Somewhere in suburbia, two video dudes sit in a breakfast nook sipping straight bourbon from dirty SONY coffee mugs. They smile wistfully.
1st guy: (sighs) “You know what this reminds me of?”
2nd guy: “That strip bar in Thailand?”
1st guy: “The drugs, the violence…”
Both: “The hookers!”
This General Foods International Bourbon moment was brought to you by the year 1995, which called and said it would like its jokes back.
Our travelogue concludes:
It was Friday in Linz, Austria, the last day of the trip. After a morning of running and gunning, shooting video in the cute little town and the cute little factory, it was lunchtime. So we decided to break for, you know, lunch. Afterwards, we went back to the factory floor, set up for the next shot, and waited for the workers to return. We waited a long, long time. Finally we realized that, in Austria, lunchtime is quitting time on Friday. Which proves my theory that Austrians know how to party, but they don’t know jack about making videos. So, we spent the rest of the afternoon in the customer visitation center imbibing 100-proof schnapps with the company president. This is something that never, NEVER happened back home. Okay, once. Interesting Austrian trivia: the Danube isn’t blue, it’s brown (see photo.)
You don’t want to know why.
When flying home by way of Paris, remain calm (I recommend chai tea, tai chi, or oxycontin) or you’ll end up like me…pulled aside and interrogated like a common Tunisian hijacker. Apparently the dudes with the automatic weapons thought my hand trembled suspiciously as I presented my boarding pass. “Why have you for to being so nervous, M’sieur Lee-vuh-lee?” This shakedown, fifteen years ago, still comes to mind every time I fly, and provides a nice bit of perspective. At least, I tell myself, the chick at the Delta desk isn’t holding a machine gun!
Aside from the undeniable glamour of Paris, it was a trip filled with sights painfully familiar to a healthcare manufacturing video dude: hospitals and factories in gritty towns. (Not to mention the back of some guy’s head on an airplane for 10 hours.) Dusseldorf is pretty much the Newark of Germany. Linz, Austria is could pass for Cincinnati (with about the same number of Germans!) And Pluvigner, France might as well be Spartanburg SC. Despite the hassle, jetlag and machine guns, it was the most fun that you can boil down to half a sentence on your resume:
“…has produced corporate video in hospitals and manufacturing centers across the US and Europe.”
Until next time, this is your final boarding call!
*Final note (June 2017). One thing I will always remember is this Austrian Fabrikdirektor, whom I believed had escaped Communism, telling us “don’t believe everything you read; you Americans have nothing but friends here.”
A Lively Exchange 
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