Gueugnon

I spent the last week on a project in France. In Gueugnon, in fact. If you look it up on the map, you will see that it is in the middle of nowhere in the east of France. It is a rural area famous for its beef. The nearest cities are Lyon, Dijon and Geneva. It took me 7 hours to get there on Monday and 7 hours to get back on Friday. I took the Eurostar for the first time, which is quite a pleasant way to travel. Luckily I had my London-based French colleague with me or getting from Gare du Nord to Gare de Lyon in peak hour would have been crazy. We then took a TGV train and then a car.
The Language
Not being a French speaker was a decided frustration factor. Most people do not have good English. The people on the shop floor do not have any English at all (though the chef in the canteen told me what the choices were each day in English - pork, lamb, beef etc.) Even some of my colleagues are no good. However, I was proud to finish the week providing some training on Statistical Process Control (in English) using a presentation that had previously been created in French with some tweaking on my part in English. Babelfish is my friend (most of the time).
One of my colleagues speaks Mandarin. This proved to be very confusing for me as he would put in some Chinese phrases in the middle of speaking French or English. He worked in Shanghai for 3 years, met his wife and brought her back to France with him. He is very rusty, though, so he is taking Chinese lessons. I would say that he is no better than I am, which is to say, pretty crap.
The Hotel
We stayed in a chateau. It is a massive mansion with 3 storeys plus a basement, which has additional rooms. I stayed in a large room on the top floor with wooden shutters on the windows. The bathroom was down the hall and had a room with just a sink (I think it used to be a bedroom) and then a bath and toilet hidden in a little room behind this. The bath was the typical European bath with the handheld shower attachment that is impossible to use to wash your hair without being alternately very cold and then splashing water everywhere.
Breakfast and dinner was in the stables, where they still have the racks for the hay and the walls between the stalls. Dinner was incredibly late, 8.30-9pm each evening and 3 courses (entree, main, cheese/dessert or both). However, I did not feel overly full afterwards and was crawl into bed soon afterwards and fall asleep easily (which I wasn't able to do on the previous project).
The People
All of the French people I have met (in the last week and otherwise) have been lovely. I don't understand why people always say that they are arrogant and rude. Quite the contrary. A little too much so. I have not been kissed so much and shaken hands with so many people in such a short space of time. Every morning with colleagues and people they work closely with, everytime you pass someone in the corridor, kisses or handshakes are exchanged. Perhaps it is my Australian and/or Chinese background showing through but this is altogether too much physical contact.
My colleagues are an ethnically varied bunch of people with a Moroccan-French, a Lebanese-French, a 1/2 Ukrainian-French, a French with Chinese wife, the usual European mixes and a Brit, who just joined the team this week. They all drive incredibly fast (100-130 km/hr on country roads in the middle of the night) and enjoy their food and wine (a little too much).
Another thing I have noticed about the French is that they are probably the opposite of the Chinese as far as business culture is concerned. The Chinese defer all decisions and opinions to the most senior person in the room. The French want everyone to have an equal say and can't decide anything. Neither model is good.
I caught up with my cousin Michelle on the weekend. She is studying international relations at LSE. Finding it tough work but enjoying it a lot. Hopefully we will be able to catch up a few more times before she goes home.
On another note, I have been on fire at badminton in the last few weeks. Lye Seng, you had better be on your toes! : )

Amsterdam

While Taffy and his cousins were off bribing officials in Budapest last weekend, I went to Amsterdam. Before you get all excited, like the people I was working with, no, I didn't get high. (Vicki, I can almost hear your disappointment.)
I had decided that I was going to be a British/American tourist and not bother to learn any local phrases at all. This was fine as the people of Amsterdam all speak perfect English. Their transport system is easy to use and their ticket machines and announcements all have English components.
First stop on Saturday morning was the Flower Market. Ma would like it there. The stalls have row upon row of bulbs and seeds of all sorts of flowers. They also had some bunches of flowers, wooden flowers and quite a lot of cactii (including aloe vera plants! I didn't buy one though. Transportability.)
Next stop was the Rijksmuseum. It contrasts greatly with the Van Gogh museum in that it is housed in a beautiful old building whereas the Van Gogh museum is a hideous concrete structure.
The Rijksmuseum holds a lot of art from the Golden Age, when the Dutch were a force in the world and the East and West India Companies dominated trade. There were a lot of pieces that were either from Asia or had been heavily influenced by Asian work - intricately carved Indonesian woodwork and Chinese porcelain.
I was surprised by the dullness of The Nightwatch. I don't know what I was expecting but it isn't a piece that stands out as a great masterpiece. I think I like some of Rembrandt's other pieces better.
I didn't realise that Van Gogh only painted for 10 years (with 800+ paintings and >1000 drawings during that time) and that he died at 36. From his self portraits, I always thought he was older. The museum is organised into his various periods so that you can walk from his dark years through to the bright colours (especially yellow) in the last few years. They also had a lot of his drawings that were really great (some done on backs of menus and scraps of paper).
The weather held out for me for the whole weekend and I was able to wander along the canals to look at the houses, the houseboats and the abundance of art galleries.
I stopped in at one of the diamond houses and viewed some diamonds. The lady showed me a few diamonds of various grades of colour, which, when you put in a setting, you can't tell which is which. Only when you put them on white paper can you see that one is quite yellow and the others are blue-white. She also showed me a green diamond, which I was tempted to buy. Thought about it overnight and decided against it.
I found out this week that my cousin is in London studying for a Masters. She has been here since September and has only just contacted me 5 months later. What the...?!
This week was my last week on the project in Dewsbury. The EHS team gave me a present to remember them by: a Chuck-a-duck (a gun that shoots little ducks out - similar to the Chicken Shooter that we had been playing with) and a Monster notebook (I had been using Monster post-it notes instead of normal rectangular ones during our process mapping). Very nice. Even the wrapping paper had Monsters on it. I am off to France next week to the middle of nowhere.
Some photos of Amsterdam in the usual place.