About a month ago (March 9-10) I went to Vallendar, Germany for the ACMAR conference. Vallendar is located on a key bend on the Rhine river, which made it a historically significant defensive point.
The conference was a lot of fun. In particular, I got to meet a lot of managerial accounting researchers.
In Germany, management accounting and control is a big thing. It’s often even a different department and college degree than the accountancy (i.e., auditing) department/degree. There are a lot of academics studying management control. Kind of cool to be there where I felt like one of the majority rather than the slim minority in the US (management accounting isn’t a heavily-researched topic in the US).
While the conference was great, the travel was not. In particular, I was supposed to transfer trains in Venlo, Netherlands. I got off a Dutch train and was supposed to wait at the platform for a German train that would take me the rest of the way.
I had a pretty long connection to begin with (about an hour). They had an indoor seating area, but it wasn’t heated, but at least I was away from the wind and snow.
At the appointed time, I went outside and stood on my platform to catch my train. It didn’t come. 2:00 was when it was supposed to leave, so I was waiting at 1:55. 2:00 came and went. At 2:05 the sign changed and said it was 5 minutes delayed (meaning it should arrive any second, since it was already 5 minutes late). Then at 2:10 it changed to say it was 10 minutes delayed. It kept being further delayed, 5 minutes at a time, until finally a train arrived at 2:55. I got on that train, which left at 3:00. Note that there was another train also scheduled at 3:00.
The delay wasn’t the problem, it was the lack of communication. If I could have gone inside for that hour it would have been fine, but since it kept saying “any second now,” I had to stay standing outside while it was below freezing and lightly snowing. Plus, since I was going to a conference (and coming straight from teaching), I was in my dress shoes and slacks. I couldn’t feel my toes by the time the train came.
Like a true European, I only did trains and busses the whole trip (I’ve been like that pretty much everywhere I’ve been). However, like a true American, I bought the wrong train ticket. In my defense, I consulted a Dutch friend who is on faculty at WHU (the university in Vallendar that hosted the conference) and bought the ticket he told me to buy. One of the bus drivers gave me a hard time about it though.
Now for some pictures of Vallendar!
View from my hotel window. My hotel was called the Hotel Rhein-Mosel-View and, true to its name, I could see the river from my window (although the tree leaves would have blocked the view in the summer). The hotel was a few kilometers away from the conference, but it was a whole lot less expensive than the hotels by the conference. I’m trying to stretch my research budget a little further than normal, so I’m cutting costs wherever I can.
Dutch Bentleys 