Scowl, Nu?

City Review – Oslo Norway

Well, faithful readers, as part of my new position, I am getting the opportunity to travel around Europe to support my customer base. This week, it was a quick 20 hour trip to Oslo, Norway.

What can I say about Norway? 8 Euros for a .4 liter beer (in München, it's 2.60 Euros for a half liter). Lots of salmon. Oh, and that smoked fish that looked like kippered salmon? Eel. Complete with a spinal column and all. Five glasses of milk, a couple of eggs (some hard boiled, some scrambled) and salmon. And the eel. And a baked potato. And three beers that probably cost me close to 24 Euros.

On the plus side, everything looks like a sauna. No shit here, folks. Lots of cedar everywhere. The Oslo Flughavn is full of it. The offices are full of it. When it's warm, it smells just like, well, a sauna. Or a cedar chest. Or an old guy that took a sauna and then put on a sweater that was sitting in a cedar chest. You get the idea.

Nice place. When I make my millions, I will certainly take a vacation there just to explore one of the few places where you can ski in the morning and sail in the afternoon. Until then, I'll go to a sauna, drink a beer and tip 100 percent and listen to Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch.

Norwegian Blue? Beautiful Plumage…

If you believed the ads you occasionally see on the Fernsehen (TV), you might be led to think that the Walden (forests) in Deutschland are full with elves making little Gummi Bären.

Well folks, you're in for a surprise. I've checked around, no Gummis are to be found in the Schwartzwald (Black Forest). What there is, however is even more magical. The hills (or to be more precise, the forests and swamps) are alive… with Bärlauch.

Bärlauch is an leafy green vegetable indigenous to Europe and parts of Asia. It just does not grow in North America. Bärlauch, which loosely translates to 'bear leeks' are the food that the bears supposedly graze upon when waking up from hibernation. It's a relative of both the onion as well as the water lily… so it grows these beautiful spear shaped leaves that are extremely tender and have a light onion flavor without any of the sharpness found in a leek or green onion. It's perfect for soups and sauces (like the Bärlauch and cream sauce for the pasta I made tonight) and is only available for a few months each year.

That's the thing about Germany. You can't get every type of Obst (vegetable) every day. At the vegetable shop in my building, you can usually find a couple types of lettuce, some peppers, mushrooms and a whole host of other vegetables, fruits and tubers. But you could go in one day and see three types of hot peppers, and the next day, none. The people here expect that if the shop owner can't find a good batch of a certain produce, they don't settle for second best, they just don't have it. This makes planning out meals difficult, but on the occasions when you can find fresh garlic that doesn't need to be peeled because it is so tender… or when you see that magical bunch of Bärlauch sitting among the salad greens, it's all worth it.

Tschüss,

Avery

As part of my new position, I'm doing more travel through Europe. As I visit new cities, I'll try and post a little report about each city. Here Goes.

City: Dublin, Ireland

First off, let me say that getting to Dublin was just miserable. First off, since I had all of 2 days to plan the trip, the direct flights were all booked, so I had to change both planes and airlines in Düsseldorf. For those of you who have to fly through Düsseldorf, let me warn you that there are no signs in this airport, and that you cannot, under any circumstances, check in at the gate.

See, for me, if I don't have bags (as this was a one day trip), I normally get to the boarding gate and check in there. It's alot easier than going out through passport control, checking in at the gate and then coming back through passport control and security.

Not in Düsseldorf.

After waiting almost an hour for a gate agent, I call Aer Lingus to find out that since I didn't check in at the ticketing desk 30 minutes before the flight, I couldn't take that flight. Needless to say, a little bit of heated conversation with the Gate Agent that showed up 10 minutes before the flight took off, and I got on the plane.

On to Dublin. Nice airport. Easy passport control ("How long are you staying in Ireland" "4 hours"). Easy getting a cab ("You're on the wrong side of the road!"). Great people that I met with. Fantastic meeting. Long cab ride due to construction back to the airport. Long line at check in. Again, short line at passport control and security. One Guinness at the Irish pub in the boarding area (which was remarkably like every Irish bar in San Francisco, except this one had less Irish people in it). One handful of English language magazines. One short flight to Düsseldorf in cattle (economy) class. One short wait and a schnitzel at the airport. One short flight to München, and I'm home.

That's Dublin for ya.

Avery

I realize that we may have been a little remiss in keeping all of the Scowl, Nu? readers in the loop on everything that has been going on in the life of your favorite e-zine editors. So, for those of you who haven't talked to us in the last year of so… here's the skinny.

June, 2002. Not that we didn't enjoy our time in Hartford, but for those of you who have ever been in Hartford, you know that three years is pretty much the limit unless you're planning on breeding. Let's just face it, for everything that Hartford tries to be, if you want to get a beer downtown after 8pm on a Friday night, you're pretty much shit out of luck.

