Old trip notes

I made it to Tbilisi, Georgia safe and sound and have been pretty busy the last two days. The next couple days will be even more hectic, but there's a lot going on for us business-wise, so there's a lot of excitement...On the plane ride over, I stumbled across these trip notes from a trip I took last Spring to Romania. I typically try to keep notes on the unique things that happen while travelling that aren't business related. Sometimes this helps me keep my sanity by realizing that, when you take a step back and look at it, a lot of funny stuff can happen when travelling and dealing with different cultures...so, I thought I'd post these...most of the people named below work for our dealer in Romania...

"Romania - May 2009 trip

Sunday, May 17 - Rick and Marty arrive...the "polly pocket" toy hand-carried from Rochester for Laurentiu's daughter has made it in one piece...

Played tennis and had BBQ with Laurentiu, Gelu, Radu, and commander of base where Citadel excercise will take place.

Marty and Gelu were teamed up - Gelu has nasty first serve, almost every point we scored was an ace, Laurentiu is pretty good, Rick was good once he shook the rust off, I was horrible.

Radu tells a story about a gypsy who tries to train her donkey to eat less (paraphrasing):

"Every day the gypsy would feed the donkey a little less, while continuing to push the donkey to do the same work. By the 29th day, the gypsy had finally trained the donkey to do all of its work without needing food. On the 30th day however, the donkey died of exhaustion. The moral of the story - don't let your business get to the 30th day."

Monday, May 18 - Met with Offset Agency, very good meeting. no noteworthy events otherwise.

Tuesday, May 19 - Citadel excercise - BGAN functionality went from working flawlessly in the dry run to getting first-demo-flu or something. Conversely, VHF radio performed flawlessly after having problems through several of the dry runs. Following the VHF achievement, Jay looked at me and said "They better turn it off quick and not look at it funny."

Wednesday, May 20 - MTA meeting with Marty, Gelu and Doru to discuss offset equipment donation. 15 representatives from MTA were sitting on one side of the table, the 3 of us on the other. Following very brief introductions, the commander of the MTA and Gelu got into a 30 min argument in Romanian while everyone else in the room stared at eachother....then Gelu turns to me and says, "Ok, please present"...he later briefed me on the situation and everything was ok, but at the time, it was comically awkward. Later met with ODC, then Rick, Marty, and both Laurentiu's went to Champions to watch the UEFA Cup finals. Bob Bolton from GD was also there and joined us for the 2nd half of the game. Laurentiu N. was sitting in between Rick and Bob. Bob was eager to discuss a few things with Rick, and instead of adjusting the seating arrangement, decided to essentially lean across Laurentiu's lap and have a discussion with Rick with both forearms squarely planted on Laurentiu's thighs...maybe that's normal in the UK, but I felt extremely awkward for Laurentiu, can't even imagine what was going through his mind as this 25 minute conversation was going on....this was like a scene out of "The Office"...

Thursday, May 21 - met with MOD at Romtehnica, then went to airport. My flight was late getting into Frankfurt with an already tight connection back to DC. I resorted to runnning through the airport to my gate which was close to a mile away. This was not a typical airport run (hurried speed walk), this was a full-on sprint, with backpack and dress shoes, I may not have set a personal best in the mile, but definitely was at a sub-5 minute/mile pace. Get to the gate and they are at the tail end of boarding, I board the plane to realize my seat has been double-booked...still sweating profusely, myself and the other gentleman approach the flight attendant who takes both our boarding tickets, comes back a couple minutes later and apoligizes to both of us and gives me my first trans-atlantic upgrade to first class, talk about a turn of events! I did feel extremely out of place, especially since we reached our cruising altitude before I stopped sweating...the rest of the trip was smooth sailing and made it home a little after midnight."