Well, last Sunday I was watching an FA cup match in my local pub, when a young couple brought their twin toddlers in for a little refreshment. The place was pretty quiet, save for a couple of us watching Arsenal and another few folks enjoying quiet beers in the corner, but the arrival of these two little blonde kids changed everything. Both of them could not stop grinning and voicing their happiness at life in general.
One of the waitresses and I have often traded stories about our neices and nephews and how much we were entertained by happy little kids. These little boys just kept smiling at her as she poured drinks and served customers. The kids sort of walked around from table to table, and every customer was simply taken with their cuteness. It kind of warmed the heart.
Arter a quick snack, their parents bundled them back up, they gave a little goodbye yell, and they were off. It helps you remember how nice a pub can be on a quiet, grey Sunday afternoon.
I like these brief moments of heartwarming, and was equally touched a couple of days later just seeing an old picture of a four year old dancing around a Christmas tree, looking shyly and expectantly back up at the camera.
With the fuzzy stuff out of the way, I will take a minute or 20 and give a quick update on the past few days. Late Monday morning, I headed out to the airport with plenty of time to get checked in for my flight to Budapest. I kind of wandered around the airport a bit, then somehow headed through the security checkpoint to the gates 21-30. That would probably have been ok, but I was going to depart from gate 14.
I went through passport control, and it was at this moment I realized that I was just plain in the wrong part of the terminal. Unfortunately, there was no way to get to the part where my gate was without going out of the airport and back in again. So, I basically left Germany for about 5 minutes (considering that you are technically in no country when you are in an airport lounge), reentered the country, then went through security (hi, how come you have so many mobile phones and ac adapters? cos I am a walking office!) again, and finally made it to my departure gate, where I discovered that the flight would be truly full. Neat.
My colleagues were flying into Budapest from the UK, but would arrive a couple of hours after I landed. We landed on time, I had a couple of coffees and did some people watching until their plane arrived. From there, we met our taxi guy, who drove us a few hours south to Pecs, a university town.
Tuesday morning, we arrived at the repair site, and I met my customer for the first time. This was my first opportunity to see the operations, and I was eager to get into things. My colleague is a pretty good guy, and quite funny; I will have some big shoes to fill as I take over the account.
We spent the day going through the basics, bringing me up to speed. At 6, we packed up, and the customer took us off to a local winery for dinner and some bevvie tasting. This was our chance to get to know one another outside of work.
Since I am getting a lot of information in a short amount of time, nevermind meeting loads of people, I find it a bit challenging to be totally relaxed. On one hand, I am eager to make a first impression, and on the other, want to get through my learning curve as quickly as possible. This is no easy feat, particularly as I have recently discovered that I am a bit self conscious on a number of levels.
At any rate, there were about 9 of us sitting around the table. The wines were pretty good, as was the meal. We were doing a fair amount of joking through the starters and the main course.
The quality of the wines improved as the hours passed, as did the consumption. I was in no way drunk, but I was starting to feel like I could go outside in shirt sleeves, even though it must have been minus 3 degrees.
When my colleague started showing signs that he was enjoying his wine, I decided to quietly move a bottle out of harm's way, as his elbow seemed like it could knock the wine over any second. Well, I moved the bottle right into my own glass, managing to knock it over, spilling the freshly poured contents onto the table and almost into my customer's lap.
The restaurant wasn not very full, but when glass breaks, everyone stops for a moment to see which plonker did it. Of course I was sheepishly saying "fuck fuck fuck" in about every language I could think of as the waiter came over and laboriously used 10 napkins to mop up the mess.
Um, this was EXACTLY what I did NOT want to do when meeting my customer for the first time. I had been somewhat quiet for most of the evening as I tend to be around people I meet for the first time, when ka-whap! I turned the spotlight right on myself.
Fortunately, everyone was most gracious and did the reasonable thing by laughing out loud, and we quickly put the moment behind us. Unbelievable...
The next day we were back on site, and I was very careful with my coffee and water. We wrapped up our visit, then took a train north to Budapest, where we arrived right about rush hour.
A taxi took us across the river to our hotel, which looked out over the castle and parliament. Quite a nice hotel, I must say. We discovered that for an extra charge, we could take advantage of the executive lounge, where we attacked the fridge of beer and the snacks on the buffet.
I think we got our money's worth, then headed to a restaurant a few seconds from the hotel to watch a bit of Champions League. The place was dead empty at 20h, but the guy would not give us a table, claiming that everything was reserved for the games being shown on the 20 odd televisions around the bar.
We elected to stay there anyway, ordered food and drink, and watched as the place filled up. I had forgotten that Arsenal were playing a match that evening, also, and with luck, it was also being shown on tv. Most of the matches were rather uneventful, and I could almost say the same for the Arsenal except for the injuries that a couple of players picked up, ultimately making their victory sort of bittersweet.
I spent the whole following day visiting another supplier, and was pretty tired when we got back to the hotel at 7.30. My colleagues were equally spent, so we once again went upstairs to attack the refreshments and relax. A little past 10, we decided to go back to the same restaurant from the previous evening (boring, I know) where we found a completely different scene: the place was totally dead.
The waiter informed us that we could eat, but that the place would close promptly at 11, so we quickly ordered dinner, watched a few minutes of football, ate our food, paid up, and called it a night.
Today was a pretty early start. Caught a taxi at 6.30, got to the airport, and I am home once again.
I am planning to do a little sight seeing here this weekend, which I will agree is somewhat ironic. However, irony seems to be the story of my life right now. So long as I refrain from breaking any more glassware, though, I think it should be ok.
keep the faith
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