Mi Casa es su Casa
In the summer of 2000, the first summer of the new millennium, I spent three weeks traveling some parts of southeastern Europe. Not only that, with 16 friends, we built a house in Beius, Romania. In just five days, we were able to built the house from the ground up! Okay, so windows, plumbing, electricity and a lot of other stuff still had to be installed, but who’s counting.
The other two weeks I visited Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Skopje, Tirana and a couple of other places, to finish it off with a couple of wonderful days in Rome, with my girlfriend Vinca. Budapest especially being strange, returning there for the first time in 3 years, having lived there for a year in 1997.
As what always happens on these trips, I met a lot of interesting people, saw a lot of fantastic places, and only had time to relax after I got home again.
Although it was summer, it was a busy time at work. Our customers are companies maintaining capital intensive production processes. Companies like Shell, Elf, Corus and others. Although typically, these companies all but shut down during summer, my agenda was packed. Going away for more than three weeks definitely wouldn’t help.
Only a couple of weeks after returning from Southeastern Europe, I had scheduled a week-long trip to the UK, for trying to sell our main software product to potential customers. All arrangements for that, I had to make before going away. Not just that, I had to make sure the IT infrastructure at the office would not breakdown in any way during my absence, that backup plans were in place and that everyone knew what to do in case of an (IT-)emergency.
On top of that, with some friends from my fraternity, I was busy compiling a book, on 15 years of our existence. This too needed to be finished before setting of.
I was to take the 6am train from Rotterdam to Arnhem on Wednesday. By the time I got to bed, it was 1:15am. Already Wednesday. I was looking at less then 4 hours of sleep.