Thursday, March 27, 2008

Of all the places I have been...

The place that left me in awe, at every turn, and wanting to go back and take my wife was Budapest, Hungary. I was there on assignment with Honeywell to train the European technical support staff for a week, in the new VPN solution we were rolling out.

What was so memorable about the trip was the feeling that I had stepped out of a time machine. Nevermind that I was in the castle district, at the Budapest Hilton, but then they gave me a room with a view looking east over the Danube river into the sunrise every morning, with a castle turret interjecting medieval architecture into a breathtaking view of the sprawling city, just across the river.

The young technical support staff was hospitable, professional, and very intelligent, most of them speaking a minimum of 3 languages. I found myself feeling less like the expert from out of town and more like I wished I could stay longer. I was able to get to know several of them during the week I was there, and told them quite honestly, I would be back. I guess the icing on the cake was that I had just discovered the music of Corinne Bailey Rae right before the trip, so I had her latest CD at the time, and so, as beautiful music can often imprint memories more permanently into our souls, so did her beautiful, lilting voice singing "Breathless", "Choux Pastrie Heart" and others, do the same to mine.

My life will forever be different for experiences like the ones that I collected in one short week in a country still shrouded in its Medieval architecture, and poised to gain considerably from the growing modernization spreading across Central Europe like a brushfire. I will return, and look forward to spending more than a week.

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