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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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