Angelo was one of my travel companions when I met Mary in late 1982 at a train station in India. We had - with two other Dutch friends - travelled the Sahara Desert in an old VW minivan, seen some of Central Africa and had just started to traverse part of India. Forty years later we caught up during a walk along the beach of Scheveningen and got soaking wet in the rain. Angelo did spend time working and living in Japan, Singapore and China. During his almost 20 years in China, he met his wife, and they had a boy and a girl together. Three years ago - just before the COVID lockdowns - he took his family to Holland where they all (re-)integrated in the Dutch society. On his phone above he proudly shows off a photo taken after he ran a long distance run together with his kids.
On the second photo is his wife Julie, his father and his brother & his wife. We spend a few hours together catching up and sharing thoughts about where current technology developments might lead the world of tomorrow. Angelo graduated as a mechanical engineer who learned operations management practices during his career and currently is a professor in that topic at a college in Rotterdam. It was good to see him again after so many years.
Later yesterday we had a reunion with six of the seven colleague students with whom I was in a committee (in 1979) organizing a welcoming program for newly arrived students at the University of Technology in Delft. We had our first reunion in September 2019 after thirty years (during my last short visit to Holland before the Corona Pandemic). Anne Marjan (in between Hubert and Liesbeth) organized yesterday's get together again. The others present were Fred, Coen and Jos. Missing this time was Jan. It was again a fun dinner with lots of laughs.
I stayed overnight at the house of Coen and Anne Marie, where Anne Marjan joined us for a night cap before driving back to her home in Wageningen (towards the east of the country; she got there in a bit over an hour; the charm of living in this geographically small country). Another fun day passed.
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