Day 87 - Ostrava - Scary Speech time.

As once before, my blog starts about thirty minutes after the last one finished.  The light had been turned out and the window shut and the air conditioning on.  It was all quiet and sleep was coming when a buzzing started in my ear,so I put the light on and there was a damn mosquito.  I thought I would try to ignore it and get to sleep, but started thinking what if it bit me and I had some sort of reaction, so I put the light back on and spent the next goodness knows how long trying to exterminate the little blighter.  For the animal rights people out there you will be pleased to know that the mosquito disappeared and has not been seen since.  If anything has happened to it, it wasn’t at the hands of me.

With last night being an early one I was up and back at the computer just after 05:00.  It is funny but even though I was up at that time I was still rushing to get my shower at the last minute and get out of the door at the time agreed with my colleague.

Today the plan was for me to give a presentation to a small audience as I was led to understand the majority of people were on holiday and this was to kick start the communications about the project and the people who were in attendance could do some work before the main bunch returned from leave.

What really happened was that the meeting was changed at the last minute to a local hotel with the presentation to be done in a room described as the “main room”.  We arrived and when we were led to that room my first thoughts were, “Oh goodness me”.  But you can substitute the Oh Goodness me, part to any expletive you feel like using as I think I used them all.  The room was quite large with over 100 empty seats ready to be filled, a lectern at the front and a twenty foot screen ready to show the presentation I was suppose to be doing.  I am not sure why but when I do the presentation in a normal size room it feels normal but put in this environment and the nerves were there in bundles.  To make this worse, before I started, the host then told me that some of the people did not have a full complement of English and it would be best if I used simple English and spoke slowly.  The first I can do easily and the second I could but try.  I then had to use a microphone which was hand held, I wonder if some of them expected to see me burst into song, but I managed to overcome that feeling and spent the next hour or so speaking slowly and trying to gesticulate my words with hand actions.  Every few moments I was interrupted by the host translating the important bits into Czech.  As the presentation went on there were less and less interruptions which meant either he was getting fed up with repeating what I had said or he thought what I was saying was becoming less interesting.  Finally it was over and with only a couple of people asking questions it made me wonder if they were the only people who could understand what I was saying.  I did consider it a successful presentation as only two people in the whole room fell asleep while I was speaking.  It is strange how some people measure success.

After work in the customer offices, I did a little bit of work at the hotel before my Lithuanian colleague and I ventured out for a walk and stretched our legs by walking to the shopping mall.  This is a very modern building and totally out of character with the rest of the buildings in the city.  It is the usual mix of clothes shops and eateries and as all the malls seem to have these days a cinema on the top floor.  I did wonder for a moment about going to see a film whilst I was here but looking at the selection that soon put me off.  The only thing I recognised was Monsters University and I didn’t fancy watching that with Czech subtitles.  On the way back we visited a local beer garden as it looked a nice place and had a light refreshment before calling it a night and returning to the hotel for some additional opportunities to do some work.  The one think I have noticed, what every country I seem to visit, apart from Romania, is that the towns and cities have their share of very nice outdoor cafes and bars.  They are always well attended by the locals and it makes a nice atmosphere to enjoy a drink.

Time for bed now and another day in the city of Ostrava beckons tomorrow.

Night All.