So, i got back the other day from an excellent trip to Holland for the Media Elements conference. It was a great experience and as usual i had fun hanging out and drinking Grolsch with the usual crowd:
- Craig Swann - Smitten with a spanish lady, top bloke
- Sas Jacobs - Talks about daaataa alot
- Keith Peters - The next king of experimental Flash
- Samuel Wan - Very clever bloke from Microsoft, just recently married, congrats!
- Owen Van Dijk - Knows how to swing his pants (dance) and has a spike in his face
It was also really nice to meet these guy’s for the first time:
- Bruce Lawson - I thought i was funny but this guy takes the biscuit
- Shane Tanner - Dude with a nose ring that doesnt stop giggling
- Bill Bussey - Enjoys the company of bushes when drunk
- Rob Chiu - Does amazing video stuff
- Danny Franzeb - Easy going, does cool interactive experiences with Making Things
- Lisa Petrova
- Aldrick Wout - Sooo laid back
- Ola Bergner - Great father, lovely wife, gorgious child
- Frank Beverdam - Top man, looked after everybody really well, phone never stops ringing, also has a lovely girlfriend
- Wild chick, very funny, speaks loads of languages
And heres the tribe as we walked through the ground of Van Twinkel’s castle in the Twente District of Holland:
Now ive had time to reflect and caught up on my sleep, i thought id give everybody a little glimpse into my trip seems as though i didnt have a camera to take pictures. This is the first part of my little story, tommorow i will write about the second day of the trip…
So last Monday evening i decided not to go to bed so that i would fall asleep by Tuesday afternoon and wake up at 2am Wednesday morning, nice and fresh, ready for my early morning flight. However, it didnt work that way, i fell asleep Tuesday in the afternoon as planned and woke four hours later and couldnt for the life of me get my head down again. The taxi arrived at 3am that morning, we made a stop at the petrol station so i could grab some Red Bull and some munchies and then we drove through the streets of London which was a ghost town, ive never seen it so quiet before! Its actually quite nice when your view isnt obscured by more people than your head can register.
When i got to London Stansted, i checked in at the desk for my flight to Niederrhein Dusseldorf. Got on the flight in the next hour and then fell asleep, it was a short flight, 50 minutes in the air and then i woke when somebody took my headphones off my ears and told me we had arrived. I got off the plane down some stairs on the back of a truck and walked onto the open runway where it was raining, looking around i saw one plane. The airport building was tiny, which wasnt what i expected for Amsterdam’s main airport. I joined the long cue to enter the country with my british passport. Glancing around, i found a map of Germany on the wall, looking closer, i soon realised that this wasnt Amsterdam. Dusseldorf is in Germany (DUH!!), but the name of the airport never really registered with me, i simply thought it was a name they had given the airport because of the war or something. Regardless, the flight was booked for me by the conference organisers, so i still presume im in the right place.
I get to the front of the cue and flash hand over my passport and get a german stamp on one of the blank pages. Then i walk through the arrivals lounge where there stands one bag collection converyor belt. My bag was one of the first ones out, so i grab it and rush to meet my cab outside the airport. There are no cabs, just a handful of coaches. So, i soon realise there is nobody there to collect me, i wait, and wait and wait and wait some more. Then i try my phone, i had a text message, “Welcome to Germany from O2″. I make a phone call to my friend in the UK, to see if i am indeed in the wrong place, my credit runs out and so i panick, smoke a cigarette and a white taxi arrives. A guy with a mustache comes over and asks me in a german kind of accent where i need to be, i ask him if we are in Holland and he simply says “No sir, we are in Deutschland”, then i really panick and say, im pretty sure that i am supposed to be in Encshede in Holland so we get into the car and he checks the comprehensive map of Germany and Holland on his pocket pc and finds the place i believe i am supposed to be at. Its 200km away in another country. He soon reassures me that this is the closest airport to the place i am going to be staying and also informs me that Holland is only 4km away across the border. I sigh a breath of relief and gaze out of the window for a while occasionally looking into the front of the car to see the drivers gps enabled pocket pc displaying the map of where we currently are. Before i know it i fall asleep.
I wake two hours later in Enschede, Holland. It is 10am there time, i dont have the address of the hotel because i was supposed to be collected at the airport, so i tell him all i can remember is that the hotel is called Best Western. Turns out there were three Best Westerns in Enschede, so the process of elimination began. I went into the first one and checked if there was a reservation for Watson, and there wasnt, so we headed over to the next one on the list. As we approached, i instantly recognised its exterior as i had seen a photo on the hotels website the night previous. This had to be the place, i paid the taxi driver, you dont want to know how much it cost and grabbed a receipt. I entered the hotel and checked for my reservation, it was the right hotel, pheeewww.
