My Sojourn in Europe 2007-08

Late summer of 2007 my company asked if I would go to Europe to work with our German branch to integrate their product into our corporate fold.....be the borg, so to speak. I agreed, feigning reluctance, and stated my conditions: a company apartment and car, and some autonomy regarding actions while there. The German branch had been acquired a few years before, and had not successfully been integrated into our way of doing things; of business and the company mind-set. We'll set aside the notion that I was the wrong person to send: I don't like Germans (as a group), and have little patience with those who don't agree with me professionally. So...an experiment doomed to failure: sending an intractable geezer to work with German engineers to convince them to modify a product they deemed perfect.

What it did do, was give me 9 months in Europe. My youngest daughter, Emily, upon hearing that I was going, said "Hey, me too!" So I had a companion, a 21 year old who had not been to Europe. "Cool", I thought, "What could possibly go wrong with this!?"

Nothing went wrong, to fend off misconceptions, it was a throughly wonderful experience for her and me. To see  Europe through new eyes was a great thing. I had been several times, but never for more than 2 weeks at a time. I found the experience of actually living there, day to day, shopping, getting laundry done, cooking, etc, quite different than living in a hotel.

In early October, 2007 we flew to Frankfurt, a driver picked us up, and drove us 140km to Bad Kissingen, the town near our German branch. They had a 2 bedroom apartment ready for us, quite spacious by European standards, and we started our stay.

Directly behind the yellow vehicle is the Weiss Haus, a great restaurant where we ate at least twice a week. our building is the next one behind it.....built in 1793, remodeled several times.

A block away, the river Saale, taken on a Sunday morning early. Once I was standing looking, and saw some rise-forms on the river, and found later there were trout in the river.

Me 'working' from home.

Ah, the food available there:  the kitchen was the smallest I'd ever had......the stove had two burners and a small oven...the fridge was 3' high, the sink water heater was above the sink on the wall, and would heat about 2 gallons of water at a time. But the food we could get at the local markets. The wurst, brotchen, brot, rabbit, fish....man. There were 5 bakeries within walking distance, all with different breads available each day...geez. And of course the local beer.

I'll do posts about the trips we took while there: Venice, Florence, Rome, Tuscany, Austria, Munich, Erfurt and the UK.

The news about Bin Laden is just breaking, I hope that we don't see too many repercussions from it. My son came back last summer from his second tour over there, and I'm happy they got him. I just hope our troops don't pay too heavily for it.