So we’ve just got back from our first trip abroad to meet a client. Duncan, Tom and I got up crazy-early on Monday morning to get in a taxi to Gatwick, where we caught a flight to Madrid. In honour of the occasion, I thought it was only fitting that we write a post about all of the work we got done. Here is Tom in a client meeting on the plane:

The flight went without a hitch and we caught a taxi to our hotel in Madrid where we had fantastic rooms. Duncan and Tom caught a chance to do some work (or maybe just try out the chairs) in my room’s lounge(!):

We actually did a really productive afternoon of work - meetings with our client, their (external) web developers and (internal) IT guys. It’s a complicated project, with many languages, domain names, and target markets. The opportunities for confusion abound and I expect that as a result you will see us writing even more than we have in the past about internationalisation and geo-location issues and best-practices for SEO.

Following the meetings, our client showed us where to get tapas and beer in the centre of Madrid, where we got the only proof that I was actually there:

Tapas isn’t enough to sustain Distilled, however, so after that we went on to another recommended restaurant where we ate octopus:

The next day, meetings started bright and early. OK. Meetings started at 9.30am. So after a good sleep and a great breakfast, we strolled in to discuss reporting, ongoing reputation monitoring, timelines and other details of the project. Once we’d got that all ironed-out, we said our good-byes, and headed into Madrid for a final taste of Spain before catching our flight. When we got to the airport, I was working hard (OK, writing this blog post), Tom was eating nuts (check out the action shot - not bad for a mobile phone camera):

and Duncan was playing backgammon (he claims he can’t do any work when he doesn’t have wifi):

It was a pretty cool trip for our first overseas business travel and we are looking forward to more visits to Madrid and other clients in similarly cool locations. If you need to resolve complex language and localisation issues on a multi-national website, are based in southern France, northern Italy, or anywhere similar you can always give us a call.

I’ll leave you with a picture of Tom on the way back:

(You can tell it’s the way back ‘cos he’s facing the other way).

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