I knew it had to be too good to last.  I’ve been gloating over the past few weeks about how quite my travel schedule is.  No sooner had I thought about taking a week of vacation than I learned that I need to be in Mumbai for a few days, then straight to Sydney for a two-day workshop. 

Flight times mean that I lose two weekends away from home.  And Aude will have to add Valentine’s Day to the long list of events I’ve missed due to business travel (her birthday and my birthday being the other two events, recently).  And let’s face it, 21’099 miles in a week is a lot, even for a backside as calloused and travel-weary as mine.

Still, we’re headed out to the slopes for a week as soon as I get back from Sydney – hopefully without too much jetlag.  We’re just finalizing our plans for the trip, booking our apartment, and buying our skis!

As soon as we’re back from skiing, it’s straight onto a plane again — this time, headed for Beijing.  Yep, February is turning into a pretty brutal travel month.  Plenty of frequent flyer miles, though!

The more I work with my colleagues in India and China, the more I come to realize what economic powerhouses these countries are going to become.  And I’m putting my money where my mouth is: a few days ago, we bought our first shares in a few Chinese companies, hoping to tap into the extraordinary growth that is going on there.

I often think about the intellectual firepower that is developing in these countries, in their universities and technical schools, and think about the possibilities it has to completely change the business landscape over the next thirty years.

I was reading an interesting article in the New York Times this morning, entitled Is China the Next Enron?  It was written by Thomas Friedman, who also wrote The World Is Flat (which, incidentally, is a great read).  He had this to say:

Now take all this infrastructure and mix it together with 27 million students in technical colleges and universities — the most in the world. With just the normal distribution of brains, that’s going to bring a lot of brainpower to the market, or, as Bill Gates once said to me: “In China, when you’re one-in-a-million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.”

I’m headed out to Beijing in two weeks to run a series of workshops.  It’s my first trip to mainland China, and I’m excited about it.  Visiting India and seeing the transformation there, firsthand, changed my outlook.  I suspect seeing China first-hand will do the same.

I wonder if I’ll ever grow out of being excited about snow?  I think it has something to do with how often I get to see it.  My father grew up in Wisconsin, and after seeing snow nearly every day from November until March, I guess the novelty wears off a little.  But not for me.

Growing up, I lived in an area where we got snow every winter, but just enough that it was always exciting.  When I moved to the UK, we might get a few inches each year, but never very much and it would never stick around very long.  So living in a place with regular snowfall is new to me.

Depending on which weather report you listen to, we’re expecting anywhere between 15-50cm of snow this weekend.  Less in Basel, I guess, more where we are due to the slightly higher elevation. Bring it on, I say.

The snow tyres are on the car, and this morning was the first time I’ve ventured out on the roads before they were plowed.  The snow tyres make a big difference to the handling (it’s also the first time I’ve had snow tyres), and I was happy as could be, heater turned up and the heated seats doing they’re job at keeping my backside warm.

For a country that gets so much snow, the Swiss architects don’t seem to have made many design concessions.  I woke up this morning to find that shutters were frozen shut, and when I finally managed to get them open, I discovered that our angled windows are not steep enough that the snow slides off them – instead, it accumulates and blocks out all the light in the room!

A shopping trip to France last week yielded a stunning cote-de-boeuf.  For any Americans not familiar with the cote-de-boeuf, think of a double-thick rib-eye steak (2.5”-3” thick), cooked medium.  Medium dead.

Anthony Bourdain: “Pound for pound, this is probably the best cut of beef on the animal — and one of the most expensive. For your serious meat-eating guests this is the way to go. When you approach the tableside with two of these intimidating monsters, and carve them in front of your guests, they will tremble in shock and awe, basking in your magnificence and casual impertinence.”

“I suggest serving this dish with French fries and a staggeringly expensive bottle of burgundy in cheap glasses. Just to show them who’s their daddy.”

I live in Switzerland, so frites = rosti. And I prefer Bordeaux to Burgundy. But the spirit of the recipe remains the same. And Aude remains in shock and awe, basking in my magnificence and casual impertinence. As do Daisy & Calypso (but with less shock and awe — more of a casual, egalitarian acknowledgement of greatness.  Or as much enthusiasm as cats can muster).

