24th febbraio 2010

"All I need to know about Planet Italia I learned from the lunch queue"

Lots and lots to report but one thing in particular has been on my mind and I repeat it goes a little like this:

All I have learned, all I know, all I need to know about Planet Italia, I have learned in the lunch queue.

It really does encapsulate everything about Italian life so far. It starts at the stage of picking up a tray. There is an area where you collect a tray, a little piece of paper to go on the tray (everything in Planet Italia, has to have at least one piece of paper, preferably signed in triplicate), some bread (quite a variety - most hard, some oily, never brown, never seeded), a glass, and some cutlery, before moving through to the main area to collect your food.

Now then - this tray collection area, vestibule, call it what you will, clearly has two areas so you could easily have two or more people collecting their stuff at one time, but it is so badly arranged that it is impossible to have more than one person doing this at a time, and generally you have about 5 people trying to get things and getting in each other's way. Lean manufacturing or six sigma this is not.

Going through to the counters, there are is a pasta or rice bar, a salad bar, a meat and vegetable bar, a pudding bar, a serviette, oil, balsamic vinegar, paprika bar and a fruit bar. It is a mayhem arrangement of people milling around, getting in each other's way. And the staff at the counters are massively outnumbered by the other staff milling around, or outside smoking, so that progress is very slow.

Then there is the pay desk, sandwiched between the serviette et al bar and the fruit bar. Again, impossible to get to to scan your card to charge the incomprehensible amount of 1 Euro from your wages, without getting in the way of the fruities, or the oilers.

Further down is the seating area. With beautiful stunning views.

And then there are the two tray return areas, which again are excessively complicated, and ends up with people bumping into each other.

After dinner, there is a standing coffee bar. Italians don't sit down to drink coffee, but have very short very strong coffees, and huddle around standing tables for a couple of minutes and then scoot off. Of course, this coffee area does overlap into the original queueing zone, which makes things more messy.

The whole is located in the beautiful Villa Gori, a beautiful 18th century, former hotel.

So - how to sum all this up?

Planet Italia is an incredibly beautiful place, the food is excellent, the people incredibly friendly, but there is a variety of frustratingly dumb roadblocks to get in your way, obstructive beaurocracy. However, simply the best is that Italians ALWAYS find time to take lunch, are very social and incredibly friendly. Very different and really very welcome. In fact, if you don't go to lunch it is seen as very strange or almost rude. I like the approach a lot.

Lunedi 22nd Febbraio

I need to make an amendment from my previous posting. I had not gone two or more weeks without speaking to anybody English...on the first Tuesday night in Marburg I spent too long at the bar, and naturally, the last three people left in the bar were the three English guys! Of course. Typical English thing. And of course, these foreigners don't know how to drink.
A domani.

Mercoledi 10th Febbraio

Two weeks away with work is a long time. Two weeks in Germany is a long time. Two weeks away with work in Germany is a long time. About three quarters of the way through now and have got a good routine but am quite tired of it.
We have a mock inspection, in preparation of a regulatory agency inspection in three months time.

The first few days we had a lot of snow, and I enjoyed several runs through quite thick snow, which was very comfortable for my knees. Since then the days have got longer (8-8 every day) and the snow thinner and slippier, so I've walked a little, gymed a touch, spa'ed a bit and eaten and drunk loads. There is a very nice wine in the hotel called "Clancy" which we had 17 bottles reserved and an emergency order for more put in. It is very pleasant, and there are about 20 of us staying in the hotel so the more the better.

The hotel claims to be one of the best in Germany, and it certainly has the best spa complex I have ever seen, all comes as part of the deal. 5 different types of steam rooms with buttons to choose which fragrance you would like - camomile, rose, menthol etc etc. Strange feet shaped sitting places, and a cold hot bath, where you walk round in a circle putting your feet in the hot and then the cold - it's supposed to be good for something. I'm not sure what. And then there's the salt steam room, which dumps a sort of steam of salt on you ever few minutes, and a swimming pool and jacuzzi, of course. But the best bit by far is the special shower room - this has four different settins. The best one by far is "Caribbean Storm" - you stand in the shower and get bombarded by hot strong jets from the side, whilst bird song tweets above you and soothing lights change colours. After a couple of minutes of this, there is thunder and lightning and white lights flash above and an icy cold mist descends on your head, at the same time that you continue to be bombarded from the sides by warm jets. Now that is special!

Naturally, there have been some HR issues with this trip. The first being that I still don't have my credit card and so can't pay for the room by any other method than by my English credit card. Nightmare. Second, Italian HR policy dictates that you cannot pay for food for anyone else from the company. So if ten of you go for a meal, the bill has to be divided into ten. Nightmare. And then, both myself and Dawn are here, but HR will not let us get around the payment issue by letting us share a room. So mine is basically a bag room. And then I am going to a wedding in the UK at the weekend. So I wanted to buy a single to Germany and then buy my own tickets to the UK and then back from the UK to Italy. But again, this is against HR policy to buy single tickets, so I have had to buy a return to Frankfurt to London and then fly back from Frankfurt to Italy on Monday afternoon. Rubbish!

It will be good to be home, for the wedding, to see the parents and also find some time for a martial arts course. I realised this morning that I haven't spoken to anyone English for nearly two weeks which is strange for me.

Work is long and hard, but we are constantly bombarded with moans from one of the Germans about us contravening German working hours. This has surprised me a lot!
Alles nich in ordnung!

The office here is slightly strange. We are in a smallish office away from the main site, but there is no canteen. This seems very strange. We have had food brought in for us every day, but the others have to go out and forage. Next door there is an Aussie Bar and we went there once but I doubt if the Germans would go there every day. JAFAs everywhere as ever. There WAS a JAFA bar in Siena, which is now a non-JAFA bar I'm pleased to announce :)

Also opposite the site is a casino - maybe I should pop along there with some euro after the inspection finishes on Thursday and see if I can win my hotel bill?

This weekend should be good fun, have got a wedding and then some martial arts. My next trip to the UK in March I have been invited by a friend to join his band to play a little light guitar. So - anybody near Bolton come along to watch "Band With No Name" (not a Seinfeld reference I believe).

Auf wiedersehen.

Lunedi 1st Febbraio

"Pinch and a punch, at the beginning of the month, white rabbits"! Yes - I am crossing everything at the minute as I need all the luck that can be mustered. I landed last night in a very snowy Frankfurt airport and ma now in our offices in Marburg in central Germany, with a very beautiful couple of inches of snow on the ground, and an impending sense of doom as I am here for two weeks with an audit next week. This week we have "role play" aka preparation for the audit. It's a big deal.

Hotel is lovely, gym is great, but just like the one at Siena, there is no rowing machine. What's all that about? It may very well be a convenient excuse, but I really really want to have access to a rowing machine to try and stop the rot. I am at an all time high of weight, approximately 9kg heavier than the summer. Of course, it's nothing to do with the food, or the cheapness of the wine, or the lack of a rowing machine - rather the combination of all of them and many more things too. But I need something to help me get out the hole. The whole hole. And it's a big bad hole.

Olive news - well, it's a mixed bag. After a few days in the water, the olives came back to life, and stopped being crispy rabbit dropping sized things and became slightly shrunken olive-sized things instead. They were a mixed bag - some tasted excellent, some tasted rank. I had a few of them raw and they tasted great, but really really intense, and some just tasted awful and were a slightly lighter colour.

That's all for now! Ciao, arrivederci. Auf wiedersehen!