If you have a connection between H and G gates, make sure you stay upstairs in H.  G. has virtually nothing but a Paulaners (sp?) restaurant, where, for major entertainment, you can watch Germans drink beer with their breakfast eggs.  (Speaking of beer, I met a fellow road-warrior at a fancy dinner in Dubai this week.  He tells me that to get a beer in your room in Lahore, Pakistan, you need to sign a paper that says that you are medically incompetent and need to have the beer for medicinal purposes!  As my colleague said “You have a medical condition; take two lagers and call me in the morning.”)

There is free coffee and tea, as well as free newspapers (USA Today and the Financial Times in English–I love the Financial Times!), so if you’re not on an expense account, that’s something, anyway.

Maybe next time–how to have a good time for free in Munich airport.

Coming home after a week or more on the road, one of the first things I notice is how loud home is.

Loud in a good way, mostly.

There’s a teakettle whistling in the kitchen, and “Kung Fu Panda” is playing in the other ear, one last time, Mom, please, before we return it to the video store.

The intimate sounds of daily life are, by and large, missing on the road.  Thank goodness.  When I get into my hotel room from a 15 hour day of airport security, subway systems, cab rides, traffic jams, PA announcements and all intimate business done in public bathrooms, all I want is quiet.  That I would have to hear some other parent’s “Kung Fu Panda” in the locally dubbed language is a nightmare.

Ditto after a day of nonstop meetings, navigating life in multiple currencies, languages, bandwidths.

But, after three days of total quiet in the private sphere, the world begins to get eerie.

You switch on CNN.

You try harder to reach home just before the kids go to school (not too early–they aren’t up yet and can’t really talk when they’re asleep; not too late–they have to catch the 7:42 bus or they’re late to school, and there’s still the socks to put on, the backpack, the coat).

When you’re interacting at a 12 time-zone difference, as I do now with some frequency between Singapore and NY, you look forward to talking to early morning colleagues, just as the white wine and Pringles from the minibar are about to accompany you to sleep.

Getting back to the domestic sounds is jarring.  How can you sleep with that racket going on in the living room?  (You can’t.  Get up, you jetlagged lazibones.)

Do they really have to argue that loudly? (Yes they do, they’re brothers.  Prevent bloodshed and your job is done.)

And then, when they’re asleep, I find myself going into their room, just to hear them breathe.

6.  You recognize half of the other business lounge passengers–even though you’ve never been in this airport before

5.  You miss the smell of diapers

4.  You try to strike up meaningful conversations in Chichis

3.  Your idea of a relaxing evening is 2 dozen cookies for tomorrow’s bake sale

2.  You’re crying at insurance commercials

1.  Pringles, white wine from the minibar and email is a good night

I continue to comment to people about how strange it is that 90% of my time traveling I spend with men.  While I was aching from jetlag and a lack of family and female company, I read this brilliant observation on being between men’s and women’s cultures in Morocco by Alia Kate, a young business woman starting a fair trade business in women’s crafts.  Her observation in particular about being able to speak Arabic and French, and her capacity to write at all–still the purview of men in much of the world–is well worth it. http://kantaracrafts.blogspot.com/2008/10/oh-baby-baby-its-mans-world.html

So, here I am in one of the most exciting cities of the world.

London.

Home of the new British renaissance in food (really! The food here is great. Marks and Spencers down the road has a “Simply Food” store that has the most interesting packaged food I have ever seen in my life—better than Zabars).

Just watched a BBC program (or “programme”) called “two fat bikers” or something like that—two guys who ride around on motorcycles (and also motorboat, and other motor vehicles) talking to potato farmers who grow 24 varieties of potatoes and fishermen who catch lots of different varieties of fish.

Meanwhile, these guys make gravlax on an icerink (I am not kidding—it is funny), and cook fish pie on a Bunsen burner next to the Tyne in Newcastle.

As a woman on an expense account, no one would criticize me for going out to a half-decent restaurant and having a new British cuisine meal.

But , frankly, as a woman on an expense account who travels all the time, I went to said Marks and Spencers, bought a salad mix and bottle of lowfat dressing, a bottle of Pays d’Oc Vignonier, and a raisin scone, called my family, and watched the two fat guys. Well, there’s more than one way to enjoy a country’s cuisine.

Last weekend I had the good fortune to have dinner with two young recent graduates from Oberlin College (there’s really only one place to eat in Oberlin, Ohio–the Feve–and since I went twice the waiter asked me if I was planning on eating there sequentially all night).

Reading Judith Warner’s column on Sarah Palin and her imposter syndrome (excellent, and found at http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/), I re-lived my conversation with one of the young women who is just starting out her career, finding herself without much supervision, not sure what is the most important thing to concentrate on in her job.

This recent alumna has been given a lot of responsibility, and like any smart person, she’s scared the half of the time she’s not having fun.

I think she was looking to find out that it got better over time–that the fear dissipated, that you felt more in control, that you really knew all the time what you were doing.

And yet, I had to tell her that it doesn’t.  That mostly a good career for ambitious, smart, caring people involved so much risk so much of the time that you skate on the thin edge of fear at least half of the time.  While you have more and more confidence over time that your specific skills are going to help you through, the more you seek to achieve, the more you push the edge of those skills.

The place this breaks down is with people who aren’t either a) taking enough risks or b) are too arrogant to know that they don’t know things or c) know that they don’t have the skills and have no hope of developing them fast enough.

Category A represents people who aren’t working to their potential.

Category B represent people who can be downright dangerous, especially if they are very smart and accomplished.  Arrogance and capability in very smart people is what brings down banks, organizations, countries.  Far more scary than downright stupidity and laziness.

