As I said earlier I wanted to write a bit about my vacation in London, so here it comes, if I can write this and make sense before I also fell asleep.
I really really enjoyed my vacation; maybe it was because it was my first vacation ever, maybe because it was my first time out of Italy, or maybe because I overcame my fear of planes once and hopefully for all. I also fell in love with London and with the say stuff there seems to work, in a way that, here in Italy, is hard even to imagine. Unfortunately, one week wasn’t really enough to see half the stuff I wanted to see, starting with Broadcasting House, which is why I hope to come back to London before end of the year.
Now that I can finally fly, I guess I’ll finally be dropping by on conferences; I just need to start looking at the calendars so I can set up my schedule for that. If somebody has a quick way to do that, or has some links for conferences to check the schedules from now on, I’d be happy of the help.
To be honest, I also fell in love with the weather up there, and when I came back I was hit tremendously by the heat here. Given I don’t have A/C at home, and I have been always against the idea of wasting power in stuff like that (it’s waste), I start to have a yet undecided, uncertain idea, about spending next summer in London (or around). Really for now it’s just a random thought, some vague idea. But at least it would be a cool place, and I wouldn’t have problems with language (mostly).
Indeed, the week I spent there didn’t feel extremely out of place for me, since I was a bit in the loop either way thanks to following general news and BBC as well. And I really would love to spend some more time there, with enough time and space to go around visiting Broadcasting House, and maybe some other England areas.
After all, thankfully, my job does not force me to any particular location: I rarely have to go to my customer’s workplace, and especially during the summer this is pretty limited. Just having a laptop, like the one I’m writing on right now, and access to my main box at home (Yamato) allows me to do most of my work without any limitation. This would mean that I wouldn’t be taking three months of vacation, but rather half out-of-office time.
Also, before I forget, after ensuring this was supposed to be the case with the local customer service of 3 Italy, I went out daring to use the 3G connection with my phone while I was in London, under 3 UK coverage. It was, indeed, included in my monthly 10GB limit, and I didn’t spend any money to use it. At the end, the only euro I “wasted” were 2.5 in SMS (because the hotel I was staying at wasn’t covered by 3 UK and I used SMS to sync with my friends on what time to wake up) and 2 for a connection on the Orange network when I didn’t note the out-of-network and thus didn’t kill it soon enough. Not bad considering a lot of people end up paying lots for using their phones outside of Italy (and I did use it quite a bit, both to call Italy and UK itself — some friends had an UK cellphone already).