Fun day today, but mostly work. Got up at 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep (which meant about 4 hours of cough-interrupted sleep, total). Headed to the breakfast buffet at the hotel which was shockingly good. Really high-quality food – meats, cheeses, pastries, fruit, all delicious. I was feeling lazy & so I didn’t want to go far, but on Wednesday morning, I know where I’m getting breakfast. Weird.

We took a car to go from Berlin to Szczecin, and it didn’t occur to me until we were going 115 that this was an autobahn. The car ride was about 2 hours, even still, but we made it, and I got to meet the team I’d be working with. Solid folks, honestly. They all spoke English, which was… super useful, as if it was gonna be Polish, I’d be pretty well useless. (I have literally *zero* Polish vocabulary, and even looking things up, I can’t figure out how they’re pronounced. I only got “Szczecin” by getting Google to say it for me a few times (Stet’zin, sort of)).

We spent the day working, and I feel like things went quite well.

It’s funny, though – I am *very* confident at this point that I know how to run a team. I know how to run a very *specific kind* of team, and it’s weird realizing how much of what I know works works because of some fundamental assumptions you make about who you hire, why you hire them, and what you expect them to do, and if you’re in a different context, *everything* has to change again. So a lot of today was trying to reframe some of my assumptions about what would work in a different context, where the variables both on the team and what they’re building and who they’re building it for are all quite different than my natural assumptions. But again, it was really good stuff, and it’s neat to see a bunch of smart people working in their native environment. Can’t say any more than that, of course, but it’s been a good experience.

We went to dinner at a local restaurant (whose name again I couldn’t possibly remember, and even now, can’t figure out how to look up). I had a traditional Polish “sour soup” and it was delicious. I just had that and a small dessert, because my body clearly thinks that it’s some other time than what it actually is here, and everything’s a mess.

I’ve been trying to kick this cough, and it’s frustrating, because I can be lying down and totally fine, as long as I’m not trying to sleep, but the moment I *try* to sleep, I start wheezing, and am then unable to actually get to sleep. So that kind of sucks, given that this is a week where I have a legit opportunity to actually *catch up* on sleep. Argh.

Still, another day of solid work tomorrow, we drive back to Berlin in the evening, and then I fly out Wednesday morning. I can’t wait to get home – I miss the kids (and Ei-Nyung) a LOT. Mobi, too. 😀

But the little I’ve seen of Poland has been beautiful. Parts of Szczecin feel like Berlin, parts feel like Osaka, and then parts of it are, “Oh, of COURSE that’s what Poland looks like.” Hard to describe, but when you see it, it’s obviously “correct”.

That’s it for today. Time to try to get some sort of sleep. Whee.