Italia, come ti voglio bene

It is wonderful to be back in Italy, 6 months after departing Milan.  The conference has taken up most of my time in Naples, so I haven't been able to fully explore the city.  However, I managed to see a few churches and visit Pompeii my first day here.  I have half a day of tourist-ing tomorrow, during which I plan to go to the archaeological museum, which holds most of the artefacts from Pompeii.

Even though I am in a very different part of Italy and within a very different context, I've found that being here is very familiar and Italy "feels like home" in many ways.  This experience would likely be much less fun and much more overwhelming had I not lived in Milan for 3 months:

• I more-or-less knew how to navigate the bus system here.  The hardest part is figuring out where to buy tickets - and I wasn't surprised when the news-seller refused to take a 20-Euro bill.  Small change is a necessity here!
• I mostly did ok taking the train to Pompeii and back.  The only mistake I made was not knowing the name of the station I wanted to get off at in Naples - I thought it was Centrale.  Luckily, it was the last station and I had to get off, even though I was waiting for the train to continue on.
• My Italian is serving me ok and coming easier than expected.  I'm still nowhere near the level I was last March, but I am succeeding in starting most interactions in Italian.  At the conference, all of the scientists speak English, but some of the staff seem to not speak very much.  
• I managed to find a great tea shop on my first day.  Obviously I do this in every city I travel to, but I had known that I could find some tea to take home.
• I know that restaurants are going to annoyed if I arrive before 8 PM, even if they are open.  I managed to eat at an Italian dinner time today and yesterday, but I knew I was way too early the first day... 
• I know how to get espresso, and can (more or less) identify the correct way to pay in different types of bars.  I know that cappuccinos go with breakfast (which is pastries) and that espresso is called cafe and that it goes after meals.
• I wasn't surprised by the building my hotel is in.  There is this style of urban buildings that have an inner courtyard with a strange door for people to enter from outside.  I have never seen anything like it in the US and it was very surprising to me the first time I went in one in Milan.  The common areas are simultaneously elegant and run down, but then they can hold very nice apartments.  This building holds many business and apartments.  The elevator is terrifying - and there are some subtleties to this one I haven't figured out yet.  But had I not had practice with the strange door system at my Italian tutor's place, I may never have managed to get into the hotel!
• Italian cities are loud, and in a different way from American cities.  In my apartment in Milan I could hear everything from the apartments around me (including chanting from upstairs) and there was frequently shouting in the street.  Here there is plenty of noise from upstairs and some nearby dogs that bark all of the time.  Compared to the US there seems to be much less traffic noise.
• The cord in the shower is an emergency pull and not for drying clothes.  It is not to be pulled, except in emergencies.
• Gelato can definitely be for dinner, and I even have a favorite flavor (cassata)

As much as I enjoy the conference and sightseeing, I also enjoy the day-to-day details of being in Italy.  I hope to come back again, though I do not know when that will be.  Assuming that I get tenure, I hope I can spend part of my sabbatical here.  This trip has shown me that it would be wonderful to be anywhere in Italy, not just in the north.  

Moderate Success at Departure

Taxi: Success
I found an App so that I could request a taxi without calling anyone.  It showed up on time, I think I didn't forget to do anything when I left the apartment (I was nervous I'd forget to leave the keys), and there was no traffic getting to the airport.  I had just enough Euros to pay the cab, though I think I could have paid via credit card in the app.

Bag Check: Almost Success
I arrived so early so that I couldn't check my bags right away.  When I did go to check my bags, I succeeded in convincing (easily) the gate agent that I could check 2 bags for free because of my Elite status on Delta.  Awesome.  He even thought that I should pay a lower fee ($60) than the system was saying ($85).  Awesome.  But then I had to go to a different desk to pay... where they actually knew the rules and said that I had to pay $240 for the bag.  Ouch.  Note that while these conversations all started in Italian, I switched them into English so that I could be convincing as possible.  I failed.  I'm mostly bitter that they wouldn't accept American Express.

Now I am at my gate, charging my electronic devices and downloading some music on the WiFi.  The next challenge is a short layover in Paris, where I need to go through EU-exit border control.  If I miss my second flight and end up trapped in Paris, I'll have time to blog about it!

