit, because they do not deform as easy as the ones made of the soft material.

Now, the train is speeding along, but it feels like we have finally stopped moving. I am ready for vacation.

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Maserati photo shoot

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The gym that I go to in Milan is located in a landmark building called Palazzo Lombardia. I’ve been there almost every day for the past few months, but I am still very much in awe of its architecture. If you look at this complex of buildings in plan view on Google maps, it looks like flags fluttering in the wind, touching each other.

The inner courtyard is under a transparent roof, which makes this outdoor space sheltered from elements. I have seen this unique space being used as an ice rink in winter, a marketplace for local cheese and meat vendors, a concert stage and a beach volleyball, a basketball and a mini-football court (the cleanup required after the sports events was particularly impressive).

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The transparent roof also diffuses sunlight, creating ideal conditions for a photoshoot. Every now and then, I see models in the next-season clothing collections being photographed on the backdrop of the building’s glass walls. Remarkably, the photographers use very little, if any, artificial light – just a reflector or a single strobe apparently do the job.

Last Friday afternoon, I was on my way to grab my running shoes from the gym’s locker, so I could go for a run along Naviglio Martesana on the weekend. On the way, I saw two cars parked in the Palazzo’s courtyard. They were concealed under protective covers, which had conspicuous Maserati logos. I snapped a couple of pictures of them and was immediately approached by a security guard, who told me that no photos were allowed. He was very friendly though, and after I asked him what was going on and told that photography was my personal interest, he explained that they were preparing to shoot a commercial for Maserati.

Sadly, I didn’t have time to stay and watch. I did see a Lexus commercial being shot on the very same spot a couple of months earlier, though. That time, they had a DSLR-looking camera mounted on a very long (approx. 10 meters) arm attached to the side of the car. The car was just driving around the plaza in slow circles. I guess, the quality of the natural light filtering through the transparent roof, combined with a modernist architecture in the background makes the production relatively straightforward.

This is the aspect of living in a big city like Milan that I am going to miss back home – bumping into cool events every time you take a step outside.

Palazzo Lombardia. Milan. Italy.
Palazzo Lombardia. Milan. Italy.

Late dinners

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We came across this difference in European and North American lifestyles when we were on vacation in Spain two years ago. We were in Nerja, on Costa del Sol, in the middle of summer. The days were so hot that the restaurants stayed closed until about 8 pm. So even though our daughter was only three-and-a-half years old at the time, we were forced to abandon our precious daily routine and have dinners at 9 pm or so – a time when she would typically be in bed for at least an hour.

The same thing is happening now in Milan. As the temperatures climb well above 30 degrees (C), people around us adjust by shifting their activities into the night hours. Last weekend, we went to explore the Navigli district. It is a very neat part of Milan, the main feature of which are canals (navigli) built between 1179 and 1209 to transport marble that was used for building the Duomo. Even Leonardo da Vinci contributed to Milano’s canals by designing a system of dams. There are junk antique markets and some junk unique art for sale along the Naviglio Grande. We also visited some real art galleries, where the owners and the artists were incredibly nice, eclectic and chatty. They spoiled our daughter with little souvenirs, let us pet their dogs and spoke to us in Bulgarian, which they learned in school, thinking that it was Russian.

The restaurants open for ‘aperitivi’ around 6:30 pm. It’s a happy hour – type arrangement, where for the price of a single alcoholic drink (approx. 8 Euros) the customers get the drink and unlimited access to a buffet. The actual dinners start quite bit later. This schedule is very logical and has a lot of built-in common sense. The days are so long now that it would be difficult to go to bed at our ‘normal’ hours anyway. What we are missing is a siesta in the afternoon that we really enjoyed on our vacation in Spain. Our five-year-old is still in school, but she still needs her 10 – 11 hours of sleep every day day, any cultural nuances aside. Basically, we like the European late-night lifestyle, but we are ready for a vacation with a lot of afternoon nap time.

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Language barrier

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During this six-months-long sabbatical in Milan, we didn’t make any focused effort to learn Italian language. That is, we didn’t enroll in any courses, and our daughter went to an English-language school.

Our friends asked us recently whether we found it difficult to function in Italy using only English. Now, after almost six months I can confidently say that it was remarkably easy. Perhaps, this is due to Milan being an international metropolis, where people of many nationalities mingle and use English as their main language. But I think this lack of communication barrier is also due to the nature of people, who live here and whom we’ve been lucky to meet.

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Certainly, English is not spoken everywhere in Milan, but even where people speak only Italian, like in our favorite bakery, which we pass everyday on the way home, or in a fish store across the street from our apartment, people always greet us very warmly and make an effort to communicate.

In some cases, they very tactfully accommodate our efforts to speak Italian. For example, in a gelatteria, where we buy ice cream almost every day, I only recently discovered that the owner spoke nearly perfect English. This happened when I exceeded the capacity of my Italian and gesture language while buying gelato for a dinner party with our friends and colleagues.

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Creating disfluency

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“The best lessons are those that force us to do something and to manipulate information “
— Charles Duhigg “Smarter Faster Better

One of my favorite jokes is about a teacher, who complains about how incapable of learning his students are: “I explained it once,” he said, “- they didn’t understand. I explained twice – they still did not understand. I explained for the third time – I finally understood it, but they still didn’t!”

This week, I tried to recreate this effect for myself. I taught a short PhD course at my host university here in Milan, and, being a visiting professor, I had a lot of freedom in choosing the content and the format of the course.

