So, on March 20 I woke up at
4:20 in th morning... smoked some
hash and called a cab to take me to the airport...
I got to the check in counter early and slept on a bench for half an hour.
The
Torino airport is tiny... makes me thing of the
Portland, OR Greyhound station... My co-worker arrives and we have an
espresso together before getting on our flight to
Zurich to connect to
Hanover,
Germany as we are on our way to the
CeBIT tech expo...
The flight is fine... borring and business class. We get to the Zurich airport and Paola has an earlier connection than I do so I see her off, before heading out of the airport (so I can get a
Swiss stamp on my
passport and to get to the street where I can smoke a cig.
Making it back inside and throught customs and control I find a free internet terminal from which I use my day's allotement of votes and write the
Killing Time in The Zurich Airport node...
Then I'm on the plane to Hanover... I meet Paola and we head by taxi to the firgrounds to check on the
Telecom Italia Lab stand... and eat lunch.
Then we check into the hotel... about 125 km away from Hanover in a town called
Gottingen or something like that... the hotel is 100m from the train station and is called the
InterCity Hotel.
My girlfriend shows up next and we go out for dinner at this nice
Korean reastaurant next to the hotel...
During the course of the next week I'll be responsible for sneaking my girlfriend into my hotel room so we can ... be togehter.
It's a nice hotel but they have a
lawn jockey outside the reastaurant... you know a short little black guy in servants clothes and red lips holding out a tray... So I bring it up with the management saying it's kind of offensive... and she says she can relate, such as if she say a
Nazi flag in the
U.S., but that these little black dwarves are common in Germany and nobody has ever complained before and that they wouldn't remove it for me...
So... the next day we got to the CeBIT even though it's not open to the public and we kick it there... Where I will kick it for the next week, standing around in
shiny black leather FBI shoes and my suit and tie (thank god for thefour in hand knot node which taught me how to tie a tie...) demoing
Link TV and
Internet Easy Video.
------------------------------
CeBIT... a weird experience.... it was huge! 860,000 people and all of them looking to make some kind of deal...
My girlfriend and I were in aggreement that it was very superficial and that the money could have been better spent on
homelessness issues and starvicg babies in
Cucamonga...
but the
freebies were kewl! See:
Cool Freebies at CeBIT.
And the after expo parties were pretty swingin... lots of loose flesh and free drinks... but the music was the same 20 top ten disco hits... I heard
YMCA 2 dozen times, and
Sex Bomb 13 times and and and... it was really generic, but did I say the
free drinks were nice?
So CeBIT and a week with Kristi in
Germany... free of charge, care of my work... it was fun... it was tiring... I lost my voice, I ate really well and splurged with the compnay money whenever I could...
Flying back I was on
Sabena which sucked... we had to fly through the
Brussels airport on our way back to Torino and the Bussells airport looks like some
B-film set and the waiting lounge made me thing of
communist Romania in the 1950s... sad, sad, sad...
Plus to top it all off they wouldn't let me cary on 2 bags... so I had to check a bag with a fine fine fine bottle of
Coline Sinese 1999 Chianti from
Tuscany///
Bue you can guess hwta happens next... yep I pick the bag up and the straps to the backpack have been ripped out and OF COURSE the bottle was shattered... destroying nearly all my receipts that I needed for work and all the wonderful brouchures and reading material I had brought home with me...
ARRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG.../.
I'm still trying to get them to pay for the wine....
(They paid me some 250,000
lire{120$} reparations in the end for the wine and other losses.)