Diversions Manifold

Shanghai. From words-chinese.com So, after a totally manic Monday, racing around Bürgeramts, HR departments, getting signatures from executive directors, answering technical questions during a telecon and then driving up to the Chinese Consulate in Frankfurt, only to arrive after their 11:30 am closing time... I don't have a visa. And, thankfully, I don't need to go. Not yet, anyway. The main justification of sending me to China this week was to pacify the customer and to show that we have people who know what they're talking about, technically. However, I am present in nearly all of the meetings via telecon, so they know who I am and that my company has me on board. The benefits of standing back a little and waiting to do things better are now clear. Firstly, somebody realised that by the time I arrived in Chongqing early next week, the people I'd need to talk to would be on holiday, leaving me with not much to do other than some sightseeing. And parts that

I'm in a strange sort of limbo this Sunday evening. On Friday I was directed to go to China this weekend to help our colleagues who are in a bit of a technical pickle. The trouble is, I need a visa and the normal application process takes two weeks. S o I'm sorting out my travel to see when I'll be able to get there. View Larger Map There is a procedure for obtaining an express visa, but this entails heading up to the Chinese consulate, which I will do tomorrow. However, the application itself involves a paper chase that isn't yet complete. Currently - I need evidence of health insurance (which the company should provide on Monday morning - I don't know what time). I need an invitation letter (received) and a letter of urgency (not yet), plus a travel itinerary from my colleagues in China - again, hopefully that'll be waiting for me when I wake up on Monday. I need my "Anmeldungbescheinigung", Registration certificates, which I couldn'

I mentioned that I am home for Christmas. This means that I am at my parents' house with my own family, having made it to England without a full passport. After the initial assurances that my passport would be ready for me well before our travel, I eventually received an email from the lady working on my case that it emphatically would not be ready. I would have to travel up to Düsseldorf to obtain an Emergency Travel Document (ETD) from the British Consulate in person. Actually, I was supposed to have gone to Munich, because that's where British citizens living in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg are catered for (or "processed", I suppose). But, since Heidelberg is so much closer to Düsseldorf than to the Munich mother-ship, I went there instead. It was an early start, but the weather was good and I made swift process along the Autobahns. Having left at around six o'clock in the morning I arrived just after nine, after battling through the Düsseldorf rush-hour

Yesterday I was in Maastricht for lunch. I felt no urge to blog about it; which itself is good cause for a short blog post. Maastricht is a lovely city, full of Dutch and European styles. It has a grown-up feel to it; calm, confident, aware of its place in the world. It has its own identity and is full of culture. Its political status is well concealed from the average tourist - there are no huge European institutions in the centre to remind the Maastricht Treaty , for example (although there are some suspicious-looking buildings further along the river). But I didn't particularly want to blog about it, in direct contrast to Naples. It simply didn't raise as many emotions. I certainly know where where I would prefer to live, of the two, where I could bring my family - I also know where I would prefer to visit...

05.10.2011 Put short, Naples could easily be described as a characature of Italy. Take for example and especially the motorcyclists on the Tangenziale; one sitting upright at the handlebars in order to have both hands free for his mobile phone, another gesticulating whilst talking into his (at least hands-free) helmet headset. The cars jockeying for position in the clogged city arteries (using my Milan driving mantra of knowing where everything is, but pretending that you don't). The wonderful weather, the port smell and the smog over the city. The sheer number of people out and about in the centre - the life - on a Tuesday evening. The wonderful dinner (fish and fruits of the sea) in an unassuming restaurant near our hotel in Pomigliano. The 'man bags' (handbags for men) and the big sunglasses. It was all there. From the strucutre of a typical blog, I would now normally explain here all the very good reasons why Naples isn't a characature of Italy; there simply aren&

04.10.2011 I'm in Frankfurt airport awaiting my flight to Munich and then on to Naples of which I will of course see very little, this being a business trip for meetings with Fiat tomorrow. It's a lovely day, the airport isn't too busy this lunchtime and it feels invigorating to be on the move again. I almost wrote 'good' there, but I can't catagorically state that it is good in itself. Yes, we're supporting the customer even better than can be expected (the presence of an 'expert from Germany' lends weight to our arguments) but there's nothing coming up that my Italian colleagues cannot sort out by themselves. And it'll be the first time that my wife will have to put both daughters to bed by herself - not a task to take lightly with a three year-old and a two month-old. Of course it'll all work out, but the first time is naturally the most stressful. In both senses, then, it's of limited virtue but it's still a bit of a nice

My business trips are now rare in comparison to how things were a few years ago. I count myself lucky as this dip has coincided nicely with starting a family. So from monthly trips to Asia and almost weekly trips to Germany from the UK, I now occasionally fly to Italy to meet suppliers and drive around Germany meeting customers. And read bedtime stories. This week I ended up on a more unusual trip, to Dacia in Romania, to discuss some issues that they have been having in production. It was to have been a relatively relaxed journey, flying to Bucharest from Frankfurt airport early in the afternoon to stay in an airport hotel until my colleague from Turkey arrived early the next morning. Alas, though, systems happened. We have the Egencia travel booking system at work; it is the business version of Expedia. Egencia turned out to be a nightmare for rapid turnaround travel as it has an - in itself eminently sensible - approval system built in. The problem is that these approvals nee