This is my daily journal recording the events, places and my observations during a business/pleasure trip around the world. I have visited most of the locations described here before, with the exception of Hong Kong. The business part of the trip consisted of training and sales calls with our Japanese distributor, then a week of customer training in India. The pleasure portion was two days in Hong Kong and one week in Nice, France. Although I have traveled quite a bit, this is the first time I have gone “around the world.” Hence the title of this trip report.
Friday, May 17th 1991
Back on the road again… it has been a while since my last international trip. Yesterday I thought I was set to go. I should have realized that my itinerary had gone together too easily. My plans had been to fly from Portland to San Francisco, then to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bombay, Hyderabad, Bombay, London, Nice, London, Seattle, Portland. John Barker then called from London and said that the customer in India wanted to move the training out one week because they are having elections in India. At the time this seemed a strange excuse but as I see later it isn’t. The bad news is the customer wants to change the location of the training from Hyderabad to Ahmedabad. I have traveled in India before and know that Hyderabad is not the garden spot of the world, but compared to Ahmedabad, Hyderabad is a resort. I am definitely not looking forward to spending a week in Ahmedabad. I’d rather spend a week on a garbage barge off the Eastern U.S. seaboard in the summertime.
I dash over to Doreen, our in-house travel agent, and she gets on the phone with United Air Lines to see about changing my flight plans. About an hour later we get a new itinerary: Portland, San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, Nice, London, Bombay, Ahmedabad, Bombay, London, Seattle, Portland. Who says traveling isn’t fun. Remember that this was just a half day before leaving. As it stands now, I have a special around the world ticket that requires my stopping in three cities. I plan on working in Tokyo, then taking a couple of days of R&R in Hong Kong. I will then have a short one week vacation in Nice staying at a friends house, and then I go to Ahmedabad to teach the software class.
The more I travel the more I am aware of just how small our world is. I tried to call my friend Michel, in Nice, to say I would be over to visit. As I was looking for his phone number, he called to say he was coming over here to Portland on business, the same time I was going to Nice to visit him. Think about that, I can call just about anywhere in the world and someone living a third of the way around the world is coming to see me while I am going to see them. It wasn’t too long ago that it was difficult calling another city, much less another country, and traveling between cities was a major trip. Well, as for my friend, I can still visit with his family for a week, and he will be here for a month so I can see him when I return.
Saturday, May 18th, 1991
It is now about one hour before the scheduled boarding time. My mother took me to the airport so I wouldn’t have to leave my car at the airport for three weeks. Mothers are wonderful. This trip is starting off typically. I couldn’t find my small leather case of travel credit cards this morning, and now they have just delayed our flight from 9:30 to 11:00.
We finally took off, but of course, landing in San Francisco so late meant Jerry (I’m traveling with the sales manager for Asia during my Japan leg of the trip) and I almost missed our connecting flight. The international concourse in San Francisco is as far away from our landing gate as possible. We literally sprinted the distance and were the last ones to board the airplane. I am really out of shape. The only excuse for being out of breath was that I was lugging 50 pounds of camera gear (. . . well it felt like 50 pounds!)
When we got to the gate we discovered that we had been off-loaded and our seats given to others. Luckily they did find seats for us, but tried to put me in a window seat. Now I don’t know about most people, but 10 or so hours in a window seat is not my idea of fun, so I intimidated the flight attendant and she miraculously found me an aisle seat just behind and across the aisle from Jerry.
The flight from San Francisco to Tokyo is unusual in that instead of 80% Asians this flight is mostly Americans. There is a large group of MBA graduates (about 90) from Denver who are visiting Japanese companies as part of the graduate program. I pass part of the flight visiting with two of them (Alan and Alexis) and perform some magic for them. For those readers who are unaware of it, I’m an accomplished close up, sleight of hand magician. I also do some magic for an eleven year old Asian/American girl named Sarah. Sarah is cute, but she reminds me why I don’t do magic for children, “Do it again” and “I know how you do it” are her most frequent refrains. I take a walk to where more of the MBAs are gathered drinking and do some Three Card Monte for them.
I really love to visit other countries but I hate the travel. We are now five hours (one beer, one wine and one Drambuie) into the flight. The movie is about to begin, it is “Mermaids” with Cher. I decide to watch it and it turns out to be pretty good.