Lox - Archived Entries for 2010 / 7

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Let there be light!: [Saturday 31st August 2010]

I am in Singapore, leaving tomorrow morning at 4 AM to Japan. Together with me there is a colleague of mine, Katia, who works in the Design/Marketing department, more Design oriented as she makes all the "visual products" that we make.

It's great to be with someone, but it's doubly great to be with someone that is actually really nice and we can laugh and chat in a very "easy" way. Before any of you perverts think of it, she is happily engaged with a Fire-fighter so let's stop all the wanderings there...

Going back to this part of the trip, spirits are certainly on the rise, and also the hardest part of the business (China) is over, so despite being stressed for the things that don't work in our company, at least the heart is not as heavy as before.

Talking tonight with Katia she told me that she couldn't find the way to switch off the air conditioning last night... The switch was on the night-stand and any experienced traveller, I mean "experienced of business trip travel", will find it our immediately... She didn't, poor thing, and kept waking up to put up the temperature or to put it down if it was too hot!! I still can't stop laughing thinking about the scene...

Apparently she couldn't find a way to switch off the lights either! But I was too busy laughing to ask her how she eventually did it...

So in a way all these trips ARE giving me "something". I guess that I could probably live without all the little tricks that I use when I am in these kind of hotels, but I guess that it makes my life a lot easier and better when I am trapped in these 4/5 stars prisons.

Tomorrow Japan, and still 4 weeks to go till the end of the trip. I want to be back soon, I want to take care of my life, but now it feels like I need to go through more pondering and more reflections before I am ready to start something new... Let's hope this trip will help me in finding "me" again, like it happened a long time ago, when Claire decided to dump me and I spent a considerable time with John going around England...

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Wrapping things up in China: [Tuesday 2th July 2010]

Sitting here in front of my mac, at 8.30 AM, already had a spot of breakfast, waiting to go to work again.
Fortunately we arrived at the end of the trip in China, so this is the last day where I will have to get drunk at night, I am a bit empty. Or better, I feel a bit empty.

Maybe is because the company where I work is in a bad condition and all the efforts that I am doing seem a bit pointless. Maybe is because I am tired of this life, and after only 1 week of work I am already letting things go. Maybe is that I didn't sleep properly, as usual, though I suspect that after 1 week jetlag is going to be sorted soon.

The good news is that my bag is back, which means that now I have all my clothes, plus some extra, that I have bought along the way. In the end it was quite hard to manage all the shopping and meeting clients, but at least my old stuff is still there, which is important!

Then tomorrow I am going to meet Katia, my colleague from marketing in Hong Kong, she's travelling to Asia together with me because we have a project to develop for the point of sale development, which is going to be interesting to do of course.

Apart from that I am already looking forward to the end of this trip, I want to be able to do sport, I want to be able to sleep in my bed, I want to be able to be with the people I really want to be with.

I have been brought up burdened of responsibilities that probably I shouldn't have had for my age, not that this is a problem mind you, but this story that "acceptance and deprivation" is synonymous of "grown up, responsible" doesn't stick to me anymore.
This seems more and more a story that people tell themselves to sweeten a pill that otherwise would be quite bitter.

So in the end we accept not being happy with things because "that's the way grown ups should do, or accept or whatever". And we don't change.

Rebellion for rebellion' sake is pointless, there is a certain degree of acceptance that needs to be considered if you want to live into society, but it cannot be 100% from one side. I want to try to change how things are, maybe I will fail miserably, but at least I want to give it a shot.

Shame that I have to wait till I get back, in the meantime I'll work on my mind!

Now time to go, work awaits me.
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Clearly, I am under some sort of test: [Wednesday 21st July 2010]

Fourth day of this huge business trip, probably the longest that I have ever made, and guess what? the deity of Business Trips "BUSINNUSS" has decided to test my resolve and strength by getting my bag completely lost.

Yes the "initial delay" turned out to be a very serious full fledged "LOST CASE", where no matter who I speak to or call, nobody can give me answers. Well, unofficially Lufthansa told me that they don't have a clue where it is and that it might well happen that the bag shows up in Beijing where it was meant to arrive without notice.

As if it will walk there by itself.

I am quite upset, to say it in mild words, all the stuff for 6 weeks of trip is in there, all my clothes for summer are in that bag, and now I am really screwed also because it seems that despite a delay that is now going into the fourth day, nobody know about compensation or what I should do.
My company allowed me to buy "some stuff" for the next 3 days, and then keep doing it until the bag is found, but quickly they also started to tell me that I should spend as little as possible etc etc etc... Spending "as little as possible" is easy in China, you go and buy local stuff, but frankly speaking since I am here for work and I must try to look respectable, I went on "mid level brands" that unfortunately are rather expensive. So now I have to deal with the guilt as well...

