The Five Worst Things About World Travel

Some people think it's glamorous to galavant around the world the way my work has required of me for the past ten years. While I concede I have had some amazing and enriching experiences as a world traveler, sometimes you just want to come home. I often really miss a quiet weekend at home with a trip to the Ferry Plaza for some great ingredients, an afternoon hike in Mount Tam, and a late afternoon with a glass of wine or scotch cooking up the produce from the market and the crab from Tomales Bay I picked up on the way home...

Now that I'm coming home today after spending 10 of the past 12 weeks in Paris, London, Munich, Berlin, Rome, Venice, and Florence, I thought would share my ranking of the worst things common to world travel:

5. Time waiting. Getting coughed on at check-in, searching for all the necessary documents at security, figuring out which taxis take credit cards at the cab stand, at the ATM machines getting new currency, frantically finding a way through the interactive voice on the phone changing flights, in the passport lines, standing in the airplane aisle while the slow people figure out that international planes only allow 20" carry-ons and not the 22" ones common in the US, awaiting your luggage because you couldn't carry on your shaving cream, getting through the 2-hour line at Paris CDG because they lost your luggage, and worst of all, awaiting the arrival of the lost luggage (this last time, my luggage was lost for the entire 9 days I was in Paris, arriving back to me literally 7 hours before I left my apartment for the flight home!).

4. Dining alone. While eating well can surely happen more easily when you travel on an expense account, the expense account also often means that you're flying solo for a late meal. And although I do enjoy catching up on my International Herald Tribune or a great book, good dinners and good wine are much better with good company.

3. Lacking a kitchen. If you know me, you know how much hotel rooms "sans cuisine" (without a kitchen) kills me. I love to cook, and even more, I love to cook with the local ingredients. Hotel rooms booked for work travel are usually pretty nice, but they are not geared for someone to cook his own food.

2. Time zone discrepancies. I am lucky enough to have wonderful friends and family, most of whom live in the US of A. The time zone difference is crushing, with my evening being my East Coast friends' middle-of-the-workday period and my West Coast friends' first hours of email catch-up. My mornings are when you all are asleep! Thanks to email, I still know what a few of my friends are doing...

1. Being associated with the annoying American tourists (yes, sometimes I'm sure I am one, too!)

Honorable mentions:

• Snack food costs $9 per serving
  
• Finding good restaurants in a foreign place that doesn't have good Zagat coverage
  
• Ordering innards when you thought it was just beef
  
• Anti-Americanism
• Obnoxious American tourists
• Waking up at 3 in the morning thinking it's time to go to work
• Not falling asleep before 3 in the morning because it's still the middle of the day
• Lack of fresh vegetables in a lot of places (yes, I'm so spoiled!)
• Different service level standards
• Airplane grime
  
• Laundry!
  

What do you hate about international travel?