Thursday, June 16, 2005

ICE Sitting in the ICE (fast train) from Stuttgart to Munich right now. The past days have been very busy, as usual I try to cram as many appointments in one day as possible, with the result that I am continuously in a hurry to the next appointment. But the two-hour train ride that I am having right now is very relaxing. Just before boarding I managed to find a hotspot to get all my emails in, load all my favourite websites in my RSS reader and Firefox tabs. I actually planned to sleep a bit (only got 4 hours last night, and tonight I will meet my cigar club friends (www.the-cigar-people.de) in Stuttgart [^] and I have a flight at 06:20 AM tomorrow morning, so not much sleep for tonight either...), but that will have to wait for the trainride back to Stuttgart later today. The ICE is actually a very nice train, with good service (food and drinks) and comfortable seats. Interesting is that at least 25% of all passengers around me is working on their laptops. They probably have UMTS or GPRS cards, because I could not find a wifi hot spot in the train. It is nice and quite in the train, no loud phone conversations or other disturbances. I noticed that many people here also listen to MP3 players, either on their phone or on separate players. This year it is six years that I left my job in Germany, also here things change. Yesterday I had a meeting at my former employer, DaimlerChrysler. I also met some former colleagues, always nice to see them again, and hear what they are doing. Interesting to see that many people are still in the same or similar jobs. My life has changed so much during this time, I would not have liked to miss that. But on the other hand, most people would not want to change their lives with me: hardly any private time, quite some stress because of entrepreneurial risks we take, and also living in Shanghai would not be most people[base ']s thing. 10:14:23 AM    comment []