One job offer later, and we're back in San Francisco.

Let's just say that San Francisco was pretty much the same as we left it. Ok, minus the "let's spend a thousand dollars worth of dot-com money on a hamburger and a bottle of Champagne" attitude. It was like stepping into a time warp? within a week, we were going to the same restaurants that we used to go to, going to the same bars and getting into the same life.

But then something changed. The bars that we once loved started to get on our nerves. Maybe the beer selection didn't change enough… maybe the music was just too goddamned loud… maybe the attitude was just too much. The same thing happened with our favorite restaurants. Maybe the portions started to shrink… maybe the prices started to edge their way up… maybe the lines were just too long.

Maybe it wasn't them. Maybe it was us.

But as things tend to happen, just as we started to realize that San Francisco just wasn't home anymore, a question was asked of me… "Would you ever consider moving to Europe?"

As a result of the my employer's acquisition by a European company, we were presented with a once in a lifetime opportunity: come to Europe to support the product that you helped design – work with a great team, pick your city and make a difference for the company.

Needless to say, on February 22, 2003, we paid our final respects to San Francisco and got on Lufthansa's direct flight from San Francisco to Munich.

It's been a few weeks here now, and we're starting to get into the swing of life here in Munich, but for me, it's already becoming more like home than anywhere that I have ever lived.

That's all for now.

Avery

6:30am. The cats are loaded into their cages. The car is fueled up and ready to be loaded. Meow.

Meow.

Meow, Ad Infinitum.

6:30am. July Fourth. Our Independance Day.

I start to wax poetic. I write like Hemingway.

Meow.

Ok, enough with the damned fru-fru writing. Plus, I always hated Hemingway. I mean, hadn’t he ever heard of a conjunction? I mean, come on, throw a couple of ands or ors in once in a while! Sheesh!

But I digress. It’s 6:30am, and we’ve just spent the last half of an hour packing our remaining suitcases, and two extremely large cat cages into the car. Time to hit the odometer reset and say goodbye to Hartford, land that we loathe and start the arduous journey west. First stop… somewhere near Chicago… that is, if we make it there because the fucking cat just won’t stop meowing. Janet even elected to sit in the back seat for the first 4 hour segment to try and keep the bloody beasties quiet.

Meow, meow, meow, yowl, yowl, sound of a foghorn, meow, sound of a walrus vomiting, meow, Avery thinking shutupshutupshutup, meow, Janet saying “it’s ok kitties”, meow, meow, noise that makes me wonder what percentage of a cat’s body is made up of lungs and vocal cords, meow, me meowing back at the cat, cat meowing back as if to say “what ‘chu talkin’ ’bout, Avery?”, meow, meow and a couple of more meows for good measure, sound of Avery swerving to avoid live yearling deer that decided to wander in front of the car somewhere near Scranton, meow in a manner to suggest their simultaneous relief that I missed the deer yet distress that the car suddenly lurched, meow for no apparent reason, meow.

10:30am. First break. Rest stop with subway attached to it. Footlong subway club with horseradish and banana peppers. Sated, we switch and Janet takes the wheel. Still, I am disconcerted that I’m writing barely better than Papa Hamingway himself.

Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow… minute of silence, meow, moew, meow, yowl, meow, meow, meow, meow… minute of silence… another minute of silence… Janet going “Kitties, are you ok?” followed by more meowing. You get how the meowing went. Luckily, around 2pm, the cats decided to shut up and we settled in for the rest of the 16 hour drive.

Aside from the deer in the road, day 1 was relatively uneventful. Somewhere near Ohio, I plotted out our first night to be near Davenport, Iowa. One quick call to 800-Hampton to see if there is a Hampton Inn near Davenport (there was) and we also made a reservation for the Sleep Inn in Rawlins, Wyoming for the second night. Other than that, it was just lots and lots of driving. Oh, and watching the fireworks through Chicago (not the big ones, but small ones all around the area)… and the 10,000 fireflies that peppered the area west of Chicago (yes, when they hit the windshield, they leave a glowing streak). That’s it. Driving, driving, driving.

Day 2. Chicago to Rawlins.

15 minutes of meowing followed by lots of Nebraska. Many, many hours of Nebraska. Nice skies, decent truck stops (ah, the Flying J), but all in all, just a long, 16 hour drive.

Day 3. Rawlins to San Francisco.

Wyoming, could this be the most desolate place in the world? No, it’s not. Nevada, now that’s the most desolate place in the world. Not even three pulls on the slot machine at the gas station could make it better. Oh, did I mention the dead cow in the median in Wyoming? Even the livestock wants to get the hell out of there.

Anyway, back to the drive. Between Wyoming and Nevada is Utah. I would say that Utah was a close number two when it comes to boredom, but all it takes is a horrible car crash to break up the bleak salt flats.

