Traveling to former communist countries

A few notes about a couple of recent business trips to former communist countries.

Try looking at slides like this all day!

Two weeks ago I traveled to Poznan, Poland to deliver a keynote address at a Logistics Congress (the European term for conferences).  It was a thrill to be selected to give the keynote and there were about 400 folks in the audience, which may be the largest group I've ever spoken to at one time.  Also, as most of the audience spoke Polish, but not all, they had translators for folks like me that didn't understand Polish and for the few folks that didn't understand English so that presenters could present in the language they preferred.  And for the two keynote talks they translated our slides into the other language because there were two screens in the room.  I should get a copy of my translated presentation, just for kicks.

As many of you know, I grew up in a town that was heavily Polish.  The way I illustrated this to the folks in Ponzan is that growing up we used to sing "Happy Birthday" in English and Polish at my school.  And just fyi, my hosts said that although my pronunciation wasn't great, I had the tune down :-)  (And for my family, the words mean, "wishing you 100 years, etc.").

The town was getting ready to host the Euro World Cup (soccer) in a month.  It was amazing to see so much construction.  I bet London looks a bit like that now getting ready for the Olympics this summer.  One of the projects I liked was this reconstruction of a main castle.  Overall, although Poland has a long way to go to catch up to western Europe, at least their GDP grew last year (unlike the rest of Europe).  With that and the investment of the EU, you can see some signs of hope.

After coming home on Friday in time to greet Sarah and Beth (our next post), I left the following Tuesday to attend a conference in Bucharest, Romania.  It was a quick trip, arriving at 6p and departing at 10a on Thursday and I really don't have any good pictures.  Just as well.  My impression was that while Poland (and Budapest, Hungary) is on the upswing, Romania REALLY has a ways to go.  I was very impressed with the "greenness" of the city (parks and trees everywhere), but everything seemed to be crumbling.  But I will say that I've never had such good wine for so cheap as in Romania, so maybe that's the silver lining ... a good exchange rate if you visit.

Russ