Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Report on our first visit to Romania: September 23-30

As originally published on ecademy, on October 4 (ecademy members may check out the original thread here).

No question at all that [our first visit to Romania] was a tremendous success. Apart from the obvious advantage of spending a week in Filip's company (and learning to build, deal, share, drink, eat, live together), it was mostly like a week-long advertisement for social networking!

Hard to believe, but we were picked up at the airport on Saturday by someone we had never even seen before. He did drive 2.5 hours to come and pick us up (!), and then drop us off at our hotel in town... Adrian came back later in the evening to have dinner and show us around.

Hard to believe, but by Sunday evening we had met with half a dozen people (oh my god, what did we eat a lot -- up to three Sunday brunches in a row, we have been sitting at the same table for nearly 5 hours!) and had follow-on appointments with business people and administrations during the week. All this from people we had never met before.

Hard to believe, but on Wednesday we were invited to present to the Director General of a State Administration, and subsequently to introduce two value management proposals for state-owned companies to be privatized. And this from people that never even heard of us until last week.

Hard to believe, but one of our new and precious contacts found us a room in paradise at a moment that all hotel rooms in and around town were fully booked by the Summit of Francophone countries. Dominic, who arranged this for us, is a topnetworker, of course.

We came home with plenty of images of a country with incredible potential, great people, and a grand future. We came home with plans already to go back, to visit and revisit, meet even more people, truly start exploring the business perspectives, go to the countryside (not for leisure), nurture our new network.

We came home with loads of enthusiasm (although very tired, I have to admit), a warm feeling in our hearts, the energy to work our way into this promising country & business opportunity, ...

Filip & Christian.

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