Regina Glei's Blog, page 12

Iceland Report – Part 2

Golden Circle and Lava Tunnel

I spent my first day in Iceland exploring Reykjavik, but it’s a small city of maybe 200,000 people and there is not that super much going on there or to do. They have a few museums, but it doesn’t feel like museum time when you go to a country like Iceland. You do tours tours to the nature sites. Although, during that first day in Reykjavik, I stumbled across a comedy show of an hour entitled “How to become Icelandic in 60 minutes”. That sounded intriguing, so I bought a ticket for it and it was fun indeed. An Icelandic comedian tells you (in English) some fun things about being or becoming Icelandic with nice sarcastic spice and it was well worth the entrance fee. But back to tours: The most common tour is the so called “golden circle” tour to the famous geyser and the Gulfoss waterfall and the Thingvellir national park. 

I did that tour on a small bus, and we started with a small crater, then a small waterfall.





The first official highlight was the geyser. The original geyser has gone dry by the way, but next to it is its little brother that spouts every few minutes. The big geyser spouted only every half hour, but was admittedly bigger. There were more people than spouts present, of course.





While we left Reykjavik in rain, we had sunshine since the small waterfall. In the sun, without wind, it actually got nicely warm, the only time it was warm in Iceland The geyser is funny but with too many tourists not a breathtaking spot. I found the Gulfoss waterfall much more impressive. Now that’s a decent waterfall, nice and big and gushy



Despite all the people there that’s a sight worth seeing and the people’s noise gets drowned out by the waterfall anyway. In the distance you could spot the Langjokuell glacier, a magnificent sight in the sun and I would have loved to get closer, but that was not on the itinerary.



Next up was a short visit to some Icelandic horses, which were for a very long time the only form of transport for the locals. A farmer put “horse candy” for sale, some dry food stuff and I fed this lovely guy here and he nibbled his nuggets skillfully from my hand

Iceland Report – Part 1

After Waken 2018 and a family visit for a few days seeing my sister and my dad, I set out again for adventure. This year the target was the fulfillment of a long harbored goal – I went to Iceland.

Before I will report on the plenty of nice stuff = the tours that I did, some general remarks of how I perceived the place. Iceland looks rich, very nice houses, well maintained, loads of new construction happening. They all must earn fortunes though, since the prices are ridiculous. A proper sandwich? 20 USD. I kid you not. A liter of water? 5 USD. I kid you not. A pizza, small salad and a soft drink at a food court like place = not a proper restaurant? 35 USD. A plate of pasta in a filthy side walk place? 20 USD.



All guides said that Icelanders hardly ever go out eating and I am not surprised. The hotels?…?? I had a lousy small room with a bed, a desk, one chair, a TV, a small open clothes rack, and a super filthy bathroom for 150 USD a night, no food included. The only thing good about the place was that is was right in the middle of town and yet quiet. The room was not cleaned during the entire week of my stay. The “room service” did nothing but empty the trash and give me new toilet paper, there was dust everywhere by the end of my stay. One guy at the reception was rather friendly, another lady was close to rude. They gave me a hair dryer that nearly exploded in my hand when I switched it on. Flames and smoke spewed out and I barely managed to switch it off before something bad happened to me.





The Icelanders are smart, they are using geothermal water for heating and showers. But the hot water in the old hotel (a building from the sixties maybe) stank so much of sulfur you could gag. The water felt soapy and was pretty disgusting. The shower was so hot it almost boiled you even at the coldest setting. And the stench… unbelievable.

All tour guides said, oh you can drink the cold water, if you let it run for five minutes. Admittedly the cold water didn’t stink, but I didn’t trust the old pipes of that filthy hotel and relied on the expensive bottled water for drinking and even for teeth brushing. The heating in my room wasn’t the best either. I had the radiator on at highest setting the whole time and it was just bearably warmish. I kept my yogurts and butter close to the window since there was no refrigerator. They didn’t change the bed sheets the whole week and I got fresh towels only once. I have never paid 150 USD per night yet for such crap. But – they can afford their shitty service, since a decent hotel costs you well over 200 USD the night and even youth hostels are pricey. They can also afford to rip people off like that because people keep coming. One guide said that in 2017 there were 2.3 something million visitors to an island with a population of 350,000 people. Wow. And they are coming for a reason, because, yes, the scenery is absolutely beautiful and stunning. 

With the amount of money I spent on tours, food and also some souvenirs, I can only afford to buy food and toiletries for the next two months or so, hahaha. But it was worth it. I wouldn’t want to miss this trip despite the shitty hotel and the horrendous costs. 

