Thanks to all of you who sent us emails, Christmas cards, and letters. Our apologies to those we haven't written personally. We've been extraordinarily busy since the time of our October message--primarily with the Hungarian company (G.Form) that Trend purchased. We traveled, but these trips were equally hectic. Here, at last, is our update.
First, our travels. We took the train to Istanbul,
Turkey, by way of Romania and Bulgaria during the week
after Thanksgiving. Although our "Turkey" was late,
the trip was worth it. We choose to go by train so we
could see the countryside and stop in Bucharest
(Romania) and Sofia (Bulgaria). Of the nine nights on
this trip, five were spent in sleeper compartments on
the train. We took overnight trains between Budapest
and Bucharest, Bucharest and Sofia, and Sofia and
Istanbul. The ride from Istanbul to Budapest was two
nights long. We arrived in each city in the morning.
This gave us two days in Bucharest, two in Sofia and
three in Istanbul.
Romania is mixed up and depressing.
We could see that fifty years ago, the infrastructure
(railways, roads, etc) was probably about the same as
Hungary. Things have changed since then. Bucharest
is home to the world's second-largest building, a
palace started by Caucescu, most of which was built
after he was executed (on Christmas day in 1989). The
palace, shown in this picture, is an architectural
masterpiece and has a boulevard grander than the
Champs Elysee leading to it.
This enormous investment of state
funds stands in a city where many buildings are in
ruins, the solid metal sides of the trams are rusted
through, and numerous stray dogs and homeless people
sleep on the street. This picture shows some typical
stray dogs sleeping in front of a typical small shop.
This picture shows one of the
orthodox churches. If you look closely, you can see a
man sleeping on the sidewalk in the lower right.
Throughout the country, people steal
the copper wire from the electric transmission lines
to survive. We saw power poles with no wires between
them and enormous abandoned cement plants along our
route through the country. We were in Romania during
their presidential election. The candidate most
likely to reform the current system came in third. A
rabid nationalist (who wanted to get rid of all
minorities in the country) came in second. The first
post-Caucescu leader (Ion Ilescu) who presided over
most of the construction of the palace won the
presidency. We recommend Romania to people who want
to see mountain scenery (a budget Switzerland),
organize a major conference (the palace now rents
conference rooms for reasonable rates), or visit a
semi-functional society. This picture is a metaphor
for Romania. Nice architecture on the outside, but
inside there is a lot of work to do.
Bulgaria was a positive surprise. Our
first impression came from the immigration officer at
the border. He awoke us in our train compartment,
looked at our U.S. passports, smiled, and announced in
halting English that George Bush had been declared the
winner in the U.S. presidential election. The
Bulgarian countryside is similar to Romania,
mountainous and attractive with the occasional
industrial dinosaur. Here is a picture of a typical
small train station in the countryside.
Sofia looks like a Russian city. The
train station is a grand Soviet-style concrete
structure. The Bulgarian and Russian languages are
similar and Bulgarian is written using the Cyrillic
alphabet. The apartment buildings, churches and other
buildings show a Soviet influence. This is picture of
the hotel we stayed in.
Since the fall of communism, Bulgaria
has nudged westwards while maintaining its Balkan and
Orthodox roots. This picture shows the Aleksandr
Nevski Cathedral. One of the domes is under
scaffolding while it is being cleaned.
Mexican restaurants, McDonald's, pizza
joints, and cute little cafes with great desserts
thrive in this safe, inexpensive, and walkable city.
Here is a picture of one of the Mexican restaurants.
The people we met were friendly and willing to help us
with directions to cash machines and internet cafes.
Istanbul feels like Europe with
mosques. The city is modern and big. The currency
took a little getting used to. The exchange rate was
about 700,000 Turkish Lira to a dollar, so we had to
count the zeros each time to distinguish a bill worth
$1.50, which had six zeros, from those worth $15.00
that had seven.