Generally, I believe that academic teaching and research are best done with some synergy between them. In other words, one can benefit the other. In practice, though, I think that usually my research experience positively influences my teaching, but the opposite feedback is indirect at best.

This time, I wanted to take advantage of the fact there were only a few graduate students in the class, who were already well on their way to becoming capable researchers. So I decided to completely re-work the way I usually present the fundamental concepts in my research area (which is aeroacouctics – I study how fluid flows generate sound). The course preparation took a lot of time, but in retrospect, forcing myself to manipulate the information that I was already familiar with helped me crystallize the image of the state-of-the-art, not only for the students, but for myself too, and define the “adjacent possible” – the area just beyond the cutting edge of the research field, where we will focus our next efforts.

The reason for this is that deliberately re-arranging the information makes it disfluent – more difficult to deal with initially (e.g. I cannot jump straight to conclusions, because I am familiar with the field.) It has been shown in various fields that engaging with information, manipulating it, makes it “sticky” in the long term. It transforms information into knowledge.

I think that is why practice is so important in any field, from research to kendo to photography. It is not enough to have read about integration by parts or suriage waza or motion blur. We need to do the techniques time and time again to understand them and “make them our own”.

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Homemade pizza

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Some experienced travelers say that in order to fully experience the benefits of long-term travel, one needs to live in the new country for longer than 3-4 months. This initial period is needed to learn the rhythm of the community android establish new routines. I think we are getting to the point of settling in Milan only now, after living here for five months.

Our daughter’s school has a fantastic lunch program. We are certainly going to miss it when we come back to Canada. The menu, which is catered in from a restaurant, is healthy and diverse, but pizza Margarita is her favorite item. They had it for lunch today, which our daughter told us on the way from school. And then she added perhaps the best compliment my wife could hope for as a cook: “But you know, mum, I like the pizza that we make at home much better.”

Making pizza at home is our daughter’s favorite pastime. She always insists on picking up some pizza dough when we go to a supermarket. Ever since reading Pamela Druckerman’s “Bringing Up Bébé,” I have been convinced that cooking is an excellent educational activity for kids. Apparently, the quantity of our practice is starting to convert to quality, if such a discerning critic as our daughter thinks that our homemade pizza rivals one from a real Italian restaurant.

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Ducati!

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Today, we took our daughter’s bicycle to a shop in Isola to fix a hand brake cable. Actually, it is not her bike. We are borrowing it from a colleague during our stay in Milan, because his children have outgrown it.

Last summer, when we signed our daughter up for a week-long Pedalheads camp in Victoria, we could not imagine that her riding would be one of the most important and enabling skills for our sabbatical stay in Milan. In fact, she has been riding the bike so much over the last five months, that the brake cables stretched and had to be replaced.

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On our way to the bicycle shop, we came across a motorcycle dealership/store that occupied tree corners of an intersection. Before coming to Italy, I was half-expecting a Ducati dealership at every corner. If I had seen this particular corner sooner, it would have certainly exceeded my expectations.

As we were passing by, I peeked inside the mechanic’s shop, where some bikes were being serviced. It reminded me of a documentary series that I saw a few years ago, where they compared the manufacturing processes, with all the inherent cultural nuances, of Japanese and Italian bike makers. For example, at Honda, the managers knew up to a second how long it takes to assemble a new bike (something around a minute). When they asked a Bimota mechanic the same question, he was a bit puzzled at first, and then replied: “As long as needed.” Later, as he was building the bike, he stopped a couple of times to wipe the partially-assembled motorcycle clean, because “he didn’t like how it looked covered with oil”.

There is definitely a flair of art about Italian bikes, and the un-rushed way they are built and maintained. Too bad we were pressed for time and did not stay longer and observe the masters at work. Oh, the irony!

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Lake Como

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Last Saturday, we went to Lake Como. Here are some notes, if you are coming just for a day trip, as we did:

  1. The town to visit is Bellagio. On the map, the lake famously looks like a stick-figure man with legs striding apart. Bellagio is located right where … it makes it a subject of crude jokes.
  2. There is no train from Milan to Bellagio. The way to go is through the town of Como, which is located at the end of the left foot, and not through Varenna (although we didn’t try the latter route).
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  4. There are two train stations in Como. A more convenient one (closest to the ferry harbour) is Nord Lago. Unfortunately, you cannot get to it directly from Milano Centrale (you need to start from Cadorna FN). The trains from Centrale come to the other station in Como (St. Giovanni). It took us 20 min to walk to the habour from there.
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  6. From Como to Bellagio, there are four options: bus, taxi, “fast boat” and “slow boat”. The ride on a slow boat is fantastic and is actually the highlight of the day trip. We took the fast boat on the way to Bellagio and the slow boat on the way back. The latter is much better – you are not locked inside the cabin, and the views are spectacular. It is really slow though (the one-way trip takes more than two hours). We were lucky that our five-year-old daughter was a seasoned traveler, but at that age you can get excited by only so many views of posh lakeside villas in a day.
  7. A single day trip might be too short for a truly relaxed experience. We were not rushed per se, but we were aware of the boat and train schedules, which was a bit distracting for me personally.

For photography, a telephoto lens is a must-have. The slow ferry does stop at nearly every town and brings you close to the beautiful buildings, but a long lens is indispensable for compressing perspective of the multiple layers of mountain rangesMy 70-200 weighs as much as the rest of my gear, but I used it 90% of the time (not counting the GoPro, which I camped to the railing on the ferry and just let it run during the entire ride).

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