The joys of international work assignments: Living from a hotel room

It may sound all exiting at first, being sent on an assignment abroad. And it's great, discovering a new culture... There are some surprises of course: power cuts, making me practice touch typing as i can't read the keys right now! The trick is to always stay positive.

One way to positive about all the time spent in the hotel room with very few distractions is to catch up with all the stuff on the computer that got postponed eons ago: tidying the MBA notes, putting colour and adding links on my site, reading old emails...

The one thing that i'm seriously worried about is the lack of exercise. No climbing wall in Delhi i'm afraid! And running outside may not be such a good idea here, with all the dust in the air. I've just about convinced myself that i need to go to a gym. That will be a first! I think i'll try one of these elliptic machines, for a laugh.

I will leave you with a picture of a strange street animal. Is it a wild pig or a domesticated boar?

Spiderman

Ma premiere soiree en Inde s'est passee en companie de Raja, mon collegue Indien, et sa fille, son gendre et leur petit garcon Pranav. Pranav etait deguise en "Spiderman". La semaine derniere, lors de mon sejour a Montpellier, j'ai passe une soiree chez Katia. Son fils Martin etait lui aussi deguise en "Spiderman".

Comme quoi, l'Inde n'est pas si differente qu'on ne le pense...

Tout nu dans la secretaire

Last weekend, I flew back to France to visit my Mum and nip over to Annecy to do a bit of winter mountaineering with my friend Oliver. But the bad weather and high avalanche risks meant that I stayed in Montpellier all the time.

Still, I managed to clock in a couple of days climbing. Antoine needed a break from studying and was very happy to do a couple of multi-pitch routes with me at a crag called "le Thaurac".

From the car park...	Antoine at the first belay

The first route was very enjoyable, straightforward bolted climbing with a pumpy, overhangy exit. With lots of other parties around us, we aimed for a quieter part of the cliff for our second route. Antoine chose an "old classic" called la voie de la secretaire.

Old school climbing: ledges and chimneys	Me at the start of the second pitch

Then it was my turn to lead. With two old pitons and a sling around the tree, the difficulty was to find where the route goes. The climbing was easy, but without my English rack of nuts and friends, i felt naked, as we say in French.

The following day, I met Guilhem at a crag half way between us: "La Clape". We choose a different cliff than our usual choice and enjoyed good rock, in a sunny, sheltered spot with view of the nearby beach.

View from the bottom of the clif	Guilhem

Que font les grimpeurs anglais quand il fait un temps a faire sourire les grenouilles?

This is for my French friends and relatives. Anyway, English readers don't need the captions to understand what i'm on about...

La vue de ma fenetre ce matin:

view from my window

Au choix: On reste au chaud, on va au mur d'escalade, ou fait autre chose que de l'escalade. Aujourd'hui, c'etait du VTT dans la foret.

at the start

De gauche a droite: Matt, Remi, Ben, Rodger, Dan. On n'est meme pas reste propres 5 minutes...

J'ai essaye le petit saut:

small jump

Et ca m'a decourage d'essayer le grand. Bravo a Dan et Matt, et aussi Ben pour une belle gamelle!

big jump

C'etait une bonne apres-midi, tout compte fait!

Purple Gorilla

Something very unusual happened to me on the last day of January sales at the sports shop.

The price of the purple gorilla woman fleece was dropping by the hour, till it it the floor at £5. My team mates, who know my tastes for brightly coloured clothes, tried harder and harder to get me to buy one with every price drop.

So soon after Christmas, i couldn't afford to spend even a fiver! I was so convincing that...

... I was handed a present at the end of the day!

You've guessed it!

The only present i got from work mates before was when i left Dublin. But this time, i wasn't leaving, no one had to get me this!!!

So a big thanks all my team mates and especially Chris, who organised it

Deja Vu

It's funny how you can find yourself falling into a sticky situation that you've witnessed others grapple with.

I was told that a colleague from my MBA is a bit young and naïve - business wise – and should wait a bit before starting her own business, staying in her well paid city job and building up her experience for another couple of years.

Then again, not many projects would get off the ground if everybody plays it safe. How many startup would exist if their owners had not been naïve and underestimated the effort required to get it started?

I am working on putting together a research project, to replace the part time job that pays the mortgage but doesn't stretch me. Having found a way to put it into words, i had 4 meetings last week with good contacts in corporations and academia. The outcome is that i have a good idea, but I'll have a huge networking effort to do to get the kind of corporate support i envisaged! Alternatively, I can compromise on the research method...

Well, I've got a lot more to do before being able to submit the project to senior executives. It seems I, too, am naive!

As for my MBA colleague, my first effort at passing the feedback I was given about her have been so clumsy that she doesn't communicate with me anymore.

Maybe I need to learn coaching. I'm sure that would help me communicate with all my business contacts...