First day for Work

Up bright and early for breakfast at the hotel. I had eggs and sausage and a demi baguette (the baguettes here are so damn good it’s sick). We grabbed a Taxi to DAF and got in to the meetings.

This first day was just a big stack of brutal meetings. The only “fun” part of the day was when I got my Krokettes for lunch in the cafeteria. No Fritz on Mondays, I think Wednesday is Fritz day.

The afternoon meetings got pretty brutal. We were all hitting jet-lag and were asleep on our feet (or rather in our chairs). We got done with meetings at 5:00pm but we spent the next hour talking to all of our rarely seen colleagues here at DAF.

We got back to the hotel by 6:15pm and had planned to meet at 6:30pm for Italian. We pretty much opened up the restaurant; there was only one person there before we got there.

This is a good point to mention how wait service in Europe is awesome; of course from the American point of view it is the worst service in the world: We got our drinks right away, and were pretty much left alone for 15-20 minutes. By the time people were ready for another round, they asked about an appetizer, one of the guys just asked for an Antipasta sampler plate. After a while, one of the other guys (in probably an “American” view) said “what do ya bet we never get that appetizer?" Before it was even out of his mouth they brought out these two HUGE trays with Lox, French butter, gorgonzola cheese, carpachio, pickled onions, parma ham, fresh melon, and several other cheeses and meats. It was plenty to feed six alone.

They gave us plenty of time to work on the appetizer. That’s a GOOD thing about the European wait service. No matter how long it takes you to eat one course, they won’t bring the next until you make it clear that you are done with the current one.

So, after a few minutes they bring out our entrees, which were actually not that great, honestly. But that could have been just that I was comparing it to the antipasta.

When we were done they brought out the check (only by our request, they would never bring the check unless it was requested), and they brought out a complementary Sambuca. I asked to see the check because I was curious when the antipasta cost, I was blown away when I saw that it only cost 29,00€… amazing. Three hours later and only 172€ for six was not bad at all.

Marty and I stopped and played a couple of games of pool on the way back at a pub called The Tipsy Duck. We played a few games of pool there last time we were over here. It’s a great little pub (bad selection of beer… all they have in this place is Bavaria, which is a decent lager, but just doesn’t compare to good American micros that I’m used to coughStonecough ).