inside and out

When I took up my current position at DECTRIS in March, I was confronted with copious travel from day zero.  Day one was Monday, 2 March, my first day at the new job.  One day before that, very early in the morning, I was on the way to the airport for my first assignment, a crystallography workshop in Athens, Georgia, that I later wrote about in an oblique blog post, the best way I could come up with of preserving souvenirs of work travels.

Oblique was the key ingredient in what has by now developed into a little series of posts.  They were written without artificial urgency or slavish adherence to schedule.  Not all trips were commemorated – even though that was my intention at the beginning.  Sometimes I was too busy or too lazy to write.  At other times, I couldn't find anything curious to associate with the trip, nothing that would make a good story.

I would have expected the most exotic destinations to be the best sources of material, but this hasn't happened.  The week in Taiwan passed without mention, though much happened that I wouldn't want to forget and even started to write up.  In contrast, a single night in Prague and a drive to Göttingen offered unexpected returns.  In this regard, business travel is like any other travel (and, incidentally, like the writing of this blog):  I enjoy it best when I don't know what will happen.

The conference I attended the last couple of days didn't promise much in this regard.  It was in Germany, down south in an area that's beautiful but also rather familiar to me, and the program, fixed from 8:30 in the morning to 11 at night, left little room for serendipity or imagination.  On the train to Munich I started thinking about the dominating topic of discussion in Germany these days, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants, and my strange lack of reaction to it.  To form an opinion, which I currently don't have, I'd need to organize my thoughts, which I do best by writing them down.

I didn't get very far.  Checked into the conference hotel by Lake Tegernsee, the misery of the world faded away as if killed, suffocated by the luxury that surrounded me, a luxury that was so profound that it was hard for me to grasp – and that it occupied all my mental faculties trying to.  The bathroom, generally a good proxy of a hotel's quality, was cladded in slabs of marble half an inch thick, like a hammam of Oriental royalty.  The fittings were golden, the floor heated and the bathtub immense.  The shower was ensuite, its own marble-clad room with a frosted-glass door.  The toilet was in yet another room.  Navigating this almost required a map.

In the corridor leading into the room were enough closets to store the necessities for a prolonged stay.  I was reminded of the grand residences where Europe's wealthy of the early twentieth century would spent entire summers in decadence, like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain or Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice.  There was no ironing board – guests apparently have their shirts ironed here – but a pillow menu that included such wholesome choices as millet chaff and horsehair stuffing.

It was all a bit much, and it became positively absurd when contrasted with arrival centers hastily erected in high school gyms and hospital basements where groups of refugees spend their days in enforced idleness, surrounded by plastic sheeting that provides little space and no privacy, a poor environment to turn desperate hopes into a modest future.  Then came the evening, and housekeeping returned to my room to bring new towels and prepare the bed for the night, removing the bedspread, fluffing the duvet, and parking the slippers for their job the next morning.

Hotel management would probably argue that luxury is the little details.  The TV magazine was always opened on the correct page.  The first morning at breakfast, it wasn't the buffet that struck me most, incredible though it was, but a low cabinet in the lobby I had missed earlier when returning from a jog along the lake.  On it, fresh towels, water bottles, apples and granola bars waited for those whom the run had left in a better shape, their vision less dulled by exhaustion than mine.

But luxury is not the little details.  True luxury is big – it's time, and of that I didn't have any during my stay.  At the far end of the circular driveway in front of the hotel, RS series Audis, outrageous vehicles including a station wagon with a Lamborghini engine, were waiting to be taken for a spin around the lake by hotel guests.  I didn’t find out whether this offer applied to us bulk-rate spongers as well.  There wouldn't have been time anyway.  Of the spa in the basement, I saw pictures only.

On the train back to Zurich where I'm writing these lines, the situation is different.  I feel calm and relaxed, resting at last after an intense two days of work.  As it happens, I have two more long train rides lined up this week.  Maybe I'll even find the time to make up my mind about the topics that are really important at the moment.