Guus Bosman

Wednesday and Thursday I was at a big trade-event for Chess. It's called Intertraffic, and it's a trade fair for the design, maintenance and management of traffic and transport infrastructure. The fair was in the RAI in Amsterdam.

Chess has been working on a new parking machine for Vialis, which is one of the projects we demonstrated this week. The goal for Chess was to make contact with potential customers and suppliers.

It was a lot of fun working there and explaining people about what we do. There were a lot of international visitors; I found good use for my (renewed) German knowledge and interesting enough also for my Bulgarian! There were a couple of visitors from Bulgaria and Macedonia.

It was also nice to learn more about other Chess projects we do from my colleagues who were at the fair.

I'm afraid I was 15 minutes late for my German lesson yesterday -- the train from Haarlem had a big delay. I had dinner at Chess again, this time noodles with a salad.

We did a very interesting exercise at the German language course. We had a chat with the whole group, where each participant was a representative of a country. Together with Noortje I was representating Germany. It was great fun to discuss the national eating habits, especially because the teacher was filming us all with a camera. After the break we watched ourselves -- this is always painful but it was very interesting. I was describing the "Biergarten", where German people would come together once a week at their "Stammtisch" with friends. I haven't actually done that but German friends have described it so it was easy to talk about it.

Later I gave my presentation. It went reasonably well. My German always degrades when I have to talk in public but that's exactly why I'm following a course. It was a great exercise, the whole lesson yesterday. Slowly but surely I notice my German is improving.

Yesterday I had dinner with my grandmother, my parents were there too. It was very cosy.

I just missed Sasha's phone call yesterday, but she was on the voice-mail. She arrived safely and everything's fine.

I'm going to the swimmingpool now. I'm happy I didn't forget about the summertime.

Really wonderful news -- Sasha is going to Cameroon!

The last months she's been working in the World Bank in a unit that deals with debts of Third World Countries. Recently she has been "specializing" in Cameroon. Tomorrow she's leaving on a business trip there. It will be for one or two weeks, and she'll be in a group with people from both the IMF and the World Bank.

Cameroon is located in the Horn of Africa, basically between Nigeria and the Central African Republic. Sasha will be staying in the capital, Yaoundé. Cameroon is a stable country, a fact I'm very happy about. The official languages are French and English.

Sasha is flying this Friday. First to Paris, and then an 8-hour flight to Africa. She and her group will be working on the subject of "debt sustainability".