I had a couple more hours in Vienna on Wednesday before coming home. Unfortunately, it was raining. That didn’t stop me though!

First stop was to buy an authentic Sacher Torte. Apparently it is one of the most famous foods in Vienna. We’ll share it tonight as a family. It had better be good, because it cost 50 euros!

Next I went to the cathedral of St. Stephen. I love seeing these majestic works of architecture. When I see them I am simultaneously inspired by the devotion and faith of the people at that time as well as the engineering marvel to build something this large and ornate.

Then I took a few trains to get back to the airport followed by a direct flight back to Eindhoven and some trains back home.

I’m super grateful for Google Maps. Traveling would be so much more difficult without this kind of technology. This would have been so much harder 20 years ago (printing maps out beforehand) and even more so 40 years ago (buying maps?). Seriously, Google maps and Google translate are like my right and left crutch anytime I travel.

Outside the Karlskirche

Did you know that in German, Vienna is spelled Wien?

I had a great visit at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Big thanks to Christoph Feichter for inviting me and Kate Patterson for organizing the visit.

I presented a new paper. The paper is about how being over or under a time budget is perceived differently depending on whether you are initially liked or disliked by your supervisor. The theory is that if someone dislikes you, then they will see all future ambiguous behavior in a negative light.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to relate the theory to The Sound of Music. I showed a picture from when the nuns are singing the song, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria.” I then pointed out that the nuns had different preconceptions of Maria (“She’s an angel” vs “She’s a demon”) which color how they interpret her other ambiguous actions.

I thought it was a great example. Unfortunately, no one in the audience had seen the movie. Apparently it’s too apocryphal for Austria.

After the workshop I went out for a great dinner and got Schnitzel! In the process I also learned that no Austrian would ever eat schnitzel with noodles. You can’t eat schnitzel with sauce, but you also can’t eat noodles without sauce. They are simply incompatible dishes. Yet another dream dashed.

In 2016 WU Vienna got a brand new campus! As part of the process, they put up a plaque/statue thanking the Austrian taxpayer. At graduation and other similar events, they also publicly thank the taxpayers for making the university possible. I really like that sentiment!

I flew direct: Eindhoven to Vienna. The early flight meant I made it before noon. After a quick train ride to the city I checked into my hotel. Then I did the typical tourist thing: a Big Bus tour!

I know those types of bus tours get a lot of flack for being too touristy and not getting the real local feel, but honestly, I love them. In 5 hours I was able to see a large part of Vienna. The alternative would have been to wander by myself for 5 hours and see a very small sliver of the city. I’d rather do the whole city at a thin level than a small portion deeply.

After the bus tours I went back to the hotel, dressed up in a full suit, and went to a fancy dinner followed by a Mozart concert in one of the famous music halls.

I’m off to Vienna for another workshop. In what seems to be my typical travel routine, I woke up at 5:10 and then biked to the train station with my suitcase on the back of my bike. I then took the 6am train. Normally I fly out of Amsterdam, but there was a direct flight out of Eindhoven, so I’m trying out a new airport.

I figure I’m leaving Linda alone with the kids for 2.5 days, so I’d better at least let her sleep in the morning I leave. It would have saved me about an hour if she had driven me to the airport, but it would have cost her an hour of sleep (and drive time), which is a bad way to start what will be a long 3 days for her.

Linda’s cousin, Adam Arneson, had a work trip to Nijmegen. So, he came a couple of days early to hang out with us. Other than Linda’s dad, this is the first visitor we’ve had, so it was fun playing host for a couple of days!

We picked him up at the Schipol (Amsterdam) airport and showed him around town. We did the Rijksmuseum and a canal cruise. It was a lot of fun!

However, the vendor also sold soda. I made a deal with the kids that they could each have a soda if they promised not to complain anymore. They did, I bought them sodas, and the rest of the trip was much more pleasant!

There’s a Dutch saying, “There’s nothing past Groningen.” Groningen is basically the tip of civilization as far as the rest of the country is concerned. It’s at the very top of the Netherlands.

I was invited to give a workshop there on March 16. It was great!

For most of my other Dutch workshops I’ve tried to do one-day or at most two-day trips (one hotel night). Not so with Groningen. It’s a little over 3 hours by train from where I live, and the trains don’t run very frequently out there, so this was a full 3-day trip.

That being said, I had a great time! Like a lot of my recent travel, I taught Wednesday morning and then immediately got on a train, eating lunch on the train.

I arrived early enough that I could see a bit of the city before heading to bed. The next day I had a great visit and then headed home on Friday.

One nice thing about the visit to Groningen is that they have a lot of archival researchers, including some that do textual analysis, so I was able to present a working paper on Earnings Announcements that I haven’t been able to present much.

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.

Easter in the Netherlands is pretty similar to Easter in the US.

Saturday we had a neighborhood activity with games for the kids and then an Easter egg hunt. The only real difference from the US (other than the language) was that all the kids found the eggs and then brought them and put them in a single basket. Then the adults divided them up equally among all the children.

I’m at the DARC (Dutch Accounting Research Conference) in Nijmegen. It’s a conference exclusive to people at Dutch universities.

I find it interesting that even though everyone here is a professor or PhD student at a Dutch school, the conference is still in English.

I’m also glad the conference is in English, so I can understand! One of the nicest things about being here in the Netherlands is the ability to go to these types of things. The conference is about a 70 minute train ride from my house (plus a 10-minute bus ride on each end), so it’s an easy day-trip for a great conference!

I went to Washington DC for a credit union conference last week (I’m on the board of directors at our local credit union. It was fun to be back!

The conference itself was great. We got to hear from some great speakers (e.g., Condoleezza Rice and Paul Ryan) in addition to some more technical sessions on the economy, managing capital, etc. The Paul Ryan event was especially fun since it was after hours in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

We also got to meet with a representative from Jim McGovern’s office (McGovern is our local congressman) and go to the capital to meet with senator Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts senator).

One side benefit of going to the conference was that I could stop at Walmart and buy all the stuff we can’t find in the Netherlands. We had been planning on this for months. I actually brought an empty suitcase just to fill with stuff I was going to bring back.

You may ask, what did the Bentleys most miss from the US? I’ll tell you:

• Brownie mix (brownies in the Netherlands are cake, not true brownies). This was the most important thing on the list. I bought all the Betty Crocker Fudge Brownie mixes that Walmart had …
• Vanilla extract
• Cold cereal (Linda missed her shredded wheat! I missed Cheerios and honey bunches of oats)
• Bisquick
• Refried beans
• Cream of chicken soup
• Canned green chilis
• Mild chili powder
• Ziplock bags
• Ranch dressing
• Old Spice deodorant
• Red Vines (for a friend)
• Inexpensive clothes (I got some shoes and jeans for about 1/4 of the price they would be in the Netherlands)

Needless to say, I had some very happy kids when I got home. I’m not sure if they were happier to see me or to get all the stuff. I chose not to ask.

I did, however, choose not to give all the presents at once. I didn’t want us binging 10 boxes of brownie mix in one go. Rather, I am spreading the presents out: a few goodies a week. Also, mixed in with the groceries are a whole bunch of tchotchkes (free trinkets) I picked up at the conference.