Day 6 - Bogota Day 2: A Working Day

Today, Wednesday, we actually have to work. We were expecting about 40 people to attend the presentation that was scheduled for 4 hours. Rich’s presentation is about 1.5 hours, mine can go to 1 hour, and Randy is just here for filler and as an interpreter (thought I’d say that to ruffle his feathers a bit.) But he can do about 30-45 minutes with some jokes about empanadas thrown in. And then of course there's the question and answer session.

The presentations are scheduled to begin at 9:30 and are to go until 1:30. But of course that isn’t how things go. One of the local EMC managers picks us up at 9am and drives us to the facility, a trip that takes us all of about 30 seconds. After a brief discussion, we find out that we only have 2 hours – half the time we thought we had. Ok, we’re professionals, deal with it. It’s not as if this doesn’t happen EVERY time, or nearly so. So we come up with a plan and Rich kicks it off, then I get up. The only problem is that this group doesn’t say a word. It’s a mix of EMC people and partners (vendors who sell our products). So I start out asking a series of questions to which the answer is… crickets …..chirp….chirp….chirp. Nada. Ok, so I now realize that we have a problem in that 1) they either don’t understand a word that I’m saying or 2) they don’t want to answer because some of the partners may be competitors. So I just bypass the questions and move on. I do my thing in total silence for about 45 minutes. Painful.  

So we finish doing our business thing, with Randy’s key value in making the audience laugh – something about the empanadas. We say our goodbyes and head out back to the hotel. It’s after 12:00 and I had been anticipating someone from the local EMC office to pony up for lunch. Ah, nope. So we decide to go back to the same neighborhood as yesterday.

We walk around and eventually select a restaurant after one of those husband and wife and wife-style discussions (there are three of us remember) of “I don’t know, do you want to eat here, or do you want to walk around some more? Well, I don’t know, what do you want to do?” What happened to the simplicity and beauty of what Rich and I had in BA? Oh for the good old days.

So we finally decide on a place, mostly because the owner comes out of the shop and convinces us. It was a cute place, multi-story with smallish rooms. We ate upstairs. The problem wasn’t that that the menu was in Spanish, as most of them appear to be around here for some odd reason, the problem was that it only had the names of the dish that didn’t describe what it was or the ingredients – such as Ricardo’s Fish.  So this was going to be a guessing game. Guess wrong and you choke with a good chance of getting Montezuma’s Revenge, and since we were in Montezuma’s house, there was more than an even chance things would go that way. Guess right and you are in heaven. I chose Ricardo’s Fish, and Rich and Randy selected some meat/beef dishes. We were in heaven.

The food was very good. Mine ended up being fish soup, Randy’s was something like shredded beef with a mole sauce, and I haven’t a clue what Rich had. I really enjoyed mine. It was a pretty good choice of places, and the waitress was cute. She spoke Spanish very fast – so fast in fact that even that sandbagger Randy had a hard time understanding her. So we winged it, smiling a lot and nodding.

But then it started to rain pretty hard, and we were about 6 blocks from the hotel. So we kinda hung out a bit and chatted and eventually the rain stopped, so we headed back to the hotel.

Nothing much else of major interest happened the rest of the day, unless you want to hear about us commiserating about work and how hard it is to travel to foreign places on someone else’s dollar. It’s a real shame, isn’t it?

Tomorrow is a travel day. We’re heading over to that fun, fun place, Mexico City. Can’t think of a better place for three Gringos to go to after Columbia than Mexico. It’s not as if that route isn’t the most well-worn route for drug trafficking – especially by Americans. No one will even notice.

Ciao.