And despite the weather. I was actually lucky, since there was no long-lasting heavy rain during the three big trips I made. The only day where it rained non-stop was the day I went to the lava cave = I was inside even on the tour

Wacken Open Air 2018

This year marked my fourth trip to Wacken and it was remarkable in so far as that I went for the first time alone without my trusted English buddies and oh miracle there was no rain! Zero rain, nothing, niente! Who would have thought that to be possible? Instead it was hot as hell and dusty beyond measure I suppose that ideal weather for Wacken does not exist

Since I am not staying in tents under any circumstances

Up the Mountain

I’d like to share my fascination with a German colleague (who does not live in Japan) who has been climbing Mt. Fuji ten times by now. I kid you not.

And I’ll be using his “hobby” to justify mine, hahaha

Attitude

At work I recently encountered another example for why I prefer living and working in Japan rather than living and working in Europe. In the company I work for we have a highly regulated workshop where the staff can give feedback to the manager who is supervising them. The staff fill out a questionnaire anonymously and the result is displayed via a point system. The manager fills out the same questionnaire in a self-assessment. His/her result is compared to the result of the staff people and focus points are jointly agreed between staff and manager. Then the manager leaves the room, and the staff discuss what the manager could improve concerning the focus points in question and presents them to him/her at the end of the workshop in form of suggestions that the he/she is supposed to listen to. The manager does not have to commit to picking up those focus points but most managers going through this process do so in the end.

I moderated such a workshop for one of our managers last week and thought it went pretty well. After the workshop was done I asked one of the participants, a Japanese guy in his fifties, what he thought about this workshop and his first and spontaneous comment was, “man we’re working in a good company. In Japanese companies such a feedback of the staff to the manager does not happen, at least not that I would’ve heard.” Five minutes later I asked a 35-year-old European expat the same question (who earns more than the mid fifties Japanese colleague) and got the answer, “well, the result was a bit meager for spending four hours on it.”

My spontaneous gut-feeling reaction hearing this was: you spoiled ungrateful brat!

I’m living too long in Japan now maybe, but I totally agree to the Japanese colleague who said, man, we’re working in a good company.

Yes, we are. It is not a matter of course that a company offers such a feedback opportunity, paid, during working time.

I think the attitude of the European colleague totally sucks. (The person is not German but from another European country). Europeans live in luxury and yet they are complaining, complaining, complaining. It’s always “but”… Instead of being grateful to be given the opportunity for feedback, that high earning expat whines about the result. And then, you were participating in creating that result, if you had wanted more result, you should have contributed to it!

I think that the “western” individualism is also a factor in the constant complaining about everything. “Westerners” have the tendency to look more for personal gain. The much more group oriented “Easterners” have often a more positive attitude towards the things happening around them and appreciate more what they have. What a difference – what does the Japanese colleague see: a good company. What does the spoiled expat see: we “wasted” four hours on something that is supposed to improve social interaction.

Needless to say, which attitude towards life and work I prefer.

Of course there is a lot of stuff that need improvement in Japan also, but man, Westerners: stop complaining about stuff that is in principle positive and work on your attitude.

In the Name of Detox

I was on a short business trip to Germany last month and while buying some supplies and also during common lunches/dinners with colleagues it struck me that the German eating habits are very different from Japan. Among the German colleagues there was a vegetarian, a vegan, someone who eats no carbs, someone who has gluten problems.

I’m not judging, I’m just stating facts when I say that among my Japanese friends and colleagues, there simply is no one who is a vegan, a vegetarian, eats only carbs or has gluten problems. Despite that Japanese people are generally slimmer than Germans and live longer too. So what’s going on here?

I mentioned that to a French colleague at an after-work dinner recently (who lived in China and Japan the last ten years) and he brought another interesting aspect into the story with the statement: “Yes! What happened to sex, drugs and Rock’n’Roll? Now it’s “organic”, “detox”, and “xx intolerance” – How boring have we become!”

I had a good laugh at that and I heartily agree

The Dumbness of the Masses

I’d like to pick up a bit at where I left off last week. I wrote about that moment of bondage and trust between an international group of people at the company I work for. What happened there during that business trip to Germany let me think about group intelligence and behavior. There are plenty of theories out there about group intelligence going in either direction – a group can be smarter than an individual, as well as, a group can be dumber than the individual. In my opinion it depends largely on the size of the group whether it’s smarter or dumber. In the company I work for it shows again and again that a smaller group of maybe 20 people can be smarter than the individual, but as soon as the group gets larger than let’s say 50 people, the tendency is towards dumber.

The small group of twenty that I wrote about last week excelled and got smarter than the individuals in it. We added to each other’s intelligence with our different experiences and backgrounds. But when we stood in front of the two, three hundred for or presentation, we looked dumbness in the face: the blunt stare of the herd animal in the crowd who relies on what the fellows around it do. There are some, let me call them, protestors who leave and don’t wanna have anything to do with what’s going on, but the majority looks at you with that numb stare of safety in the crowd. A thousand individuals might be smart, but the same thousand in a crowd are stupid especially if they are under some political influence. Look at the masses of people nowadays who follow asshole political leaders. Even if there is an individual intelligence that that leader is bullshit, the individual opinion drowns in peer pressure and conformity. As soon as you can hide in a group, the morale and intelligence level of the individual can sink dramatically.

