When traveling anywhere, you often notice things that not only do you not see at home, but really draw your attention as being interesting, or worthy of mention at the least. Especially true when going overseas.

On my last trip the following items kind of stood out in my mind:





Package of Kleenex from Hungary with a Ratatouille theme. Just kind of cute. And the package is interestingly square instead of rectangular.




Our taxi which had an ominous telephone number...




This is most interesting - this is the switching control panel from the Hungarian Railroad station that we visited. One of the members of the group from our partner company had a big interest in trains, so our assembly plant staff arranged for a "Behind the Scenes" tour of the local train station. This was "State of the Art" when it was installed in the mid 1970's. And is still in use today. I wonder if it even has solid state technology...




Finally, a picture from the Duty Free shop at the Vienna Airport. We put these tiny little warning labels on our cigarettes. These are nice, big, simple, easy to read labels. Love them. Wish we could have them here. But interestingly, you see a lot more smoking in Vienna. I came out feeling a bit like an ashtray every time I went indoors to a restaurant or some other public place. Wonder why this is? Maybe they should have the warnings in German/Hungarian/local language? Or is it in English because the cigarettes are American?

Tags: Humor, Travel

The food in Zalaegerszeg has been surprisingly good. Ate well every night I was there. And every lunch I was there. Our hosts were apparently pulling out all the stops. And definitely doing a good job. I have a lot of pictures from the trip and will hopefully in another entry highlight some of the pictures I found the most fascinating.

In addition to the food, there were a few other redeeming points that I ended up finding. The town is major enough to have a Citibank. The people seemed friendly enough (to someone who didn't speak anything remotely sounding like the local language), and there definitely wasn't much traffic. the town was virtually a ghost town after 8pm in the evening.

Gas, like in the rest of Europe, is expensive. About 310 Forints per liter. Given an exchange rate of approximately 160:1 and 4.5 liters per gallon, this works out to about $8.71 per gallon? Wow.

I was warned that this town was a throwback to Cold War Era Eastern Europe. Not entirely far off.

It was a 3 hour van ride from Vienna through some extremely interesting, and extremely rural countryside. Went right to work on arrival at the production facility I was visiting, which seemed rather out of place. Very modern in just the middle of nowhere. Arriving at the Hotel Arany Barany, which is in the center of the town, the first thing you notice is, well, it's very dark. And I've not seen dark wood paneling in my hotel room since the 1970's. I do have free internet access though.

You notice how unmodern the hotel is when you realize there is no smoke detector in the hotel room. This hotel is very old. But given there's only two hotels in the town and this one is reportedly the more modern one, it makes me wonder what the other hotel is like.

You seriously wonder if someone is going to jump out of the hallway and scare you as you walk down the hallway. You hope the motion sensors for the lights work (you walk out the elevator and it's pitch dark until you step out and the motion sensors turn the lights on in the hall).

I have to admit I slept with the light on last night.

Hopefully more later!

Work this week is allowing me to do a little travel - I arrived in Vienna this morning and as things have it, have had a little time to sight see. Will post pictures when I get them downloaded (I've got a lot of pictures to post unfortunately from the last couple of months).

Vienna, from the limited time I've been able to sight see is neat. The airport (which I've seen the most of) is by US standards, a bit small. The hotel is literally right across the street - I typically park farther away from the terminal building in hourly parking than the hotel is to the airport! Flying in on Austrian Airlines was also interesting. The color scheme in the plane was, um, bright. But the service was friendly, I had two seats to myself, and you board to waltz music. That in and of itself was really nice!

Next stop, Zalaegerszeg, Hungary.

10 years since this very memorable picture.



So as my sister-in-law put it, 2 kids, 3 houses, who-knows-how-many cars, certainly-too-many computers later, and 10 years, here we are.

We celebrated with a nice dinner -- my comment is that despite us having a 10 course Chinese Wedding Banquet for our reception 10 years ago, we ate better now than we did back then. We only made it to course #2 10 years ago before we had to start the dress changing/table visiting/toasting thing.

Wow. Where did 10 years go?

Every year, I wait until the weekend after New Years to go calendar shopping for a calendar for my office. I kind of started this tradition years ago for a number of reasons.

First was that some years, I received calendars and didn't have to go out and buy one. Whereas, if I bought one before Christmas, sometimes I'd end up with an extra calendar.

Second, the calendars are always dirt cheap (at least 50% off) after New Year.

The bad part, of course, is that you are stuck with the selection of calendars that no one else wanted.

Last year, I ended up with the "Dubious Saying of George W" calendar which contained all sorts of humorous quotes from our President. Even die hard right-wing supporters usually see the humor in George W's choice for words.

This year was more challenging. No, I really didn't want an Obama or Hillary calendar. I've long since tired of Far Side calendars, and I have to put up with too much of Zack and Cody to want one of their calendars. We have a Thomas Kinkade calendar in our bedroom.

The verdict was the "GTV Garfield Television 2008" calendar. A bunch of drawings of Garfield making his favorite editorial comments about today's TV shows and commercials.

It tells the date and is at least mildly tolerable.

Tags: Humor