Category C represents the Sarah Palins of the world: smart enough to know they can’t develop the necessary skills fast enough to survive, but not smart or moral enough to bail out fast before they fail mightily (and bring down everyone else with them).

What I most appreciate about working with very smart, very ambitious, risk-taking individuals who develop genuine, hard-won skills is that when you couple that with critical thinking–the capacity to question your own actions–you get people who are always uncomfortable, and always breaking new turf.  Couple that in turn with a strong moral compass, and you can get people who will change the world for the better.

Here’s a quote from Anatole France that I found in The Week:  www.theweek.co.uk:

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know.  It’s being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don’t.

It can be a fine line between pushing the boundaries of what you do know–the skills you can bring to bear to a problem pushed to their outermost limits–and really getting in over your head.

I’ve been in both situations.  Mostly, in the former, you walk into work every day scared and exhilarated.  Some days you can’t wait to get in and tackle the obstacles.  Some days you can’t bear to go in because you can’t imagine how you’ll overcome.

In the latter situation, when you’re in over your head you get fired, or if you’re an entrepreneur, you fail.  That’s a good thing in a career at least once.  If you’re going to fail (and I hope you will), do it early.  I recently met a man who was fired for the first time in his 50′s.  That was devastating.  Better to be fired in your 20′s and recover and not let it happen again.  I also met a kindly billionaire who talked again and again about his multiple failures.  It was humorous–a man who had succeeded so many time talking about his multiple failures, and with such good humor.  My guess is that he also suffers from imposter syndrome, but doesn’t let it stop him.

Unfortunately for all of us, people who are really in over their heads–the Sarah Palins of the world–usually don’t admit it.  We just can’t let them into the jobs in the first place.  We really don’t want people in over their heads in very powerful jobs–you can’t bring a whole country down with you when you’re testing the waters.  But, if Obama or McCain are any good, they will be suffering from imposter syndrome in a big way, knowing that they have worked on particular skills, that those skills will take them pretty far, that even that far is not going to be enough, and that they have to be intellectually humble every day  to know “what you do know and what you don’t.”

If it is true for the American presidency, it is true for all of us–in a life that is always demanding more of us than we know how to deliver, the most accomplished people skate on the thin edge of fear most days–and succeed all the same.

On the second floor of the international terminal, the restaurant at the top of the escalator.  Come spring, fresh asparagus done several ways–soup, sauteed.  White or green.  A taste of the country in springtime.

Maybe one of the hardest things about traveling is coming back home.

Or, not the coming back, but day two or three when your presence is no longer a novelty, your jetlag has subsided, and you are expected to be a full member of the family again.

Only, you can’t.  Not really.  Over two weeks in the lives of a seven-year-old, everything may have changed.  There may be entirely new friends (“Jason?  I don’t play with him any more; he’s mean”), clothes outgrown, new subjects in school.

This summer I came back after two weeks away, looked at the backs of both boys asleep in bed, and marveled at how much my older son had grown.  Then I saw the face of the one I thought older and realized I was looking at my younger son.  My sense of the gradual passage of time had brokenlike the 1970′s stop motion animation, the herky jerky stop and go of the tulips opening in a Barbara Streisand movie.

Meanwhile, you expect to come back to the place that you left, and yet clothing in the closets has changed from summer to winter.  There are new foods in the cabinets according to the new regimes.  The bus you thought you caught to take the kids to school is now different.

So each time you come back, you need to relearn your place.  Home stops looking quite so much like home, and more like another place you visit for two weeks at a time.

Being married to a musician is like having your own personal soundtrack.  Brushing your teeth?  Bossanova.  Walking along the beach?  Klezmer.  Taking a bath?  Bach. 

Anytime I’m at home, or with my husband, there is music.  He carries at least a mandolin with him (it being the smallest of his instruments) at all times.  Like a landscape isn’t real for a photographer without a camera to stare through, a landscape isn’t real for him without making music within it.  When we traveled across the country with a three-year-old, a five-year-old and a 1963 camper behind our minivan, I worried about the weight and didn’t pack all the shoes I wanted.  Then, in Illinois, counted the number of guitars he had brought–11.  Excuse me, they weren’t all guitars, he says.  They were also banjos and mandolins and a base ukelele.  At least we had music for 5,000 miles.

The time I really need the music, though, is when I’m alone for night number 12 in a hotel room in some distant country.  Then I need to hear “I don’t need a tattoo ['cause I need you]” or “Smelly toes.”  If you want to hear any of it, you can at www.malcolmlucard.com.  Mostly you can hear the funny love songs that keep me going when I can’t remember what anyone in my family smells like or feels like–the anomie of business travel.

Somehow, I also have Billy Jonas “Bear to the Left” now permanently etched into my traveling brain.  Every time I reach for my superduper maroon Samsonite suiter, four wheels simply gliding down the corridors of the world’s airports, I hear Billy Jonas.  “Travelin’, travelin’, travelin’ on/I ran into my friend John/I said “Hey John, which way do I go?”/He said “Follow the animals/they all know.”  At the risk of sounding like an advertisement for fabulous folk musicians, you can find Billy Jonas at www.billyjonas.com.  He is the best children’s musician, bar none, that I know.  Adult music too–spiritual, rhythmically interesting, intelligent.

So, if you’re in a hotel lobby and you hear someone singing “I don’t need a tattoo tattoo, ’cause bayyyybeee, I got you” or in airport securing singing “travelin’, travelin’, travelin’ on” stop a moment and say hello.  It will be me.