Summary of my Leave, as a list of lists

Scientific Progress

• One article submitted (project started during leave)
• One article in preparation (project started last summer)
• One article in preparation (project started during leave)
• Data collected for new simulation project
• Experiments planned for (another) new simulation project
• I've mastered an aspect of Geant4 I haven't used before
• I've read a lot of papers about two different topics, tangentially related to my past work and central to the current/future papers.  Basically, I've gone from knowing nothing to 'a lot' on two new topics.
• I've read a number of papers related to my past work/ongoing projects and gotten caught up on the literature of my specialty.

Cities/Towns I've visited

• Milan
• Lecco
• Genova
• Oxford, England
• Bologna
• Bergamo
• Prague, Czech Republic
• Varenna
• Bellagio
• Venice

(I should make a list about museums, churches, and art exhibits I've seen - but that will be too hard to do quickly off the top of my head!)

Cheeses I've eaten

• Valtellina Casera
• Piattone - Delebrio
• Rosa Camuno
• Bitto (I really liked this one)
• Robiola Bosina - Caseificio Dell'Alta Langa (my favorite)
• Toma
• Taleggio
• Some sort of goat cheese from a street market, but I didn't get its name
• A variety of unknown cheeses at restaurants and in the dining hall

Major Achievements, other than science

• Acquired a level of Italian that could be called 'conversational', in that I have had many conversations in Italian (a few lasting an hour or longer).
• Tried a variety of different regional foods and learned many aspects of Italian culture
• Learned to make two different pasta recipes
• Visited Eastern Europe
• Learned some history.  I think I actually understand why the churches in Milan look different than the churches in Venice, for instance!
• I am going home at the same level of debt (credit cards, student loans) that I started the trip with.

Goodbye San Raffaele

It has been sad to say goodbye to everyone at San Raffaele - and with the Easter holiday, there were goodbyes spread out all week as people left early.  The feeling of "leaving a place that feels like home and saying goodbye to everyone" is very familiar.  However, I am confident that I will return to Italy in the future - and hopefully see many people again!  There is a fall conference in October (in Naples) that I hope to attend, and I hope that I can return to San Raffaele next summer and during my post-tenure sabbatical.

Beyond the knowledge that I can come back, I've also cheered myself up by thinking about India and eating a mango.  I'm almost done with packing (at least, what I can do now), so I plan to walk around the city tonight and see the Duomo one last time.

San Raffaele has a small zoo, with monkeys.  I learned this on my penultimate day!

What I've learned about Italians

1. Italians really like dogs.  Dogs are everywhere.  There are a ton of dog-friendly parks in Milan, which is good, because I've seen what the sidewalks look like in cities without dog parks (Genova).  Dogs go in stores, dogs go in cafes, dogs go on the metro, some dogs appear to be living in bars/cafes.  They are most small dogs (for small apartments), but occasionally there are some big ones.  There is a dog clothing store closer to my apartment than a human clothing store, and I don't even live in a rich/yuppy part of town.
2. Italians care about San Remo, but not Eurovision.  This is perhaps on too small of a sample size... but some of my colleagues got the San Remo-winning song stuck in my head.  I found out it is the Italian representation at Eurovision this year and told my colleagues that I would watch and cheer for Italy.  However, they had no idea what Eurovision is.  Even after I explained it.  I might as well egregiously extrapolate: Italians care more about competition within Italy (and between Italian cities/regions) than between Italy and the rest of the world.
3. While many aspects of the driving are questionable, they are very respectful of pedestrian and cyclists.  I'm always careful about walking out in front of cars, even in crosswalks, but I find people always stop here.  Even when I'm not about to walk out into the street, cars stop.  I've seen others walk in front of cars that are going fairly fast, knowing the cars will stop.  People may drive way too fast on my tiny little residential road, but I've seen no issues with pedestrians or cyclists.  
4. Italians are (seemingly) not upset by people speaking their language badly.  Initially, everyone was very willing to speak to me in English at the hospital.  Once they found out I spoke some Italian, they spoke to me in Italian.  They don't seem to mind that my Italian is terrible.  I met up with my Airbnb host, and the same thing happened.  After I demonstrated an ability to hack my way through some Italian, we ended up speaking entirely in Italian.  Consistently, people have demonstrated patience with my poor Italian and occasional need to switch to English - not just people I know at the hospital, but in stores as well.  
5. They have a lot of rules, but few of them are taken very seriously.  It took months to sort out the legal paperwork for me to be at the hospital, but I never received a badge or e-mail or anything.  When using the Metro, one must scan the ticket both to enter and leave.  But, I've witnessed many people jump the turnstile (without any of the guards blinking an eye) and found that I could argue myself through the one time I made a mistake.  Recently they had us start signing the lunch tickets - I think to regulate the fact that many non-students are using them.  All of us non-students sign them... but nothing changed.  