I made it however there was still one more little glitch, i couldnt check in until 2pm. Three hours to kill. Not very impressed with my this whole chapter of events, i speak to the manager who didnt understand much english and explain that i need to sleep, so he kindly breaks the rules and checks me into a room that had already been cleaned. I slide the card into the door of room 204, the green light flashes and i go in, infront of me are some stairs, i go up the stairs to find a double bed, i go down the stairs to find a lounge and the bathroom. Wow, these rooms are sweet. Then i unpack my bags and call reception to see if anyone else has checked in, not yet so i put my head down and sleep for a couple of hours.
I wake up and play around with the television, it seems broke, so i go down to reception to ask them to fix it. It wasnt broke, i just had to get a card which would give me access to all the channels. I plug it in and voila, the first thing i see is the Adult Channel. So, i watch it for a while as you do and then do some channel surfing, most of the 300 channels were english, there were five porn channels and about five music channels, the rest of the stuff i wasnt interested in. First priority now was to get an internet connection, the receptionist informed me that the whole hotel was wireless enabled, super, so i go get a username and password, take my laptop into the restaurant, order some ham toasties and check my email. The conference organiser had been sending me emails as he was wondering were i was, so i send him one back telling i had made it to the hotel and im in the restuarant waiting for people to arrive.
An little later, i leave the restuarant and head back to my room, sit on the bed and flick through the channels on tv again. The phone rings and Frank, the conference organiser its on the other end. We chat a little and he tells me he is downstairs in the lobby. I grab my cigarettes and run down to the lobby to meet him. A really cheery guy with a funky spiked up hairstyle is waiting there for me. We shake hands and do the usual kind of first meeting stuff and then head over to the venue in his car to check out how things are shaping up. The venue was a huge cinema complex with two levels, exhibition stalls were being set up on the ground level and the 10 presentation rooms were on the first level. The conference was split into two parts, business and professional. Each session was one hour long and at any one time 10 presentations were to take place. Frank was a very busy man at this point, his phone literally ringing none-stop. He would put the phone down and it would ring again so we headed back to the hotel to wait for the first round of speakers to arrive.
I went up to my room and asked Frank to call me when they arrive. Usual story, i fall asleep for two hours until the phone rings in my room, the first bunch had arrived. I went down to the restaurant to see Sas, Craig, Sam, Keith and some other peeps i hadnt met before sat around the table ordering the first round of Grolsch beer. We say hello etc… and then get into the banter. Seriously, i have seen more of this bunch this year than i have seen my own grand parents, bless. I believe the rest of the evening panned out as follows, we sat around the table checking our emails, talking on msn, drinking beer and generally having a giggle.Then we ate a lovely meal in the restuarant courtesy of Media Elements, it was mustard soup (a bizarre concoction but very nice), pork fillet with mushroom sauce and sourbet ice-cream.
All but myself, Craig, Sas and Shane decided to head to their rooms to catch up on their sleep. We decided we would go into town and explore the finer things that Holland has to offer. Straight to the coffee shops we go. Frank drove us into town, parked the car and we walked into the town centre. There we found a beautifully lit church surrounded by bars and a taxi rank, shame. Then we explored some of the side streets, after walking round in circles for 20 minutes or so we decided to stick to the one place we were pretty sure was a coffee shop; The Sahara. It was dimly lit with a sign outside in the Jamaican colours. Blinds covered the windows and beads hung over the main entrance. We said our goodbyes to Frank and then we rang the bell on the door and somebody came and opened it slightly. He didnt say hello, he simply said “passports”. Craig thought he said “password”, very confused Craig then asked dissapointingly “do they all have passwords?”. One of us heard him correctly and showed the door man their identification. I instantly realised that i wasnt going to get in as i didnt have any id on me, im so paranoid about losing my passport that i had locked it in the safe in the hotel room and totally forgot about it. So, the other guy’s went in and i had to go back to get my passport.
I ran down the side streets to see if i could catch Frank but he was nowhere to be seen, so i just chose a direction and luckily came to the train station where one taxi was waiting outside. I jumped into the mini bus taxi which seemed kind of a waste and gave him the address of our hotel. He was listening to some trance station, the dutch love trance. We arrived back, i left some money with the driver and i asked him to wait for me. Ran upstairs, opened the safe, got my passport, locked the safe again, ran back down, jumped into the mini bus, slide the door shut and back we went. The taxi managed to squeeze its way into the little side streets of the town centre and dropped me off near enough outside. I rang the bell at the coffee shop and glance through the window to see the gang sat their, eyes wide shut sat around a table on some sofa’s. The guy came to the door and let me in, after looking at my passport.
There was a bar but it didnt sell alcohol, you could only buy pre-rolled spliffs, rizlas, resin, bags of different strength weed and fruit juice. So i grabbed a white widow spliff for 4 euros and some apple juice for 2 euros - bargain! It seemed like everybody was already stoned, Sas was giggling away with Shane and Craig was moping around with squinting eyes, must have been strong stuff. We decided to play pool. I played Craig first and after discussing the rules we wracked them up and smashed them up. I won, naturally 
and then Sas and Shane played. Sas won, i believe. Some other guy’s from the conference arrived and ordered their stuff and we sat around the table on the couches rambling on. The place closed at midnight so we headed out and it all went a little hazey from here….