Gearing Up for Nearly 5 Months of Travel

Yikes! I’m just a day away from departing on my next batch of travels. This time I’ll be going to:

• Kuwait
• Turkey
• Israel
• Spain
• Morocco

I hope to have the energy to blog while I’m in each of these places, although Kuwait, Turkey and Israel are going to be pretty rushed. 

Why Kuwait? you may be wondering. Answer: Because a conference organizer is bringing me over to talk about customer service. Although I said I was retiring early I still love going to interesting places and talking about one of my passions (customer experience). So if I get an all-expense-paid invitation, who am I to say no? I just didn’t want to have to do sales and social media self-promotion any more.  Kuwait is reputedly the most modern of the Gulf States when it comes to women’s rights. It will be interesting to see how that works out from what I’ll be able to see. I realize that cossetted in a business hotel conference environment won’t exactly be representative of everyday life for most people.  That said, “most people” in Kuwait are foreign workers. The total Kuwaiti population is 4.2 million, of which only about a million are Kuwaitis. (Source: http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/kuwait-population/) It is a little nerve-racking speaking about customer service and employee relations in such a different cultural context. I’ve adapted my talk a bit based on my research about the Gulf States, but there may be some cultural norms that will clash with my message. (Such as greater flexibility and openness with employees at all levels.) But those things are crucial to achieve the kind of results I’m talking about. So, although I’ll acknowledge that cultural factors may make it take longer to win acceptance for some of these ideas, they are still worth pursuing if you want the competitive advantage. Just hope I hit the balance right. 

When I first thought about journeying in the Middle East, I thought about terrorism. Bombs and shooting in the Istanbul airport. Bus and car bombs in Israel. But then I looked at the numbers, and the attacks seem far less common now than they were three years ago.  There’s a much bigger danger in store for me, however.  Sesame seeds.  I have a severe allergy to sesame. It is one of the most common ingredients in Middle Eastern cooking, and it is far more likely to kill me than a terrorist attack. It sneaks up on you in insidious places. For instance za’atar seasoning contains sesame, thus explaining why at Heritage Days I sometimes got sick from grilled meat on a stick from Middle Eastern countries: it had been seasoned with za’atar and/or sesame oil. Sesame is also a main ingredient in tahini. Even when you tell people that you are allergic to sesame, they often forget about things like tahini, which they consider as an ingredient in itself, not stopping to think about what it is made of.  I’m also severely allergic to nuts, which are another common ingredient. (No baklava for me!) And to fish and seafood, which is a real pity because I love coastal towns! So I have taken the following precautions: ​ 1. I have a suitcase full of epi-pens, dehydrated food, and nut-free, seed-free granola bars. (I tried to find protein bars that would qualify, but even the one type that I found said “may contain traces of nuts”, so I couldn’t use it. The Made Good brand of granola tastes really good though!) 

2. I have several copies of my allergies list in Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew. (Thank you to Omar Mouallem’s mum for the Arabic, the chef at Sofra for the Turkish, and Sara Larson for the Hebrew.) That should help, but in countries where they are not yet used to the notion of allergies, accidents are still likely to happen.  ​3. I changed the default screen on my cellphone so that if anyone powers it on they will see a message saying that if they find me unable to speak, they should look in my purse for an epi-pen and administer it ASAP.  So, wish me luck! If you never hear from me again, you can assume that the precautions didn’t work. (Seriously though, I don’t believe that’s going to happen. Epi-pens and emergency rooms should control it if anything bad does happen.) ​On that cheery note, stay tuned…