public speaking...my favourite thing ever.....

My Dad always says that the Dale Carnegie course on public speaking that he took in 1908 was the best money he ever spent... he can now speak for 17 hours straight in 48 different languages on any topic in the world. Apparently doing a recruiting tour of a zillion different countries has the same effect-- I have always HATED public speaking, but look at this picture of me in front of about 250 people today..... I had a microphone and everything! I think it helped that I knew that about 85% of the people didn't understand a word I was saying, plus this was about the tenth time we had done the same presentation so by now I knew it pretty well. All in all though, the recruiting in Cairo was really successful, we found some good people to bring to makkah. Here we are writing contracts accompanied by a pianist (the girl in the sunglasses is the HRD's 17 year old wife...). Thankfully it's over now and I have a few days off before heading to Dubai to meet the rest of the team so we can travel together to Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

I actually ended up staying in the hotel for the whole 4 days we were recruiting, because we started early and finished late and I would have spent about 3 hours a day in the car, so when Abdou came to pick me up from the hotel this evening it had been about 2 weeks since we'd seen each other, and he was SO excited to see me! He kept welcoming me home and saying how much he missed me- I was actually pretty glad to see him too, the little guy! I gave him a pineapple from my hotel fruit basket (I got two) and he was even more excited! Tomorrow Abdou, Stephanie, Stephen, Kristine (you've heard me talk about Stephanie before, but Stephen is a chef from one of our hotels in Hawaii who is helping us for a few months, and Kristine is his wife who is here visiting) and I are going on a road trip to Alexandria (about 2.5 hrs to the North of Cairo, on the Mediterranean) just to see what's there. I'll report back.

Hope you're all having a good Thursday, I'm going to bed now, xoxo C

PS: Thank you to those of you who expressed concern about my allergic reaction - after seeing the hotel doctor in Cairo a couple of times I am almost back to normal- less itchy anyway!

PSS: Thank you also to those of you who said that I don't look fat...well of course I'm not going to post the REALLY fat looking pictures, but believe me, I'm definitely bigger than I've ever been, even after the winter I lived in whistler and drank beer and ate Reese peanut butter cups every single day!! But thankfully the makkah HRD and GM aren't coming on the next leg of the trip so hopefully there will be less of an emphasis on eating. And I'm sure I can run outside in Beruit, right!? {Mum, I'm joking...}

PSSS: Michael told me once that there is absolutely no reason for a PS in an email or word processed letter because you can just incorporate the paragraph wherever you want using the cut and paste function. Sorry mikety mike!