In Istanbul, we did our Christmas
shopping at the bazaar, a covered market with over
4000 shops, little crooked alleys and no maps to help
us when we were lost, which happened frequently. This
picture shows Bert trying on some slippers in the
bazaar. We should have taken a picture of Jean trying
one of the belly-dancing outfits hanging in this shop.
We visited the Aya Sophia, a Christian
church built over 1500 years ago that was the largest
building in the world for many centuries. This shows
the scaffolding inside reaching the top of the dome.
When the Ottoman Turks captured
Constantinople in the fifteenth century, they
converted the Aya Sophia to a mosque by adding some
minarets and painting over the Christian frescoes.
Now that everything is crumbling, you can see bits of
Christian and Muslim influence, with scaffolding where
things are being cleaned up and steel reinforcement to
keep the building from collapsing.
We visited the Ottoman palace complete
with its Harem (where the Sultan lived). This picture
shows the throne room in the Harem. We took a boat
ride across the Bosphorus to Asia where we walked
through a residential suburb with smaller mosques and
children eager to practice their English. After three
days in Istanbul, we boarded the train at midnight.
Thirty-eight hours later we were back in Budapest.
Our only other trip during the last
several months was a whirlwind at Christmas. We took
an overnight train from Budapest to visit Oma Boon
(Bert's grandmother) in Zwolle (the Netherlands) the
next day. That afternoon, we took the train to
Rotterdam and had dinner with Willem and Annette (one
of Bert's uncles and aunts). The next morning we got
up before dawn and flew to St Louis to visit Jean's
family, arriving on Christmas eve. After two days
there, we drove to Colorado in time for Bert's
mother's birthday. While we were there, we had time
to take this picture of Jean's nieces and nephews
(Gregory, Stephanie, Jason, Logan, and Sydney) with
some of their presents. We stayed there a couple of
days visiting family and catching up on paperwork. On
New Year's Eve, we made it to Gene and Carol's (Jean's
cousin and husband) party in Winter Park. That night,
we drove back to Bert's parents, slept three hours,
and flew back to Hungary.
That sums up our travels. The
question we were most often asked over Christmas was:
"What are you doing?" So, let us explain. We are
working for Trend Technologies, a manufacturer of
plastic and metal parts for the electronics industry
that Bert had worked for in Colorado. We are
responsible for helping the company grow in Europe.
Last summer we found a small company (G.Form) in
Hungary that Trend has now acquired. One of our
projects is to help G.Form grow, build a new factory
for them, and do whatever else is needed to facilitate
the selling and supplying of plastic and metal parts
from G.Form (soon to be renamed Trend Technologies
Hungary) to international electronics companies that
have established manufacturing facilities in Hungary
or the surrounding countries. This is not as easy as
sounds. We are trying to grow the business quickly.
It requires dramatic improvements in systems,
significant development of staff, changes of
organizational culture, and lots of money. A further
challenge is that many of the key staff members at
G.Form (including the former owner and general
manager) do not speak English and we do not speak
Hungarian. Bert and the general manager communicate
in German, but even fewer of the other staff members
speak German. Bert has been spending virtually all of
his time in Hungary, and part of the time when we're
traveling, helping to facilitate the development,
construction and integration process between Trend and
G.Form. Jean has suspended her "doctor" business to
help by taking care of a lot of the administrative
issues and learning business, accounting, and computer
software (especially email, word processing and
spreadsheets) along the way. This way, Trend has
gotten two employees for the price of one, but we get
to work together, which has been nice. In case you're
wondering about this picture, it was taken at an
internet cafe in Sophia. Even when we're traveling,
we were checking our emails. Bert was receiving about
twenty messages per day during our trip to Turkey.
It has been a long time since we have been able to update our email list. If you no longer want to receive these messages, please let us know. If you have a better email address that we should use, please let us know this also. As always, we love to hear from you.
Best regards, Jean and Bert
P.S. Please note, our web server is moving from California to Colorado. You won't notice any difference when you log onto our website, but our old email addresses (jean@jeanbert.com and bert@jeanbert.com) will no longer function in the future. Please use jeanbert99@yahoo.com for any future correspondence.
This page was last updated on \\\12/31/01.