Just like any large organization, you can’t work in AIESEC very long without going to more than a few meetings. Working in a national office brings this fact of life to a fine point. The six elected members of the office are entrusted with crafting the strategy for AIESEC in Germany but during a typical week have their time eaten away by administrative tasks. As a result it’s necessary to take two days off every month or two to do planning. At the beginning of November, they invited me to come along with them. We traveled to a small town outside of Cologne called Remagen and stayed overnight in a small hotel. Remagen is of moderate renown to history students, as it was once home to a military rail bridge which fell to American soldiers in World War II, a psychological victory as they crossed the river Rhine. A small museum still stands at the base of the bridge. We visited the museum, but it seemed to be a little over the top, apparently a mayor of the city had made it a special cause and it seemed to inflate the importance of the bridge, maybe I was just tired….
The city itself is beautiful, it came into view through the autumn leaves as my train pulled around a bend along its riverside track. Our hotel was just a few meters away from the train station. I arrived on my own, the other six had come the evening before, and were already immersed in the weekend agenda. We did some priority setting for the remainder of the year and talked about the direction we wanted to follow. Boring as this is for you the reader, I was really excited to get the chance to have more input not to mention a better idea about what goes on in the office away from the computers. It was also the first meeting I attended where the working language was German. I had just completed my two month German course, and was ready to crash test my new language skills. I fared alright, but spent most of my energy just on understanding the conversation, and wasn’t able to add much of my own input.
After several hours of creating flipcharts, to do lists and the usual meeting outputs, we settled down to making dinner in the kitchenette. We had a real solid German meal, fried sausages, potatoes and red cabbage. We then wandered into the town and came across a tiny put called the night watchmen. A capacity crowd would probably constitute all of 20 people, and we were definitely the loudest bunch in there. Looking back on it, I think it’s the only time that all seven of us have been together for such a length of time. On any normal evening at least one person is traveling on business, or tired and at home. It was a great weekend.