The large crowd is not only dumb it is also rude.

I sit in an open plan office with 60 people, at the coffee corner everyone “hopes” that someone else will clean up the coffee machine once a week (we don’t have a “system” of who cleans it (yet)). We put candy and chocolate into the coffee corner after we return from business trips or holidays (that’s tradition in Japan). They are gone in an instant, the ravenous crowd grabs up the goodies in fear of not getting their share. Everyone hopes that the next person will empty the shredder and stuffs the last bits of paper into the full bucket until it nearly explodes. If you can hide in a large group where nobody will find out that you behaved “badly”, people do behave badly.

Unfortunately I don’t know a cure for this and the constant appeal at individual responsibility and effort is tiring. I wish we could do without “military” discipline and punishments, but unfortunately humankind doesn’t seem that evolved just yet…

That Thing About Trust

I’ve been on a business trip last week to the headquarters in Germany and attended a three day workshop of the business unit I now work for. The German boss of the unit called for “volunteers” half a year ago to work on “soft” topics like leadership, collaboration, strategy deployment and communication. It’s an interesting group from all over the world. We have members from the US, Mexico, Germany, Hungary, India, China and I’m the representative of Japan. We also have a lady from Cuba in the German team and another Chinese colleague in the German team as well, so it’s not even weird that the representative from Japan office is not Japanese.

We struggled through our workshop and came to a point where we realized that all this talk about better communication and collaboration etc. does not really mean anything, because there is an underlying issue beneath the surface and that’s lack of trust. We don’t trust the management and the management doesn’t trust us and the working level doesn’t trust each other either. So we better start with building trust, but how… we were supposed to present our results at something that we call a “town hall” meeting, meaning the management “gives info” to a few hundred people.

The first hour of the town hall meeting was boring top-down stuff about figures and business situations. The big boss who supports us said, you better stay for the presentation of the “soft stuff” group. Despite that several people left after the facts and figures were done. Then we presented out progress, more people left, then we dared it and “froze”, asking “do you think this will change anything”. People looked confused. We had a deliberate painful moment of silence and finally one of our guys said, “Is this it? Is that all? What about trust?”

We were all very dramatic about it. One of our colleagues then told a story about trust, trying to get people thinking. More people left with shaking heads. We had placed cards with questions under the chairs of people asking stuff like, “Do you trust your colleagues?” “How can we collaborate globally if we don’t even collaborate locally?” and things like that. We asked the remaining folk to discuss these questions. A few did, a few looked bluntly at the cards and talked about I don’t know what.

I hope we managed to reach a few people in the audience. No matter what, at least the twenty of us from the team had a nice “dramatic” and also “human” moment. I don’t think we’ll change too much, but at least that little team has a nice bond now. It really didn’t matter anymore where we come from and at least the few of us are beyond borders, nationalities and prejudices. It’s cool that something like that can happen in a big company and it’s cool that a few rare guys are around who allow something like that to happen (the big boss in Germany). So, all in all it was a tough but also a good week.

Writing Update

I’ve not announced a writing update in an age! So here is one.

That Thing About Collaboration

In a company there are buzzwords going around once in a while, one year it’s “we need to take care of our efficiency” and everybody is talking that topic to death, next year it’s better quality, the year after its strategy and so forth. This year it’s collaboration in the area I work at. We have “collaboration days” events in the engineering area, a month later in sales, since March some initiative on a division-wide global level, trying to get 7000 people to collaborate over all continents… good luck with that!

When I look at the tiny section of 90 people where I’m working at at the moment in Japan – not even we manage to collaborate.

I don’t want to blame my male colleagues but collaboration does not seem to be their thing really, because, let’s face it, there is a constant game going on in the background of who gets promoted and gets a “career” and who doesn’t. Alliances are formed and shift, people are sidelined. For a while it’s the German expats against the Japanese local staff, then a mixed gang against another mixed gang and so forth.

It would be fun to watch if I wasn’t half a part of the silly game. I’m an outsider in the game simply because I’m a woman, and man, am I happy about that, pun intended. When I see my male colleagues at their pissing contests, I’m glad I’m not really a part of the game anyway.

I don’t think women work like that. Don’t get me wrong, the ladies can be super mean to each other but we are mean in a different way, lol.

Last week there so much of “my dick is longer than yours” going on at the office, it was fascinating. It’s exhausting and does not help the matters at hand. A bunch of alpha animals fighting for the best spot is surely not the best model of collaboration. Concepts like collaboration globally and “we are all nice to each other and respect each other” are nice, but in my humble opinion an illusion, since in the end we are all still animals and act much less rational than we think we do, which shows itself in those unnerving alpha male pissing contests… that was a little corporate working life report for a change. Cheers!