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.

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Nairobi, Kenya…December 1993. Sande and I had been living in London for just over a year when we decided to embark on the first of what would be many holiday adventures beyond Europe. Over the coming years, these would include the faraway wonders of China, India, South Africa, Mongolia, Nepal, Morocco, Russia, and Oman, among others. The fact that we started in Africa—or frankly, that we started at all—is noteworthy given that Sande’s idea of a “travel adventure” was being in a hotel without hairdryers and my previous experience with “roughing it” was to leave Boy Scout camp several days early with a bad case of stomach cramps owing to my inability to cross the threshold of the odious outhouse, much less take a seat inside. (Thousand leggers crawling, flies swarming, bats hanging, and the smell—ugh!) Nonetheless, at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning 1993, Sande and I landed in Nairobi to go “On Safari.”

Over the next twelve days, we would track big game in Samburu, straddle the equator atop Mt. Kenya, camp on the vast plains of the Masai Mara, and snorkel in the Indian Ocean off the coastal town of Mombasa—a town we were quite fortunate to reach alive! But that is a New Year’s Eve story. »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.

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Riyadh (& Jeddah), Saudi Arabia…1995-1997. Its culture diametrically opposed to my own and its appeal, well, there wasn’t much of that, despite my first-hand look at the opulence of life inside the walled residence of the scion of a family whose patriarch was a highly placed member of King Fahd’s Council of Ministers.

The chauffeur-driven limousine picked me up at my hotel at about seven that evening for the twenty-minute drive to the residence. Surrounded by desert and twelve-foot-high walls the color of sand, the house itself came into view only when guards opened the heavy wooden gates to a courtyard where several more men stood. Even then, with few exterior lights suggesting grandeur, I was not overly impressed. Then I stepped inside.

The foyer was massive; its polished marble floors seeming to rise up to meet the moonlight filtering through a sky-high stained glass cupola as impressive as many I’d seen in European cathedrals. Ahead to my left, a doublewide marble stairway curved itself to a higher floor, while straightaway beyond was the Library where I would meet my reason for being there. I tried to act like this was all normal fare for me. Yeah, right! »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.

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Krakow, Poland…February 1996. I don’t handle cold weather very well. Poor circulation is undoubtedly to blame. That, and the fact that I never seem to have (or remember to bring) the proper cold weather gear, made my client’s desire to “take some air” on a brutally cold February night on the Eastern Front a real pain in the ass.

I was in Krakow with one of my client counterparts from British Petroleum. Michel, a Belgian with a heavy French accent and a ready wit, was the Marketing Manager for BP Europe—a position akin to herding cats, given the European mindset that our country’s problems and needs are different from all the others. For that reason, it was important to periodically visit with the local country managers and discuss their particular issues.

BP Europe was just one piece in my agency’s BP Global portfolio, but it was a crucial piece and Michel was, in turn, an important client contact. Exactly why he cared to put himself through the trials and tribulations of “herding cats” was a mystery to me, as I had it on good authority that Michel was quite wealthy, owing to his family’s success in various Northern European business ventures. A refined and charming bachelor with a penchant for collecting and restoring vintage automobiles, Michel was a delightful travelling companion and, on this particular night when the thermometer was falling precipitously toward single digits, was far better ward-robed for taking some air than was I. Put simply, Michel was dressed like a Russian Cossack, whereas I looked like I belonged in a Miami Vice episode with Crockett and Tubbs. »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.

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Tokyo, Japan…July 1995. Stepping out through the Rosetta marble columns of Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, I found myself thinking of Oddjob, James Bond’s Oriental nemesis in Goldfinger. The hotel’s entrance columns had that same look of squared-off immovability as the squat muscleman with the steel-rimmed bowler…not terribly elegant but damn solid. I was heading out for a late afternoon jog to clear my head and get my bearings.

This was my first time in Tokyo and I had just finished an intense meeting with a Japanese businessman and an interpreter. For all the traveling I had done in recent years, this was only the second time that I had required an interpreter, the other being in Barcelona at a meeting with the head of a small Spanish agency whose Gothic offices overlooked Las Ramblas, the city’s eclectic pedestrian promenade. The Barcelona meeting had been a delightful introduction to the world of language intervention, thanks to the interpreter being an exceptionally pretty young woman who seemed to find everything I said fascinating. In contrast, my translator in Tokyo was an older gentleman, with a kamikaze-like focus on the job at hand. It was a trait I would find repeatedly in my dealings with the Japanese over the next few years.

I had arrived in the land of the rising sun to intermittent bursts of pouring rain that whipped up an impressive level of humidity reminiscent of the Baltimore summers of my youth. I was, however, reasonably acclimatized, thanks to Tokyo being my final stop on a two-week excursion that had already taken me to Kuala Lumpur, Brunei, and Jakarta. »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.

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Muscat, Oman…Christmas 1998 & New Year’s 1999. It seemed like a good idea at the time—to spend Christmas and New Year’s in a Muslim country in the middle of Ramadan.

Perhaps the most sacred month of the Islamic calendar, Ramadan is a period during which Muslims refrain—dawn to sunset—from eating, drinking, smoking, and sexual relations, arguably the perennial Big Four on Sande and my holiday wish list. Nevertheless, on Christmas Eve, we boarded a British Airways flight out of London en route to a destination about which we knew little, a culture that could hardly be more foreign, and a region that, within days, would make worldwide headlines when sixteen tourists in neighboring Yemen were taken hostage by Islamist militants. Four of those hostages and several of the terrorists would subsequently be killed when Yemen government troops stormed the compound where the hostages were being held.

True to form, Sande and I were blissfully ignorant of such dangers as our plane touched down in Muscat. Our concerns were more basic. Had Sande brought enough color-coordinated veils to cover her head whenever we were out in public? And since we could only drink alcohol in the privacy of our hotel room, albeit via a very well stocked mini-bar, how often would we actually be sober enough to make it downstairs for dinner? »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.

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San Remo, Italy…May 1988. Sande and I were on the second week of our honeymoon, having spent the first in Paris falling in love with everything Parisian—from the magnificent mural painted on the ceiling of our Left Bank hotel room, to the perfect-for-people-watching cafes along Boulevard Saint-Germain, to the sexy lingerie stores where Sande went bra shopping and I shamelessly tagged along.  We then made our way south to the medieval village of Eze, dating to 200 BC and perched high atop a cliff overlooking the French Mediterranean and the city of Nice. We would spend the final week of our luna de miel in this virtual fairyland, while exploring the coastal wonders of neighboring towns along the French and Italian Riviera—like San Remo, where I almost got arrested. »Read More