Month: April 2022

Different city, similar story this week. I wrote this in a coffee shop where I worked this morning. I’ve traveled from Vienna to Berlin. This iteration of the work-from-anywhere experiment will continue for another week for me. Then it will be back to the US to regroup and consolidate from what has been learned during this European sojourn. At a minimum, I’ve learned that I need a portable second monitor to make things work. If anyone has used one that they would recommend, I’m accepting suggestions. There have also been some lessons in scheduling, but I’m uncertain that those will be implemented soon as we don’t frequently need to manage nine-hour time differences when in North Carolina like we have been with our clients based on the West Coast during this trip.

Berlin and Vienna are very different cities. Vienna has more grandeur and feels older, more refined. It has the palaces, the Ringstrasse, the art at the Albertina and Belvedere, and the peddlers in ridiculous outfits trying to get people to attend classical music performances since Mozart lived in the city. I attended a chamber music concert at the opera house on Saturday. It was just short enough to maintain my interest, and while I’m glad I attended I’m not eager to attend another such performance in the near future. Berlin is grittier, has graffiti everywhere, and feels like the sort of place where there would be lots of black leather jackets if it were an American city. These differences are linked to the two cities’ different histories, but they go some way towards explaining why Berlin is not atop many Americans’ list of European cities they wish to visit. That said, there is an energy in Berlin that I didn’t feel in Vienna or Paris. Maybe it is just spring arriving later in Berlin and the timing of my visit, but I suspect there is more to it. This is the startup hub of continental Europe, and tomorrow I will attempt to get a glimpse of this by working out of one of the coworking spaces here. It isn’t likely I will make any connections while there (it is me, after all), but I will be in a place where a serendipitous connection might be possible.

There is also more variety in the food in Berlin. Even though I did not eat at the same restaurant twice in Vienna, I did have the same dishes several times. The first schnitzel I had was my favorite, so that was a little unfortunate. I am following the same rule in Berlin, but I don’t expect that I will have a doner kebab more than two or three times while I’m here (even though this is where the dish was created and the best of the genre can be found here). I have been eating out every single meal during this trip. That is not sustainable even if I did budget for it but does leave me wanting to eat at new restaurants when I get back to Raleigh and not just go back to the same three or four places I have frequented in recent months. Maybe I can even find a few people to participate in those culinary explorations.

My European exploits continue this week. I am now in an unseasonably cold Vienna. Not that that has stopped me from taking long walks in the morning and planning my days around meals at restaurants I want to enjoy. Such a program has its hits and its misses. Yesterday I walked the entire Ringstrasse, one of the world’s great boulevards. I timed it so that I ate an early lunch at one of the restaurants in the Michelin guidebook, one especially chosen for its discounted lunch prices. This is, after all, not the first time I have visited Europe. It was a lovely meal with myriad subtle flavors (rhubarb blueberry lemonade anyone?), a craft saison with elderberry with an unexpected dry taste given its sweet/sour smell, and a waitress that started in German each time she visited my table. My German is much better than my French, but it is nowhere near as good as my Spanish and I am unable to speak in complete or even coherent sentences on most subjects. That she kept speaking to me in German was more a reflection on my appearance than anything else, something I have come to expect in this part of the world. Lunch also ended up being cheaper than my rushed dinner that was of much lower quality. As I said, hits and misses.

I visited the Belvedere Museum on Sunday and despite watching a well-written YouTube video about the significance of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” did not find myself moved by it in the same way as I do when I stand before the Impressionist masterpieces. There was a quirky bit that ties into the conference from last week as the museum has minted NFTs of portions of its most famous painting, almost as if each dot in a pointillist work were being sold individually. We are still in the earliest stages of NFTs and it is still a technology searching for meaningful use cases, but the advent of these “overpriced JPEGs” has already altered the economic fundamentals of the art world at every level.

Today I visited the Albertina Museum. It is more my style with its Monets, Picassos, and even a few drawings by Michelangelo, but there was one exhibition that only made me uneasy. Most of its works were scenes from a psych ward—no people, just cold furniture, walls, and doors. The artist had himself suffered a mental breakdown and his time in a psych hospital was his inspiration for the series. I wish he’d found a different muse, but at least that was the first exhibition I visited and so the better parts of the visit came afterwards to chase away the ickiness.

