This past week I was in Vienna for the EMEA (Europe/Middle-East/Africa) Symantec Symposium (conference) which gathers our pre-sales technical people along with partner companies and the product groups to go over the various products (like NetBackup) that we have. The conference ran Wednesday to Friday but I had to get in by Tuesday for a pre-event meeting with our technical champions who are the go-to guys in the field for NetBackup. So instead I came in Sunday so that we would have a full day Monday to do some sight seeing and spend some time with Mayur, one of the guys on my team who is based in Virginia. My whole team is so distributed that it is great to spend time with someone in person when we’re traveling to the same place – even if it’s half way around the world. So Monday we walked around and got on one of those hop-on hop-off buses that drive around the city. I took a bunch of pictures and put them up on Flickr here.  Vienna overall was a neat town – definitely a classy place for a work conference.  We ate weiner schnitzel, drank Ottakringer (Austrian) beer and finished things off with lots of pastries.  The city seems like it would also be a great place to go for a long weekend getaway or a romantic vacation (similar to Paris).  It had a certain level of sophistication with a large part of it’s history wrapped up in classical music, art and architecture.  I particularly like it when I go to a city with low expectation and find that it’s a neat place.  I had been through Vienna once before when I was younger but didn’t spend much time so this time around was much different.  Definitely one of the more low-key cities in Europe and a nice place to visit.  I wish I had more time to blog about some of the smaller moments while I was there but work travel is always a busy schedule.

I’ve been back home for a week now and haven’t had time to talk about going to India for work since returning.  After leaving Tel Aviv I had a bizarre path to get to Pune India.  I went from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt and then Frankfurt to Delhi and finally Delhi to Pune.  The reason for it was that Lufthansa was on strike and they were the only airline to offer a direct route from Israel to India.  It was semi-worth the long trip since I was able to get a lot of work done and being in Frankfurt for a few hours was a relief since I could actually speak/understand the language unlike Hebrew or Hindi.  I ended up flying Air India from Frankfurt to Delhi which was also an experience all in itself.  All the flight crew wore traditional Indian sari while showing bollywood movies and serving Indian food.  Definitely not what you’d expect on a flight. Continue reading →

Wednesday I took the morning and went to do some sight seeing finally. Jerusalem was the place to do that and it is about an hour away by car from Tel Aviv. I didn’t plan it out very well in advance so Tuesday night I called around to see if anyone was giving tours for Wednesday. They all required registration a few days in advance so I was forced to wing it. I got a map from the front desk of the hotel and did a little research online for what I should see. The short list 3 places: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which has a huge number of Christian things. Second was the Via Dolorosa – the walk Jesus did from judgment to crucifixion. And the last thing was to go see the wailing (western) wall.

Getting There
So with my map I grabbed a taxi outside the hotel. The taxi drivers in Israel are awesome. The rides to the office usually consisted of friendly banter and I never felt unsafe when stopping at security check points. In fact, on one of the trips back to the hotel when they were inspecting the trunk the driver said something to the gun-toting guard in Hebrew. I asked what he said and he joked if they had found the bomb in the car. I probably wouldn’t have laughed if I had heard that when he said it but it’s amazing how people are just accustom to these things here in their lives. So the taxi driver, Simon, told me lots about Jerusalem on the way and the various cities in between. We drove through Modi’in which is a new city about half way between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It’s littered with construction cranes and looked really nice and new compared to Tel Aviv.  Not that Tel Aviv was bad but this reminded me of Bellvue in comparisson to Seattle.  Shortly after we went by the city of Ramalah and the Israeli prison camp for terrorists. Continue reading →

I got in to Israel really early Monday morning (3am). Flying from Seattle was a long haul with layovers in Minneapolis and Amsterdam. The layover in Amsterdam was actually a full afternoon so I figured instead of getting bored with the airport I’d go roam around the city. I hadn’t been in Amsterdam for almost 10 years and we didn’t spend much time the last time I went. Placed my luggage in lock up which was much easier than when Jim and I stuck both of our gigantic backpacks in 1 locker last month. I then took the train from Schiphol airport which was 3 stops or about 10 minutes and drops off right at Amsterdam Centrale. I wondered across the canals and watched a bunch of street performers. Didn’t bring the camera so no pictures unfortunately. Got a beer and some food at a small little restaurant and then went back to the airport. I was lucky enough to sleep pretty well on the flight over so I wasn’t too tired but getting back on a plane wasn’t the most exciting thing so I grabbed some coffee before the flight.

Tel Aviv
Flying to Tel Aviv was pretty easy. European flights are always interesting since the seats are usually much crappier but not that much worse if you’re use to Northwest. They do serve food more often than not so that’s nice. I didn’t really take advantage of it since I passed out and slept most of the way there. There was a really old Jewish couple next to me and they were reading books in Hebrew from right to left. Weird to see a new book opened with the back first. I woke up right before landing since we basically did a nose dive. It might just be a European thing since I know Ryan Air did that a few times when we were backpacking. Continue reading →

I had a good business trip to the west coast this past week. I spent the first half of the week in Mountain View and got a ton of things done. It was a little odd for timing since our marketing team was moving from Mountain View to Cupertino but it’s always mind boggling how much more you get done when working face-to-face. With so much email going back and forth lately it seems like there is so much time spent just processing email. The full 3-days allowed for us to bash out a lot of material for the Veritas Backup Reporter 6.5.1 release scheduled to go out next month. I also met with a NetBackup partner in the EBC (executive briefing center, or enterprise briefing center?). That place is a presenters dream come true since it’s laid out really well, has all the AV stuff to make demo’s look really good and even the new lady who helps setup the briefings is ridiculously nice. She set up a room next door for Kristine (marketing manager) and I to each lunch since our part of the full-day presentation was over the lunch hour. I definitely am looking forward to doing more presentations in that place. Continue reading →

I was back to traveling this week and am trying to make more of a point of blogging about what I’m doing since that’s a major reason why I started a blog in the first place.  I spent Monday night and all day Tuesday in Montreal which marked the first time I’ve ever been to Canada.  Kinda weird considering I’ve lived so close to it in Minnesota for 7 years now.  I got in around 8pm Monday night and went out for a run around Old Montreal which was where all the traditional French style buildings are.  It was a really neat area – much like Europe with all the shops, restaurants and people walking around.  They even had the really classic blue signs for ice cream drumsticks that always makes me think of Europe.  I got pretty hungry half way in to my run so I stopped at a Subway (all sweaty from running) and attempted to order a ham (jambon?) sub in French.  Running back was a little interesting trying to hold the sandwich without squashing it and the people that saw me probably thought I was in a big hurry to eat my food.  Nothing too much more exciting about Montreal but I was definitely surprised about how nice it was, would definitely consider going back for a vacation.  The sales training I did there for work had about 20 people and it went really well.  Lots of good discussion and the 4 hours of presenting flew by much faster than I expected.