2nd Stop - Munich

Left Paris for Munich early Wednesday morning with Maimouna from Senegal and Akkar from Tunisia. We hooked up on-line via www.covoiturage.fr and shared the road from Paris to Strasbourg. Thanks to both of them and especially Maimouna for bluetoothing me some great songs (including Chris Brown - Forever, click here to see an awesome music video).

Made it to Munich late in the evening with some difficulty. I should really have a GPS. I guess it makes things more adventurous to just have mapquest or mappy print outs.

Iris Barnert from InterCultConsult hosted me for 5 days and we had a blast. The first two days we did a lot of work on our own but also managed to share some best practices for business. Iris was really happy to learn about Nomadesk, a file synchronization software, which allows her to keep all of her files synchronized on her 3 computers and an on-line server. No more headache with back-ups and external hard-drives!

On Saturday, we went out on the town by bike and happened upon the annual Streetlife Festival on Leopoldstrasse. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to stick around because we had a powwow to attend with some translator colleagues...

Thanks to Martin and Chao Ling for joining us at Schwabinger Wassermann’s for cocktails and dinner. We had a great discussion about intercultural issues in international business and corporate social responsibility. I really liked what Martin said, “The borders of my language are the borders of my world.” And did you know that if you ever have to send a quote to a Chinese client, you should avoid the number 4 (death) and go heavy on the 8’s (lucky number)?

On Sunday, I made crêpes for breakfast, then we headed out to the Garden show in Rosenheim to see a friend of Iris’ put on a concert, Bea from Bea and the Franks. It just so happened that this concert took place on the ark stage and most of the people in attendance were from a women’s catholic group. Great fun, I’ll get the video out soon... thanks Bea for the concert!

Thanks again Iris and looking forward to attending another one of your excellent trainings in Aarhus in a couple of weeks!

Next stop: Nuremberg!