Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Saturday - Leaving the Hotel


I seem to be getting behind in my posts…

Saturday we had two important visits planned. About noon we had arranged to visit Natalia and Amit Shrira and their daughter Tamar, who is about 6 months old. Natalia is the Product Manager of Picture-Logic puzzles and Amit is Conceptis Operations Manager. Their work includes so many things that I am not able to even describe also including the fact that I am not even aware of everything. Anyway I know that Natalia keeps the archives of the published puzzles and Amit is involved in handling all the artists.

Little Tamar was really cute! She had a wonderful smile which she gladly showed us.
One thing I have found in common in all the Conceptis people I know closer: they all have cats! Natalia had two. Now I have seen one more of the Conceptis offices. Last year I visited Dave’s office in his home and Natalia and Amit are working in the same room in their home.

After returning back to the hotel I had to do something which was at the same time wonderful but also sad: I started packing. Maybe this sounds funny because the family was about to leave the next day but we had planned that since they had the car, they could drop me off at Gil’s place. That was probably the hardest packing I have ever done. If I had left something important behind, it would have ended up in Finland.

Before we left we went to take some coffee and Marika and Katri got beautiful cappuccinos (my blog is gradually turning into a food blog!)


Gil lives in a small village called Kefar Netter. The GSP informed that the village had 9 streets and so the right address was easy to find. We had had some problems before. The Hebrew names written with our letters can be done in different ways and the GPS did not always find the streets/places typed exactly the same we had found on the map we had.

The journey took again longer than I had thought. The rush hours are really bad when you want to get somewhere and here the rush hours are longer than in Finland.

It was so nice to see Gil again. We met last year at the Conceptis party which took place in Gil’s place. We have learned to know each other so much better since then. Gil has been my mentor in blogging and we give each other hints about new good tools and social media platforms.

We had first some coffee and talked. Gil and Nitsi had made a reservation to a Turkish restaurant which was not in the village. The funny thing was that it had been two years since he was there last and finally we used our GPS to find the place :)

Like I have told before the Israeli portions are huge. Gil told us that they usually order one pot of food for all of them and we took his advice. Two pots and Marika’s vegetarian pot was more than enough for the family.

The yard had also some shops selling clothes and gifts and all kinds of items. After dinner the girls of course wanted shopping! I also like to look things from other countries but I did not buy anything. I have one weakness and it is candles. Nowadays I buy them only when they are something totally different from what I have seen before.

It was late and I said goodbye to the family and they returned to Haifa for their last night in Israel. I went to Gil’s place to stay two nights there. Nitsan and Gil Galanti work both for Conceptis. Nitsan is the Graphic designer and Gil is the Marketing Manager. They have a lovely daughter Carmel, 3 years old and even though she and I have the language barrier between us, we became good friends during these two days.


Their house is beautiful. It has a garden and for the first time in my life I ate passion fruit taken straight from the tree.








Zemanta Pixie

No comments: