Almost Done With Todi

(notes from March 2025)

Kinda crazy that we’re almost done with Todi!

So was it successful, the whole working-abroad-for-a-month thing? Well yes and no… yes in that we could both do our jobs pretty much every day. No, in a couple of ways: when we first planned this, Sam had a light workweek of around 20 hours—but by the time we finally got here, she was more like 50 hours, and was having long Zoom calls nightly between 10PM and 2AM (because of the timezones of her west-coast teams), so that was totally unexpected, and it was pretty awkward to have to work well past midnight almost every night.

And one of our biggest ideas was to eat at least half the meals in the flat, but I totally misjudged how that would go. I had assumed a decent grocery store nearby (wrong!) but more importantly I just didn’t understand how much we needed to get out. Our flat is very well laid out and I love it, but it’s still very small, about 600 square feet—you spend all day inside, with scenic Todi outside beckoning, and you kinda have to head out. Staying inside all day is just not gonna work, even if we had a decent grocery store!

So we ended up eating most meals in restaurants, which is expensive of course, and that sort of nuked the idea that this month would cost us about the same as staying in Cincinnati… maybe next time we should splurge for a slightly larger space, so we’re not so anxious to always get out? We can definitely fine-tune this for the future.

We have two days left in this beautiful place, so we are trying to soak up the local atmosphere as best we can. But it is still brutally cold here, howling hilltop winds and all, and we are totally ready to be home! Gonna terribly miss all this the second that we leave, but still, we’re ready to be home.

Now follows the normal random photo dump lol