zittiblog.com

I don’t know if anyone besides me ever watches Mythbusters on the discovery channel but it is great show. Here is my mythbusting facts (or at least observations) about Eastern Europe:

MYTH: Polish are kind of stupid (hence we make Polish jokes). BUSTED: The Polish I met seem quit intelligent (although they did build the tallest building in the city of Krakow in 1975 and it has stood there totally empty the last thirty years).

MYTH: The drink Absinthe contains a crazy hallucinogen that makes you see a green ferry. BUSTED: Original Absinthe may have but the kind you can buy now (which is still illegal in the US) just makes you drunk and tastes really bad. There are no hallucination effects.

MYTH: You can get a five star hotel room in Bratislava for $1.83 per night (Eurotrip movie). BUSTED: The exchange rate is helpful in Slovakia but nowhere near that helpful.

MYTH: Germans are highly stiff and pretentious. CONFIRMED: Travelled with one for quite awhile, had to everything planned down to the minute. Subway station in Berlin tell the exact time in minutes and seconds to the next train.

MYTH: All the graffiti in Eastern Europe is expressive of the artistic culture. BUSTED: Some is good but the vast majority just looks like vandalism to me.

MYTH: Berlin is the third biggest Turkish city on earth. CONFIRMED: Only Ankara and Istanbul have larger population of Turkish people than Berlin.

MYTH: Germans drink huge quantities of beer. CONFIRMED: I see people all the time just walking down the street and drinkin a beer while reading their paper…. at like 11 AM.

MYTH: Opera consists of a fat lady singing FIGARO. BUSTED: No singing in the opera I went too.

MYTH: Eastern Europe has some of the most beautiful women on Earth. BUSTED: I would have to say no more so than back home and definitely not like some parts of Asia. Perhaps it is necessary to venture even a bit further to the east to confirm this myth.

That is it for this edition of Mythbusters… check you next time.

What to say about the capital of Germany… I just got done saying how Prague is my fave city visited but I may be changing my mind. Prague has more to offer the tourist and is really awesome but Berlin is a city that gets under your skin. It is sort of like Beijing and Bangkok I think. Beijing is very cool, great sites, somewhat compact, geared to a tourist, etc. but Bangkok is the city that gets under your skin. I could see myself on a long stay in Berlin.

Here, you have to really work hard scratching the city’s surface to find what the city can really offer. Prague just packages it up and hands it to you. Berlin is so much more modernized, fast paced, and the like but yet when you really look, talk about history. Capital of the nation divided by cold war, the nation that started two world wars, the nation that has been both the occupied and the occupier several times in modern history. Really, really distinct culture and historical attitude. It is working hard to remember and at the same time put the past behind it to lead Germany back into the big time on the world stage.

Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt are three amazingly different cities… think NYC, San Francisco, and Vegas or something.  It would be imperative to go to at least these three (and more I’m sure) to consider yourself as having seen Germany. Anyway, Berlin is really worth the trip (one few tourists make relative to other European destinations like Paris and London). I can’t believe I consider not making the stop, almost messed up on that one for sure. I am leaving tomorrow afternoon I think for Warsaw to meet David and the others for Business & You. Makes me a bit sad to think I’m on to my final destination before the flight back over the pond.

Travelling and being here has reminded me how much I love doing this. I could easily spend a year or two or three doing nothing but backpacking the planet and love every minute. It helps me keep life in perspective a bit I think… career is critical in life I think we can agree, but at times we must ask if it is enabling you to do what you love or impeding it. A good thing to always keep in mind I think when looking for that elusive thing humans call happiness.

Back to Poland or bust!!

Prague was totally fabulous, but I hit the road for one more destination again before my final stopping point in Poland. I am back in Germany in Berlin for a couple days. I was pretty tired this morning checking out at ten after staying out late (like late, late) on the town in Prague. It was fabulous tho… I met a whole bunch of really cool people again in Prague. A Scottsman, couple of English girls, couple of girls from Delaware, and several of new Aussie and Kiwi mates. All are super cool and we went out dancing last night and gave Prauge our all.

I have even acquired a travelling mate who cruised up here to Berlin with me… Marty from Melbourne, and we are meeting a German girl up here that we met in Prague so we even a local tour guide. I love the road!! Anyway, more to come with have something to report on Berlin. Ciao again!

OK, I hate to say it. Vienna was beautiful, Munich was a blast, Budapest if fabulous, but I finally figured exactly why I came to Europe…. PRAGUE! This is the spot. Real old-world architecture (not rebuilt after WWII destruction), tons to do, cool mix of people… yea, I think I may not be coming home. Just jokin, kind of. Really, right up there with Bangkok, Singapore, and New York City among my favorite cities.

No time to talk tonight for long tho I am afraid. It is Friday night and a young guy wandering the Earth looking for a good time is in Prague. I am off to explore… Hope everyone is well. If the nightlife here lives up to expectations and is as cool as the day life, I really may stay. Later ya’ll!!

My right brain obviously needs a lot of help. So… I am doing my best to learn how to appreciate all of the world’s variety of art. In fact, I feel it is art, sport, and economics that unite people around the world when so much of everything else is devisive. I love sport and business is my life, but art has generally escaped me.

Therefore, I travel. Traveling always triggers my interest in art as it has this trip. I am proud to say (when at one point in my life I would have been embarassed to admit) that I have taken in six art museums, the opera, and tons of architecture in Europe. Yesterday, in fact, I saw an original Leonardo Da Vinci oil painting called “Lady with an Ermine”. According to the brochure, there are only like five Da Vinci paintings anywhere in the world (one of which  being the Mona Lisa of course) and I just happened onto one in Krakow Poland. It was a pretty cool picture even actually, outside the fact someone famous did it. The light effects are really pretty cool when you check it out up close, I kinda see why the dude got so famous, haha. Actually, a Rembrandt I saw in Budapest is my favorite of the trip so far.

So… speaking of Budapest, guess what I did under my own freewill. Yes, I actually paid the full price of a ticket to watch the opera. And… it was marvelous. It is called an opera but there is no fat lady singing figaro (obviously a stereotype I acquired from a cartoon or something). No singing at all actually, more like a symphony and it is way better when you’re there in person because the different sounds from different instruments all come from different directions which you can’t do with speakers.

This crazy Hungarian guy was real famous I guess who both wrote and conducted the opera. So he wrote this thing (design and build phase) and then conducted it (execution and management phase) and made this hugely diverse set of instruments symphonize (if that is a word) into this wonderful sound that all these very diverse people in the audience went crazy over at the end.

It occured to me that if more CEOs operated like this guy they would be much more successful. In business, we generally take bigger problems or tasks and then break them down into small pieces we can solve. In art, there is some great vision and the objective is take small parts to create the vision. It is the difference between construcing and deconstrucing. Businesses fail (look at Ford or GM) because they creat no symphony, the departments or people or whatever the pieces are, are constantly working to solve their bit of the deconstructed problem and are pulling against each other. Great comapnies (look at Wal-Mart or GE) are constantly operating as an organization, not a department, in symphony toward some great vision (a vision which is generally not profit, that just follows). The composer knew when he needed to give the violins a bit of extra encouragement and when he could just leave the cellos be as they were cruising just fine because he had a clear vision of what the constructed result should have been. I think a bunch of us who call ourselves business people really don’t have this vision of what we are actually trying to create. Anyway, I think the arts are good, great in fact, so I take back all the mean things I once said about them :-\