Difficult trip.

Regarding my bag the thing that really upsets me the most is the fact that I have lost a lot of items that I really liked, not just clothes but also my rucksack, lucky holiday hat, bags, shoes and so on...
I guess that it's very stupid to grow attached to a "thing", but I have so little of them that the few I have I really like..
Still, "things" are just "things" I cannot cry over loosing them, there is much worse in the world, and in any case I am resolute to make Lufthansa pay for this blunder, because it's all their fault. Shame they have been a very good partner for travel all through the years...

As to the trip itself it's really a pain in the ass, the meetings with the sub-distributors happen in the afternoon, then dinner with mandatory heavy drinking, some sleep and then move to a different city, half drunk and half asleep.
Yesterday in Beijing I had to force myself to throw up because I knew that keeping the alcohol inside would have meant a terrible day after, which I cannot afford.

I am sure that people think that my job is much nicer than this!! It isn't it's really crap having to stay 3 hours at dinner with people speaking Chinese all the time, then every now and then they stand up and drink with you bottoms up whatever alcoholic drink they find.

today we are moving to another 2nd tier city, Shenyang, 4 hours on the train, it will be the first experience in China.

The positive side? I do not have a huge suitcase to carry around.... though I wish I had it...
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Intercontinental Travel: [Monday 19th July 2010]

Not a good start for this business trip. For the SECOND time this year Lufthansa managed to loose my bag, I really hope I can get it by tomorrow as they tell me because otherwise I am royally screwed.

To top it off the insurance coverage that the company was meant to have is not "sure" anymore, meaning that I cannot spend a lot of money to buy other stuff, and all the Beijing shopping centres are quite far from where we are so it makes our situation much worse as I have to revert to brands that normally I would not buy.

Meetings with the clients were ok I guess, but the whole situation is only reinforcing the feelings that I have had enough of this kind of life.

On the 21st moving to Harbin, never been there, bound to be interesting (I hope). I have been already promised a night drinking Harbin Beer which is apparently as good and famous as Tsingtao, the most popular brand of Chinese Beer around the world.

I wish John was with me to really enjoy the night, but alas it's not going to be like that...
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Another spin of the wheel: [Saturday 17th July 2010]

Sometimes I stop and think.

I used to do it a lot, then I realized that I was hurting myself far too much with all those nice "movies" that my head managed to think up, and thanks to a lot of efforts I managed to let it slide a little.

Not that I have anything against daydreaming, I love to do it, it's just that I used to feel like when you are actually having a great dream, that seems reality, and all of a sudden your mum comes into the room and the last things you hear before seeing the dream slipping out of sight are "TIME TO GO TO SCHOOL! WAKE UP!"...

I mean, imagine this: you having a great dream, where you are a superhero, where your smarts saved the day, the world, the company, whatever. The mandatory Hollywood babe is there begging for that little "sumthing sumthing" (or even more if you are already into the more hardcore version of the dream), and all of a sudden when you look down at her (she is kneeling), her face quickly looks at you like the kid in the Exorcist, and that beautiful face grimaces in an expression mixed between annoyance and sleep and tells you "Time to go to school, get up!!".

Ok I probably took the long path to describe why limiting pointless thinking is good for you. In the end you always end up disappointed.

Going back to the main topic, yesterday I was thinking.

I looked at my life in the past 11 years, always on the move travelling, and that nasty pang of dissatisfaction hit me straight in the face.
I guess that after the recent events a lot of certainties have fallen apart and I have a strong desire to start living my life again here in Florence. But the reality of things is that I am trapped in this line of business where I get to travel a lot in places that after so many years are a bit dry for me, I have seen them all, "..been there, bought the T-shirt..." feeling.

And now that things were kind of picking up a little with new friends, new sports, new things to do, I have to leave. Mind you not for 2 weeks and be happy with it, for SIX BLEEDING WEEKS... All Summer gone, I will not have any holidays this round, mostly because I will be taking a group of 24 people around Japan as a sort of tour leader of a trip that I organized for a friend that has a travel agency.

It's not the holidays that I will miss, I will miss the opportunities of meeting people, chill out, maybe even find some woman, who knows!

I travel far too much and it's starting to affect my life as a whole and I am not happy. I hope that I can pick it up from where I left it in September, and I hope that I can actually bring it forward despite all the hurdles, I hope that the friends will still be there, that those honeys I saw at the bar yesterday will still be there, I hope that Florence will decide to stand still for a month and half.

But the reality is that she won't, so I am daydreaming again... :(

What am I going to be in the future if I keep living on a plane?

In the end the feeling that I have, and the "movie" that I made yesterday was of me playing at the famous "wheel of Fortune", and always getting "skip one turn"... :(

Another spin of the wheel....

Off we go!
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