Last night’s post made it sound like I was carousing wildly but the truth is I was making it sound better than it was. The fact is I never left the hotel yesterday. In fact, I haven’t held a Euro in my hand since I arrived, but more on that in a moment.
The training went extremely well, as my earlier post indicated. I wasn’t entirely sure how things were going until dinner last night. One of the Irish participants asked me if I’d noticed a difference in how Eurpoean students responded in class. When I asked him about it he told me that most Europeans are very reserved in class, unlike the Americans. In America, he said, a student is more apt to raise his hand when he has a question. Europeans like to keep a lower profile. So that explains why even though I tried to keep things interactive, there were actually fewer questions than I expected. In spite of his theory, he and his colleague proved it wrong by pestering me every ten minutes with questions!
Dinner and the drinks at the bar turned out to be great fun. I really enjoyed sharing stories with the guys from other countries. One of the m, an Irishman, is marrying his German girlfriend in Germany this fall. Thus, we traded wedding stories and listened to the Germans there talk about the wedding traditions in their country. One friendly African flew eleven hours (!) from Cape Town just to attend my training. Incredible! I’m really humbled by that.
One thing that is markedly different about this training session than the one I did in Australia is the obvious camraderie these partners show towards each other. Though Australians seem generally friendly, the partners I met there were not as open with each other. They seemed to view the other partners as competitors much more strongly than this group does.
I’d had two glasses of wine at dinner and was thinking of holding the line there but I couldn’t turn down an invitation to the bar. I was happy to see practically the whole class there, drinking and laughing. I nursed a pint while discussing world affairs, among other topics. My German told stories of how much he loved his visit to Las Vegas, and how he got a little too free with the speed limit in Nebraska. The state trooper pulled him over and then locked and loaded on him when he unknowingly sprang out of the car. As my friend was lying on the ground, the trooper realized he was German. Having been stationed there himself in the Army, the trooper gushed about the fun he had there before happily waving him on. The German had nothing but good things to say about Americans. I was glad to hear it!
Around midnight some of us had slipped out of the bar. That’s when Niall offered to buy me some whiskey. Normally I shy away from whiskey and I almost made it out of there before he ordered it. But not quite. It turned out to be about a shot of triple-blended Irish whiskey. On ice, no less. So I didn’t get quite as crazy as one might have inferred by my previous post.
Today’s training should be over quickly. I hope to have the team go through the set up and configuration all by themselves and make myself available for any questions they may have. Then they’ll take an exam before giving feedback on the course and heading back to their homes. Hopefully we’ll be done by 1PM, which should give me time to finally look around Amsterdam. We’ll see how it goes.