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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Marrakech, Morocco…New Year’s 1996. Notwithstanding being ordered from our car at gunpoint on our way to a tribal village in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, or the human feeding frenzy I engendered with an ill-conceived act of kindness toward some Berber children there, Sande and I loved Marrakech.

Had the best mint tea of our lives in a makeshift café on the edge of the walled city, prepared by a happy guy with no front teeth wearing a homemade Moroccan hoodie.  His refreshing recipe: stuff several large mint leaves, straight from the earth, in a small pot of warm water, add a block of sugar the size of a baseball, and have at it. Undoubtedly, his missing teeth owed something to his prodigious consumption of sugar, but he made a damn good cup of tea.

Visited the weekly Berber market, just outside the city walls, where the “parking lot” held not one car but nearly a hundred donkeys. Even more surprising, the pack mules were lined up in almost perfect order, as if some unseen donkey park attendant had organized them. Meanwhile, the only blonde head for miles belonged to Sande, making her impossible to miss and quite popular.

Decided to relax in the hotel steam room one afternoon. Attendant said, “Go in the first room on your right.” Entered a large space the size of a boxcar, lit by a single overhead light, the walls a magnificent mosaic tile, the floor poured concrete with a drain in the middle. To my right lay a hose about six feet long and a wooden bench like prizefighters sit on between rounds.  Turned on the hose; damn near scalded the skin off my feet. Spent the next several minutes effectively assuming the lotus position atop the prizefighter’s bench, steam slowly filling the boxcar. Strangest shvitz I ever had! »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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Delhi, India…March 1996. I have always been fascinated by India. Yet, whenever that country comes up in conversation, it is usually met with negative comments about overcrowding, lack of cleanliness or, in more recent times, frustration that the local cable company’s customer service representatives all seem to live there. None of that was on my mind in the spring of 1996 when Sande and I, and two female friends, set off on one of the most fascinating holidays of our lives, at the heart of which was ten days in neighboring Nepal, featuring Himalayan mountain trekking, white water rafting, and the jungle tracking of rhinos and tigers while perched safely (if bumpily) atop an elephant’s back. That Nepalese adventure, and Nepal’s magnificent capital city of Kathmandu, which still houses the “Living Goddess” and its fair share of ‘60s hippies, was indeed extraordinary, but Delhi was its gateway and our days there were no less memorable. While unequivocally reinforcing the negative perceptions of so many, it only reinvigorated the allure of this very foreign land to me personally. »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.

*  *  *

Rovaniemi, Finland…December 1994. One of several travel routines that Sande and I established while we were living in London was an early December weekend in one of Europe’s wintry wonderlands. Someplace cold, cozy, snowy, and full of the Christmas spirit. This particular year, we decided on Lapland, the unofficial “hometown” of the jolly fat man in the bright red suit, and a place where, in early December, the days provide little more than a dusky gray light from maybe 10 in the morning to around 3 in the afternoon. Everything else is nighttime, in no uncertain terms. Laplanders have, of course, adapted well to these conditions—the prodigious consumption of alcohol and a virtual disregard for the clock being the pillars of their assimilation.

For geographic perspective, Roveniemi is just three miles from the Arctic Circle, and over 400 miles north of Helsinki, a city to which I traveled often during my London-based tenure, and before. In fact, my first trip to Helsinki was in 1991, the year before Sande and I relocated. One of my agency associates and I traveled there from Baltimore to meet with Nokia Communications, at the time one of the most dynamic multinational players in the mobile technology market, headquartered just outside Helsinki. It was a fascinating experience, noteworthy for the deadly serious characters we met at the meeting, the mouth-watering dinner of Bambi steaks we consumed that evening, the money I lost in one of the city’s casinos that night, the vodka I subsequently consumed because of the money I lost, the plane I missed the next morning because of the vodka I consumed, the business meeting I punted in London the next afternoon because of the plane I missed, and the fact that I felt like crap as I then scrambled to reconnect the dots of my binge-busted itinerary. But that’s a different “travel” story. Please pardon the riff. »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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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