Milano and the Interview

This is the part I've done before. Dealing with any Italian city takes patience, a certain savvy, and a lot of time. This is especially true when it's your first day in the country, you don't have a place to stay or any cash, and you're carrying 40 lbs on your back.

So, first step is getting enough money for the bus ride from the airport to the train station. I change $40 for €15 (holy s**t), and now I have €7.50 and am sitting in the train station.

Next step is finding an ATM. 2 ATMs spit my card at me, saying to get money from my own bank (the English instructions literally say that: a bit rude, no?). I warily stick my card into a carefully-selected third, and this time I ask to withdraw half the amount, €100. The ATM spits my card out, but lo and behold, the money comes out too!

Next I find an internet cafe and write the emails I should have written before leaving, and do a bit of research about hostels and the location of the cell phone store.

Before I can call the hostels I need the cell phone, so I make my way there, and proceed to spend an hour with the guy trying to figure out how to make it work. Of course, I had taken some sage advice and settled everything before, but promptly left my sim card in the US, so here I am doing exactly what I had set out to avoid. Long story short, the sim card works, but apparently not in my phone. So that's a chore for another day.

At this point it's starting to get late and I still don't have a place to say. So the next step is to purchase a pay phone card at a tobacco vendor (perfectly logical, right?), and find a working pay phone. 3rd time proves to be a charm on this experience as well, both with the choice of phone as well as the choice of hostel. I phonetically memorize the metro stop, (coup-D-eight, not an Italian word I've ever heard before) since my request for the guy to spell it results in a slower repetition of the same word; coup.. D.. eight.

Armed with these three enigmatic syllables, I make my way down to the subway, and scan the map for any indication of something similar. I nearly give up to ask an attendant, when my eye alights on QT8. Of course! Quartiere Otto!

I get to the hostel at 7PM and meet my roommates, one a Roman Alto Sax player living in Costa Rica, and the other an immunology PHD from Liverpool. The jazz player invites me to listen to some top-notch jazz in the city, and as I hear myself turning this awesome opportunity down, I realize that I have less energy than I did the last time I was here. So, I miss Buena Vista Social Club performing live for free, and do the responsible thing, going to bed at 10PM for a much needed 9 hours of sleep. Yes, I'm disappointed, but sitting here now I realize it was the right thing, as I just had a job interview with what looks like a great Property Management company here in Milan.

The interview was great. The guy liked what I had to say in my fluid though flawed Italian, and called my walking plan ''next level.'' I thought his company had a great idea and business model, and so it went just the way I had always hoped it would: how about a second interview next week?

For a very brief second the thought passed through my mind: ''plan the interview and take the job if they offer it, Pat. This is your chance to live in Italy!'' Just a brief second, however, after which I said, ''sorry, I'll be in the Alps next week.'' He tried to plan it for later today, but when that plan failed, all that was left was an agreement that I would call them as soon as I was done walking, and that we would go from there.

Did I lose the opportunity of a lifetime? I don't know. But I do know that taking a job would have meant losing this opportunity of a lifetime, and there is no job in the world that would make me do that. Sorry, Mom.