I am working from a table at a Viennese café editing this. I considered a coworking space but opted against it given that this is Vienna, a city famous for its cafés. I don’t drink coffee or tea and much of the romance is lost as I sit working at my computer and not reading a newspaper, editing a manuscript, or having some philosophical conversation. Still, I am doing it. It is unlikely to help me make any new acquaintances, but it is a gesture in that direction. Finding comrades, that difficult task under any circumstances, may prove the most difficult part of a digital nomad lifestyle.

It was my birthday on Monday. The amount of change in my life over the last year has been greater than at any point in my adulthood. I am a corporate lawyer now with a growing M&A practice and a few startup clients that have me immersing myself in emerging technologies. I live in a new city. I have a job that lets me work from anywhere. I’m finally putting that flexibility to work.

I’m actually sitting in a conference room in Paris writing this. The past few days have been the beginning of a multi-part experiment. We arrived in Paris on Sunday evening. Monday and Tuesday were spent with a different schedule. I spent the morning and early afternoon both days exploring the city—revisiting Musée D’Orsay, walking through the Luxembourg Gardens, getting sticker shock at Galleries Lafayette, etc.—all before the workday began in Eastern time. The methods of travel have been metro and walking, two modes I have used at many times and in many places in my prior travels. It has been refreshing to return to this comfort zone after an interlude of something like two and a half years. My utter lack of French has not helped, but sight “reading” is possible with the language so I have mimed and pointed my way through the necessary interactions.

My culinary experiences have been mixed with both meals that have me contemplating taking some classes to learn to prepare some of the basic sauces that form the backbone of French cuisine and meals that have me wondering whether something got lost in translation when the menu was converted into English. I have not returned to the Louvre, and probably won’t on this trip, but I was frustrated that the Musée de l’Orangerie was closed yesterday (why Musée D’Orsay is closed on one day and Musée de l’Orangerie is closed on another is beyond me, especially when you can buy a single ticket to visit both).

Work has still gone on, but in the later afternoon through to almost midnight to accommodate meetings with people on the West Coast. This part of the experiment will continue for the next few weeks and there will probably be some variation in the work schedule to better calibrate it, but these posts will more likely cover the things I get into outside of work as I live in work in a few other European cities.

We were in Miami for a few days. It was warmer than the last time I was there and more humid too, but it wasn’t unbearable just yet. That said, I would rather not return again until at least what is the late fall here in North Carolina. It was Bill’s first visit to Florida, and I’ll just say that I’m glad Miami was not my first experience in the state. He only saw some of the showier parts of the city (though I made it clear I had no interest in going over to Miami Beach on this trip so he didn’t get to experience the chaos of South Beach). The choice of hotel and location of the conferences we attended dictated this, but I was okay with him not developing a strong desire to return soon given my attitude toward the summer in South Florida. Then I spent a contrasting, pleasant Sunday with my brother and sister-in-law in quieter sections of the city and ended my time in Miami with an arepa at a restaurant where the staff didn’t even pretend to speak English and a brisk walk through the airport terminal to get straight onto my return flight.

As our visit centered around attending conferences (this was ostensibly a business trip after all), there was a lot taking place. That commotion was why we were there, to expose ourselves to as many new ideas, developments, and projects as possible in a short period of time. There was a lot of silliness too, but those things weren’t overbearing and we were able to filter them out of our sensory intake.

Some of what we encountered validated a thesis that has been developing in my mind for several months. The particular strategies I will deploy to implement it are still to be determined, but at least now I have a destination and can chart a course to arrive there. What was even more exciting, though, was what we found missing. Sure, these were not the largest conferences dedicated to this growing field, but much of what we saw represented cutting-edge developments. We have been hearing about one of the next big things deploying these technologies for some time now but the current iterations are wanting, and this got our mental gears turning. Perhaps nothing will come from these ruminations, but we have decided to further explore some possibilities.

To sum up the experience, it was a testament to the value of exposing myself to new ideas and the latest developments in a growing field and to the value of resting and grounding myself with family. It was a nice change from the heads-down, build-the-business ethos that has been (and will remain) mine at least until we have a stable foundation under our feet through our legal practice.