Europe, Day 2: Midnight in Milan

The roads are still full at midnight – our driver is speeding up, hugging the center lane to scare off motorists thinking of merging in. He has good reason – we’re traveling at over 160 km/h. Working it out on my phone, I realize that’s about a hundred miles an hour. We’ve been driving for a half-hour already, after the hour-and-a-half flight from Vienna. I need a distraction.

I sit back and think of almost seeing the Alps. It was dark – we fly at night – and they could have been mistaken for clouds on the long, cautious approach to the Milan airport. They played Strauss, and the attendants – red skirts, red jackets, red tights with a blue chiffon – served a midnight meal.

If there’s advice I could give to business travelers, it’s this: eat whenever you can. As the (admittedly early) days go on, opportunities to eat remain far away and few between. So far it ends up as a simple binary choice during a break between talks:

• Eat
• Answer Questions

In a scenario of pure numerical outcomes, the choice of mortal refueling versus knowledge dispersal is easy enough – you need to take in order to give, and the maneuver of presenting should be giving enough to warrant calories paid back to the presenter.

But for me – and maybe this is something endemic to the setting, or to the product, but when people, many of them young people, have not only the courtesy to indulge your teaching style and presentation material –they respect you that far – but that they then have the fortitude to question something they have seen or heard – they worked it into their conscious minds – it becomes the priority to be responsive. Answering their questions is the right choice.

Thus, I remain forever grateful to the small tokens presented by the busy, for the busy; it feels as though in the small silverware and serving dishes of the airlines, in the leftover sandwiches from the conference caterings, and from the snuck-in meals from cafeterias after hours, there is a shared respect for the sanctity of basic nourishment, and it engenders within that culture an ideal – one of courtesy.

It is in the faces of the servers and the served. The same feeling I felt working those early months at the neighborhood hotel, a few miles from where I grew up. Food, beds, showers, souls in need of recharging.

“A hot meal?” she asked. The smile on her face was genuine, warm. A small glass of Riesling. A Swiss chocolate. When these things are readily available, we might refuse them. But I refuse nothing in these hectic days, and learned something in that moment, eyeing the food placed in front of me: I travel, not to increase my isolation, but to learn to be grateful for it, and for the moments that I return home and appreciate it for being there, and unchanging.

Don’t refuse a chance to rest and refuel when traveling. Eat whenever you can. It helps you remember home. It helps you stay human.