Finally returning here. Where are we? Well, great Stanford has accepted my application. We are progressing. Remains now to get my boss to sign up on the bill and get the company to pay. In the same time, book the ticket. Stops to foresee:

1. Québec, visit Siham my niece's wife who is preparing a PhD and who has got married last year. her husband has emigrated from France to Canada last August.
2. Montréal, visit my friend Vince, a European executive at RioTinto, expatriated in Canada for the last 5 years. Not yet contacted. Will he be there? Ask Vince how much the Internet has/is changed(ing) the way a mammoth corp. like Rio Tinto is operating.
   
3. Houston. My friend Marc, a Shell executive, expatriated in Houston for 2, 3 years. Study the oil business cluster in Houston, Texas.
4. Chicago, visit Houda a young Swisses who has moved to the US 2, 3 years ago to join her husband, a medical doctor.
5. New York which I plan to visit with my friend François, ex-colleague, French and a GE exec. in the US for the last 10 years. François being married with an American is by now half American.
   

A Tuesday sunny morning at my desk

As for any project or indeed for anything we do, the most difficult is to get started. I have done a few things already to prepare my world tour. First, I've formulated the project, then I've organised the time, making sure I terminated my current employment and that I would not start another one before having accomplished my project. Starting this blog is another building block. As it stands, the idea is to visit places and/or countries I have not yet visited with a view of meeting friends or friends of friends (the network) and learn from them. Learn what? Learn about business, economy, culture, wisdom, learn what I do not yet know.

In fact, I have started.

Getting started

I have conceived the project of touring the world visiting friends and satisfying the curiosity fed by the last 10 years in the metal trading business. I have come to the metal trading after attending the PED at IMD in Lausanne in 2001. There, I met a wonderful bunch of people some of whom I have staid in contact. We have done class reunions over those years. Now, some of them are in the US, Canada, Brazil, Russia and obviously China. On top, in my metal years, I have met other people from again China but also India. Now, that I have the chance to leave my current employer, I decided to undergo a world tour "à la manière de Marco Polo". That means discovering the current world with the eyes of a businessman.