Don Riesett

I have had the good fortune to travel all over the world—for both business and pleasure, not that those are mutually exclusive. This blog is about my unique experiences around the globe. It is not intended as a paean to the wonders of the locales themselves, as there already exist volumes that more than do justice to the magnificence of virtually every corner of this earth.  Here, I simply recount small, personal moments of surprise, embarrassment, stupidity, excitement, fear, heroics, and other stuff like that.

*  *  *

Kuwait City, Kuwait…September 1994. My first trip to the Middle East was to a country just three years removed from the ravages of the Iraqi invasion and Saddam Hussein’s attempted annexation of its oil fields. While Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait lasted just six months, before “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf and company sent Saddam’s “elite troops” packing, Kuwait remained a badly scarred city when I arrived for, of all things, a series of meetings about fast food…essentially the mother’s milk of public social life in the Muslim world. This was just one of the anomalies of Middle Eastern life that I would encounter over the coming years; Kuwait serving as my introduction to the contradictions and land mines, both real and perceived, of doing business in a very foreign land.

“You don’t need to talk to her,” the Lebanese businessman said to me, as I sat across the table from him and his Jordanian wife, attempting to make small talk in a Kuwaiti restaurant because, well, because that’s what I’d always done in business situations where my counterpart brought his other half. Of course, what I learned that night is that the wife doesn’t quite count for a half. In fact, she doesn’t much count, period. And this was Kuwait—where sheria law is rather liberally defined, certainly when compared to other Muslim strongholds, like Saudi Arabia and Iran. Indeed, this husband/wife dinner package was the one and only time I would even meet a “wife” in my Middle Eastern travels. Anyway, the businessman’s don’t talk to her reprimand got my attention and didn’t seem to bother the wife, so I spent the rest of the evening doing my best to treat her like a coat rack. Weird. »Read More

I have had the good fortune to travel all over the world—for both business and pleasure, not that those are mutually exclusive. This blog is about my unique experiences around the globe. It is not intended as a paean to the wonders of the locales themselves, as there already exist volumes that more than do justice to the magnificence of virtually every corner of this earth.  Here, I simply recount small, personal moments of surprise, embarrassment, stupidity, excitement, fear, heroics, and other stuff like that.

*  *  *

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia…July 1995. You know you’re in trouble when you don’t know where you are.  I knew for awhile…the while I was more or less within the city limits of Kuala Lumpur—a city to which I had previously traveled and would continue to do so over the coming years because of its strategic marketing importance to my client, British Petroleum, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies and my ad agency’s single largest client.

Kuala Lumpur is a fascinating mix of a leading edge building boom that seeks superlatives like “the world’s tallest and most architecturally daring,” and third worldly, stilt-supported, thatch-covered huts bordered by deeply rutted dirt roads and hygienically challenged concrete drainage channels. Fine restaurants populate the city’s glitteringly modern “Golden Triangle,” at whose edge food is more likely to be consumed in open-sided venues where tin roofs are supported by steel beams along which regularly scamper rather large rats, while street stalls offer all manner of Asian delicacies that are best left unidentified and untouched, at least by weak-stomached Americans like myself. Yet, despite its unquestionably foreign nature, I loved Kuala Lumpur’s cultural diversity, even as I longed to expand my Malaysian experience beyond its city limits…a longing that would be more than satisfied in the week ahead. I was about to cross the South China Sea and enter Malaysian Borneo, where I would come perilously close to being quite literally lost at sea. »Read More

I have had the good fortune to travel all over the world—for both business and pleasure, not that those are mutually exclusive. This blog is about my unique experiences around the globe. It is not intended as a paean to the wonders of the locales themselves, as there already exist volumes that more than do justice to the magnificence of virtually every corner of this earth.  Here, I simply recount small, personal moments of surprise, embarrassment, stupidity, excitement, fear, heroics, and other stuff like that.

*  *  *

Grand Cayman Island…January 1982. A friend had offered the use of his two-bedroom beachfront condo on the island’s famously beautiful Seven Mile Beach. My wife and I arrived on a Saturday afternoon to 85 degrees of perfect sunshine, having left Baltimore that morning to 2 degrees of brutal winter. Another couple was to join us midweek, but that plan would be scuttled on Tuesday by the horrific crash of an Air Florida jet into the freezing Potomac, immediately after taking off from Washington’s National Airport in a blinding snowstorm. But this is not about the beach or the crash. It is about what happened in the restaurant.

On Sunday, perhaps owing to too much sun, my wife was not feeling up to dinner, preferring to rest in the cottage and send me off to the restaurant by myself. I was shown to a small table on the side and immediately noticed a large table ahead and to my right. There were about a half dozen couples seated six across, with a single individual seated at the head. My immediate reaction was a flashback to a scene from The French Connection, one of my all-time favorite movies. In that scene, Popeye Doyle and his partner, Cloudy, are in a Manhattan nightclub, observing a small-time hood, named Sal Boca, throwing money around like there was no tomorrow as he entertains a bunch of aging, cigar-chomping goodfellas and their well-endowed nieces. Popeye turns to Cloudy and says, “That table is definitely wrong!” »Read More