About 20 minutes from the Nevada border, in the middle of the salt flats, I was driving along at a decent clip. On the other side of the road, which was seperated from my side by about 70 feet of white salt flats, a speeding white car suddenly barrels into the salt flats. Less than a heartbeat later, the car is flipping in mid air and a second later, after rolling over at least 6 times, it comes to a crashing halt. If it wasn’t for the fact that I was chugging along at 75 miles an hour, I would have stopped, but instead, I called the Utah State police who were already fielding a ton of calls over the accident (PS: if anyone knows what happened to the driver of that car, let us know) and kept on going… a little more carefully though.

California! We hit the border and already we start to forget the horrors of Connecticut. Not even an agricultural inspector almost making us take the cats out (he decided not to) or a car on fire (everyone was out of it – nobody was in danger – or the fact that it seemed that the last thirty miles felt like it took three hours (What? 28 miles to San Francisco? Wasn’t it just 29 miles to San Francisco 10 miles ago?) – could bring us down. We were heading home… and at 10:48pm, we arrived.

It’s official. We’re back.

Meow.

Everything Falls Into Place

Well, hunting for a job isn’t everything that it’s cracked up to be. A cursory look for positions proved to be frustrating and fruitless. Seriously. Once my resume was out on the web, I started getting calls from all sorts of recruiters, but none of the positions materialized. One of them got to the last interview and then they told me that they wanted me to work in Manhattan Beach. Just to clarify, they didn’t want me working at their office in Manhattan Beach, they just wanted me to live close by so I could stop in as a contractor at their whim.

Pass.

Then there was the position doing what I was doing in Connecticut but in San Francisco. During the two week phone-screening process, they had three re-orgs, two major changes in their management and a freeze put on their hiring.

Had an offer been placed to me, I would have passed.

Then there was the startup that sounded great with excellent people that I would have been honored to work with, but the hiring went from burning hot to ice cold in less than 5 days.

So, essentially I gave up. That’s when Carlos, long time friend and co-worker, instant messaged me with the name of a recruiter that was looking for a product manager for an IVR company in the bay area. For the hell of it, I emailed my resume and gave him a call. He said that he wanted to review my resume and would call me back.

Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang. A quick phone screening later, I was scheduling up an interview with the hiring manager.

Two phone interviews later, I was asked to come out to California – on the week that I already had scheduled for vacation (coincidence? I THINK NOT) – for a series of interviews. A week later, Janet and I were bound for the Bay Area once again.

The interviews were a blur. That Wednesday, I had a quick meeting with the hiring manager. The next day, from 8am to 4pm, I was interviewing with everybody from the CEO to fellow individual contributors who would eventually become coworkers. Thursday night Janet and I left the San Jose area and went to stay in San Francisco.

I got the call on Friday that everything looked positive for an offer to be put together.

Ok. It’s Friday afternoon, and we just found out that we’re coming back to the bay. That’s great, but we were flying back on Sunday… that left us one day to find an apartment.

In San Francisco, finding an apartment in a day is borderline impossible.

So we started off by subscribing to Rent Tech on Friday night from my iBook using the most excellent SurfAndSip wireless network from a local coffee shop and calling apartment after apartment after apartment. By 6pm, we had picked out 4 potential places and had scheduled one walkthrough and planned on going to three open houses.

The first place was a dud.

It was nice, but it was small and on the ground floor with bars on the windows. Plus, the landlord was a first time landlord and he had just bought the property. Not the best combination, right?

Second time’s a charm

The second place, less than 5 blocks from our old studio in the Lower Haight, was amazing. Parking, washer/dryer hookup, two floors, two bedrooms, skylights and a private yard. Within minutes, we were filling out the paperwork – and the manager said that if we wanted it, it was ours.

We looked at one more place…

It was nice, but nothing spectacular. At that point, we cancelled the last apointment we had scheduled and told the manager that we were coming over with a deposit check. Apartment hunt complete! Total time – less than a day.

The next few days were a blur. Getting the offer letter, getting the lease, signing both the letter and the lease, resigning, scheduling the flight out to California (because they needed me to start in less than 2 weeks) and getting an unexpected offer on our condo from one of Janet’s co-workers. By the time I could stop to catch my breath, I was packing up my suitcase and getting ready to head to San Francisco as a solo act for the next two weeks.

Life as a bachelor…

It sucked. Luckilly, between the friends from the Toronado, Jocelyn and Slappy, Brett (a co-worker of Jocelyn and Slappy), Paul Jack and Jeremy (both kinfolk of Jocelyn), they kept my mind off of the fact that I was celebrating my 12th wedding anniversary 3000 miles away from Janet. But July 1 came faster than expected and I was on my way back to Hartford to gather up Janet and the cats, supervise the movers and prep for our drive back to San Francisco.

Tune in for the next installment: 3000 Miles, 3 Days, Two Cats and a Dead Cow on the Median…