What I've learned about myself in Italy

1. I can learn a language if I invest 3 hours a day.  A few weeks ago, I really felt like I was thinking in Italian and was happy with how quickly my language skills were progressing.  However, this past week has been much worse!  Before, I started my day with a 90 minute lesson and my brain started running in Italian.  I ended my day with (typically) 90 minutes or more of homework.  Now, the 10 minutes of review is nowhere enough!  It is like a part of my brain is no longer functioning.  At least I know what it takes for me to really get to a place where I can speak a language!
2. I'm a good scientist!  My graduate school experience was a bit unusual, and then I skipped the whole "post doc" step.  While it is no surprise that I have a bit of "imposter syndrome", I've lacked a certain confidence or exuberance for my research over the past few years.  The past 3 months have shown me that I have a strong skillset and I have good ideas.  I have read papers on a variety of new topics and even thought "well, since no one else has predicted/measured/calculated this value, perhaps I can calculate it from first principles".
3. I will never have free time.  This is my first attempt at "leave", and while I did the "go away" part correctly, I didn't quite nail my time management.  In particular, I really thought I would get much more done than I actually could!  On the bright side, I've been sleeping like a real human being.  One day I did the calculation, and my work schedule and Italian lessons (with homework) was justifiably taking up my entire day.  It isn't my fault my "side projects" weren't getting done, there are just not enough hours in the day.  
4. When I buy pastries for breakfast the next day, I eat them as soon as I get home.  Oops.

(I've leaving off the things I learned in the past, like my love of bitter Italian drinks, my love of Italian food, and my love of trashy Italian music)

Organizing Papers...

I really hate organizing papers.  I love Zotero, a program that manages references.  It syncs across multiple devices and interfaces very nicely with LaTeX.  I have used it for a long time, so I have a lot of references saved in it.

Unfortunately, I've never mastered organizing references beyond putting them in Zotero.  I made "collections", but not in a way that has been helpful or useful.  For instance, I made a subfolder in the collection (folder) that corresponds to my main research topic.  I called this folder "recent", because at one point those were new papers on the topic... a few years ago.

But beyond the references is the issue of the papers themselves.  In graduate school, I typically printed the most important papers.  This was especially useful for making notes by hand, my preferred method.  But, how do I organize those printed papers?  How do I remember if I printed it already?  And do I really want to take those big binders with me when I travel...

When I graduated I ran into a new problem: I could no longer access journals.  I didn't save many papers, because I could always go back to the online journal and access them there.  But I had that access through Stanford!  While Agnes Scott has access to some journals, I cannot directly access the majority of papers that I need for my research.  The library is able to get the papers for me, but there is a delay and a cost associated with it.

Now that I am at a major research institution, I have been able to access most papers that I need.  I've downloaded all of them, so that I could access them later.  But how do I organize them on my computer so that I can ever find them again?  The papers I already had typically ended up in many different places and I could rarely find what I needed.

The obvious solution is to create some sort of folder structure and then associate each file with the Zotero reference item.  This way I can use Zotero to search and organize, but then I still have a copy of the paper when I lose journal access.  Perfect!... except that at the hospital, my laptop cannot access the internet.  This means that I've been using other computers there.

While I've read (in many cases, skimmed) well-over 100 papers, I haven't saved any of them to Zotero.  Oops!  I have 5 days at the hospital left, so I really need to make good use of the journal access right now.  But it turns out, I hate this step.

I'm going through all of the PDFs that I have saved and am pulling up the journal website on my computer to save the reference to Zotero and then associate the file.  I have to do this at home, where I have internet.  But I'm also trying to look for the important references that I already have in Zotero that I don't have a file for and then getting the file.  But this has to happen at the hospital.  So while these two tasks are related, I can't do them in the same place.

I've sunk many hours of work into this already, and I am maybe not half-way done.  There are entire topics that I've forgone creating Zotero references for since the papers aren't associated with my current projects (but are important for a future project).  I really dislike this task and wish it wasn't needed.  Viva open access publishing!