Before I start let me just tell you this short true story of something that happened at work yesterday. A few of us are organising a return trip to Champagne next week so we can stock up on bubbly for new year. The task of phoning up the champagne house fell to a choice between myself and my Polish colleague as we are the only 2 of us in the group who speak French. The conversation between Lucas and myself went thus:

me - “I`ll phone up, its not difficult to ask if they are open new Wednesday and what the opening hours are, I`ll deal with this”

Lucas - already dialing the number “No no I will do, I speak much superior French to you".

The call starts

Lucas - “Bonjour, bonjour …… do you speak English?”

Awesome.

Anyway today with what I was really going to talk about. I work in an office totally surrounded by all the separate NMRs (National Military Representatives) for every nation in NATO. In fact my office is situated right in between Denmark and Romania ….. making me ….. Poland? Anyway, the point is that I meet people from dozens of different nations every day. A couple of weeks ago I was chatting to the NMR rep from Slovenia, a country, that prior to this meeting had caused me to conjure up mental images of Borat. To cut a long story short I ended up agreeing to go to her house to fix her computer which would not connect to the internet.

I thought it would take 5 minutes.

It actually took nearly 3 hours.

But a few days after that the lady showed up in my office with a gift for me, which turned out to be a very nice Slovenian home made cake:

It was delicious. She also handed me, as well as the cake, a holiday brochure for Slovenia.

I flipped open the brochure at some random page and I have to say that I fully intend to go to Slovenia at the next available opportunity:

Naked women covered in mud - thats a sentence which is sure to get my blog blocked by some ISPs.

Anyhow, I was showing this to my boss who has worked for NATO for the past 20 years and never visited Slovenia.

He flies there this Sunday for a week long ‘meeting’.

I cannot wait for my turn!