Overseas trips often fraught with mishaps
Gary Evans, Senior Editor -- Furniture Today, September 5, 2005
Frequent overseas travelers always have stories to tell. Here are a few from our industry. Bruce Minkoff, a longtime executive in the furniture division of Woodson & Bozeman in Memphis, Tenn., once took the long, long flight to China, thinking how good it would be to get to his hotel, take a shower, and get some rest. Unfortunately, he somehow had gotten a visa for Taiwan instead of mainland China.
Minkoff was carrying a lot of money, since he was on a buying trip to a country where ATMs aren't plentiful. To make a long story short, he managed to get into China, but when he left customs he wasn't carrying nearly as much money. In fact, he was carrying a whole lot less.
Sherwood Robertson, who heads Robertson & Associates, Strategic Planning Consultants, weathered a raging typhoon in Manila and had a sandwich named after him in Thailand. But it was the call of nature that got his heart pounding in Egypt.
He was two hours into conducting a session for furniture executives in a Cairo Marriott hotel when it hit him: "I had had too much coffee that morning, and I just had to go."
Heading for a restroom, Robertson went tearing around a corner ... right into the middle of about 40 Muslims on their knees, praying toward Mecca. He found himself standing right in the middle of them.
"I thought they were going to jail me for it. I said to myself, 'What have I done?' I just froze for a second. But they were all with their faces on the floor so they never saw me, I don't think. But I was scared."
Furniture designer George Kosinzki has eaten a little of everything on his travels — monkey, snake, dog, cat, even ballot, a Philippine dish consisting of a very fertile duck egg too gross to describe. But it was the wrong words that got Kosinzki into cultural hot water.
After a night out with some Chinese buddies, and with a bad hangover the next morning, Kosinzki tried to use a newly learned phase on an elderly woman as they both waited for an elevator. He thought he was saying the Chinese equivalent of "How're you doing?" But he misspoke, using words you don't want to say to a stranger, elderly or not.
"She almost fell over her own cane," he said. "Her eyes got as big as saucers. She just kept back up against the wall. And she wouldn't even get on the elevator with me."
My own story involves a mixup over my visa that kept me from getting into Brazil. Eventually, I flew to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to see if I could get a visa there to return to Brazil. It didn't work, but I shouldn't feel too bad. Ashley's Ron Wanek, whose company owns the largest furniture factory in Brazil, had the same trouble. After a day of untangling red tape, he finally got in.