After being stuck in the house for a week, a combination of the stores being closed for the holidays and then miserable, rainy weather after they reopened, we finally emerged today to go downtown to walk around the city centre, do a little shopping, and see the decorations before they take them down later this week.

Basel Rathaus at Christmas

Matthew at Marktplatz

Aude at Marktplatz

The entrance to Marktplatz

Christmas lights

Street scene

Fountain with Christmas lights

Christmas lights at the Hotel Basel

Christmas tree at the Hotel Basel

A creative use of bottles to decorate the tree outside a bar

As we come to the close of the ‘Noughties’, it’s time to wish all my friends and family a happy New Year 2010.  I was reading the paper this morning, and I think this quote summed up the year perfectly:

“(2009 was) like shock therapy, where people really change when something bad happens to them,” said accountant Conrad Jordaan, 35, as he enjoyed cigarettes and coffee Thursday at an outdoor cafe in London. “It will be interesting to see if it changes peoples’ behavior long term.”

I was born in the seventies.  Gerald Ford was president, the Cold War was very much alive, and I remember Star Wars, the Rubiks Cube, and listening to the music that we call ‘classic rock’ today.  It was a transitional generation, moving out the troubles of the 1960s – racial tensions, the Vietnam war and a general feeling of rebellion, and into something different.  My parents owned a yellow station wagon with chrome bumpers and ‘woody’ side panelling, and my mother frequently dressed me in highly-flammable, brightly-coloured synthetic clothes.  I was part of the generation raised on Sesame Street.  The highlight of my week was eating sugary cereal and watching the cartoons on a Saturday morning, having transformed the sofa into a fort.

Roll on the heady 80s.  Hostile takeovers, shoulder pads, Reaganomics, dodgy hairdos and even dodgier music, this was the ‘Me, Me, Me!’ generation.  These were my formative childhood years, marked by some amazing inventions like the mainstream adoption of computers and the launch of the first space shuttle, but also by some big new threats: the escalating Cold War, the outbreak of AIDS, Nancy Reagan telling us to ‘Just Say No’ and the Columbia exploding and falling back to earth.  We bought our first VCR, and later, a CD player.  My mother bought her first cellphone, the size of a purse.

The 90s brought high school and college.  I left the US and moved to Europe.  I jumped on the internet superhighway in the early 90s when it was barely a two-lane road, and never looked back.  If I think about the inventions that had the most impact on my life, the internet is surely one of them.  I got my first job just as the whole world moved to casual dress Fridays.  I watched the Democrats get elected into the White House the first time I was old enough to remember.  I watched the US get involved in Iraq and OJ Simpson get acquitted.  The cellphone was still analogue, but it was now the size of a transistor radio.

I had just started my professional career as the ‘Noughties’ arrived, and everyone was looking for the next big thing.  Everyone you spoke to was an entrepreneur, ready to make a million on the internet. The stock markets shot up every day, and it seemed every idiot with a stockbroker was making a fortune. 

I was working in New Orleans on 9/11, and I saw the coverage of what was happening in New York from my hotel room.  I tried to call home to let people know I was okay, but the lines were blocked.  It was the first time I could remember having an overwhelming urge to jump on a plane and get straight home.

In my industry, we shed loads of jobs in the wake of the burst of the internet bubble.  Friends and family lost their jobs, but at least the payouts were good, severance packages generous.  People took six-month vacations and then picked up where they left off.  When the real estate bubble burst, more jobs were lost – but this time, without the generous severance packages and with unemployment rates still hovering near 10%, the short-term prospects aren’t great.

But we have our health and the prospect of a new decade ahead of us.  As we enter our ‘teens’, I think we’re due another transitional decade, influenced by the unbridled optimism of the 80s, the huge technical advances of the 90s, the geopolitical shifts of the Noughties, and the sobering reality and lessons of the last few years.  Each time I visit Asia, I’m aware that the world order is changing, and that the whole world is becoming more interconnected.

I’m excited by what the next 10 years have in store, and ready to face whatever may come.

Best wishes to you and yours for a very happy, health, safe and prosperous 2010!