I’m now more than halfway through my trip to Germany, having had meetings in Stuttgart and spoken at the Open Source Meets Business Conference in Nuremberg. Last night I flew to my third city of the week and I’ll head home early (very early) on Friday. My first meeting today is not until noon, so I’m using the morning to catch up on some things like writing employee evaluations for 2007.
I’m doing this in the hotel coffee bar since I wanted to make sure that the room cleaning staff could get to my room this morning. The cappuccino was great, though I must say they gave me the smallest croissant I have ever seen. Since it is just after 10 AM and I’m having lunch in 2 hours, that’s fine. I could do without the loop of Elton John’s greatest hits playing in the background, but it’s fairly innocuous.
The full agenda for the conference in Nuremberg looked quite interesting and I was especially pleased that I could hear Larry Augustin and Jim Zemlin speak. I’ve never been to Nuremberg before and would have liked the chance to look around the city, but it just didn’t work out this time. Being a tourist really isn’t the point of business travel, but if I can squeeze in an hour or two around a full day’s work, I try to do it. I especially like to get to museums in the cities I visit, time permitting.
As I’ve mentioned before, once I go someplace new, I tend to go back within a few months. This will be the case with Poland, a country I visited in September, 2007, to speak at the Economic Forum in Krynica. I’m going to be speaking at the Interoperability: The Key to International Business conference in Warsaw on February 6-7.
