An unusual turn of events...

First, let me explain that travel for Intel is not glamorous... sure it sounds like we go to interesting places, but usually these trips involve flying out coach on the cheapest ticket Intel can find, followed by non-stop meetings and business dinners, e-mail in the hotel room at night and returning to home having had nothing to show for visiting the foreign country outside of the stamp in your passport.

I have been lucky and been on business travel for more than a week at a time leaving me the weekend to explore some great places (Penang, Malaysia, Hong Kong, most recently Shanghai). The trip I am currently on is extremely unusual.

I accompanied our Account Management team to a customer in Germany that uses our boards to integrate into computer systems that they sell to businesses and governments around the EU. My engineering team is responsible for fixing issue on our products after we start mass production. In this case, the German customer reported an intermittent issue that was very difficult to root cause, and my team did not do a great job of communicating and making expediant progress. Our customer lost their customer over the issue. I had to go infront of the customer and explain what happened, and what we are doing to insure this doesn't happen again - both the technical issue, as well as the process gaps (communication, etc)... It was a challenging meeting to say the least.

So, I flew out of Portland on Tuesday - which was immediately after the holiday weekend, and after all of 5 days I spent in the country after my 3 week trip to Asia in May. We flew out on Tuesday so that we didn't cut short our holiday weekend. The downside of this was we left Portland at about 1:30pm on Tuesday, arriving in Frankfurt at 8:30am, connecting to Dusseldorf. We arrived in Dusseldorf around 11:00am, and had to change into our suits and meet with the customer at 2pm (after about 3 hours sleep on a plane)... This is the usual/normal Intel business trip part of the story. We then took some meetings with the same customer on Thursday morning. The account manager I was traveling with was flying home on Friday late afternoon, and the technical marketing engineer was flying to our campus in the UK on Sunday... I was flying onto Shanghai to meet Steph and look for a place to live on Saturday... This meant we actually had almost 2 days in the EU to actually see something!

So we put our heads together on Thursday and decided as soon as we were done with our meetings in the morning, we were headed to Amsterdam for dinner. All of the Hotels in the EU on Intel contract are roughly the same cost, so we decided to head out - none of us had been there before!

I don't have much in the way of pictures, but here are some thoughts about our trip:
• We bombed down the Autobahn at speeds up to 230 KPH – which is roughly 140 MPH. CRAZY. Our average speed was probably about 110 MPH in Germany. We had a nice car, so the ride through the German countryside was very enjoyable.
• The Account Manager I was with spent a year in high school as an exchange student in Germany about 20 years ago, so we stopped by the small town on our way to Amsterdam. He was able to point out some places he remembered, and we had lunch in a café… also, he found the house he lived in and the people still lived there. They were not home, but he left them a note… it was pretty cool.
• Amsterdam is a great city. The canal network is amazing, and while traffic in the city is kind of a mess (since the city seems to be laid out in circles from some central point) it is a phenomenal city to walk around in. We stayed out of the coffee houses – which is where you can buy and consume ‘soft drugs’, but we must have sat down in 4 different bars on 4 different squares as we walked around and admired the architecture.
• The buildings in Amsterdam date back to the 1600s. They are beautiful, although many are falling over (propped up by newer additions or steel). Evidently some of the buildings are falling over as the earth beneath them sinks – I was told the city, same as much of the country, is actually below sea level… Like New Orleans without hurricanes.
• We spent so much time walking around the city and drinking Dutch beer, that by the time we realized we needed to eat it was pretty late. The Technical Marketing Engineer we were with is a vegetarian, so we were looking for someplace she could get something to eat, and unfortunately ended up in the very touristy ‘Hard Rock Café – Amsterdam’. At 11:00pm, and after much Dutch beer, it really wouldn’t have mattered too much.
• We woke up a little on the late side on Friday AM – tired from the drive, hung over from the beer – and headed straight back to Frankfurt, which is where we are all flying out of over the weekend.
• Frankfurt is a nice city, but robbed of much of it’s history by the bombings of WWII. Many of the buildings were rebuilt after the war, meaning that there is not much historic architecture remaining in its original form. There are some beautiful churches that they did everything they could to repair to ‘close to original’ stature.

I had what can only be described as an amazing couple of hour lunch experience in Frankfurt today. I jumped on the tram (lightrail) and headed into Frankfurt looking specifically for a bratwurst. I didn’t have any last night, but saw a couple of stands selling them like you would see hotdogs sold in the US in New York or Chicago. When I got off light rail near a main shopping plaza, what I found was Frankfurt’s ‘Farmer’s Market’ – at least this is what we would call it in the US. There were people selling all sorts of fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, plants, flowers, and much to my happiness – you couldn’t toss a stone and not hit a bratwurst stand!

So I went to the first one I saw and ordered up a Bratwurst, served on a hard roll, slathered it in mustard and devoured it while walking around the market. That’s when I happened upon the most popular stand in the market – they 2 guys with 4 taps selling beers for $2 Euros a glass. Having finished off my brat, I drank a German beer. All I could think about the entire time was my Aunt Patrice. I just kept imagining that like me, she might have found this to be one perfect moment. In a foreign country, eating a brat and drinking a beer! It’s in her honor that I decided I should do it all again 1 more time, just for her… so Patrice, I must tell you, the second Brat and beer were better than the first!

I am headed off to Shanghai in a few hours, so off to the airport now. We’ll likely post another entry next week some time with some pictures of Shanghai and the schools and apartments we choose to live in for the next 2 years.

Hope all is going well, wherever this finds you.

Cheers!