If I’m Hungary, It Must Be Tuesday
I arrived at Ferihegy in the late afternoon, but it was already dark, and flurrying snow. By the time I reached the hotel, there were several inches of slush on the pavement. I checked in, hung up my suit, and phoned into a conference call on my Blackberry. My co-worker, Carsten, phoned in from a cafe which turned out to be about 5 minutes walk.
After the call, I went outside to take pictures and synch up with Carsten. He decided that even though I was wearing my newest pair of give-a-speech-and-meet-with-customers-in-a-tie shoes, which are leather soled, Carsten talked me into taking a circuitous route that maximized exposure to puddles, snow, and water. We went into a restaurant and I perversely ordered ‘spicy pork’ (did the Spanish borrow the word ‘pikante’ from the Magyars, sort of like the Austrians borrowed ‘Paradeiser’ for tomato and ‘Kren’ for ‘Meerretich’?).
Giving speeches, even in a business context, is essentially show biz. An effective presenter is picking up cues from the audience, ensuring that they are grokking the message and tuned in. Yesterday’s crowd just seemed to be in a different place. Hungarian is a fiendishly complex language, spoken by a relatively small group of 10,000,000 people. As is the case in the Netherlands and Finland, this encourages multi-lingualism, and you can reliably expect anyone with a tie and a budget to have a useful working understanding of English. In spite of this, I just didn’t feel like the audience was with me. I wasn’t getting my audience cues, and I had to generate energy and excitement instead of pulling it from the audience.
After the event, the audience feedback was positive, but it was a tiring 24 hours. Carsten and I took a cab back to the airport, where we ended up in separate terminals. Although my ticket was coach, I spend enough time with BA that they give me lounge access, a privilege that becomes almost obsessively important when you are spending so much time in airports. Budapest’s lounge turned out to be comfortable, although the food could be better. It was better than the lounge in Prague, which only provides olives and crackers. In the Barcelona BA lounge you can make a sort of Frequent Flier Gorp by mixing peanuts with pretzels. They’ve got olives, too. The airport in Zurich, Kloten (a name that means ‘testicles’ in Dutch) has been moving upscale, and the new BA lounge, although in an obscure location, at least offers champagne. Its nice to sit back, sip on some bubbly, and relax before you hop back into the cattle car and hope that the guy behind you will not spend the entire flight sticking his knees into your back.
At this point, I’m making one more trip this year. Carsten and I are doing a 3-city, 3-day tour of Istanbul, Athens, and Tel Aviv. Instead of doing 1 pitch each, we are doing 3 each. Whee! I’m looking forward to exploring a whole new series of small lounges–assuming we can get access. Most of the week, we have so little time we’ll be lucky to be in an airport long enough to even find a lounge, but we’ve got over 2 hours of layover in Larnaca. I wonder if they have more than one kind of olive.