A Good Weekend

OK, so it's more personal stuff but I had an excellent end to last weekend so I don't care Skip over this one if you don't care what's going on in my life. That's cool.

I finished work on Thursday lunchtime and then made what seemed a ridiculously long 'short' trip to Schiphol via the joys of London Gatwick and a taxi on landing that seemed to go on forever. Which meant I was pretty late when I was met by Marco Gralike and his daughter, Athina. They had a gift for me which was very sweet (more on that later) and I had bought the very orange Mr. Tickle who had decided he wanted to move to the Netherlands.

By the time we got to the Amis office in Nieuwegein, near Utrecht, I just about had time to setup for the informal presentation. As Marco introduced me he presented me with a gift that he and Eva had organised. This is it under Marco's care.



I suspect a few things are obvious.

1) It's very carefully and prettily wrapped (thanks Eva )
2) It's very Orange!

As Marco later described it, it's a Dutch Football Supporter's Survival Kit. Including some of the noisiest, craziest, and Orangest toys I've seen in a while There were also some sweets, Stroopwafels (that are scrummy and have gone down well at work) and this guy at the back.



At the front is another new cuddly toy, Mr. Hollandia, the gift from Marco and Athina. So, let's get this straight. Mr. Tickle decides to move to Holland and free up some space on the comfy seat and then I come home with two more! LOL. Speaking of Cuddly Toys, this is me introducing Gordon and Pierre to the audience.



People were very understanding I had fun seeing Jacco again and some people I'd heard about but never met.

In the end, once I get talking about those pictures .... well, it went on for about 2 hours I think and although I initially thought it went well, it subsequently hit me that I didn't complete a demo in the way I intended, but I'll make up for that with a blog post soon.

One funny moment was when Echofon popped up a notification to show me how many tweets had arrived because I had a network connection. As friends know, I never use Twitter so that gave Marco a chuckle

Marco had lined up a really nice hotel for us in Utrecht, but we were both too beat to do much more than head off to bed before the course the following day.

The course was probably less of a success from my perspective. Not disastrous, but pretty difficult to talk about so many different things in one day, but the feedback I got from Marco and Jacco was pretty good. People stayed late on a Friday afternoon so they can't have been completely sick of me.

Time to party. We went to a bar that was probably quieter than we expected to watch the England match and there were times when I wasn't sure it was really happening or we hadn't drunk way too much beer (we had). It was a rare chance to spend some time with Marco and Jacco away from a conference, where things are hectic, so it was one of the best nights I'd had for quite a while. Only to be beaten the next day when Marco drove us over to Jacco's place in Deventer. Marco and I have a running joke about how cool Jacco is - he wears nice clothes, completely unlike a techie! Sure enough, his apartment was completely lovely, his partner's lovely, the cat is lovely, Deventer is fantastic. This man has landed on his feet!

It wasn't even a 5 minute walk to the bar where we would do what I'd really come for - watch Holland play in a bar in a Dutch town. Marvellous experience. They go crazy for football. A couple of St. George's Crosses doesn't cover it, folks.





After more and more beers, Jacco's partner Margot turned up from work and it was back to his place for .... meat and potatoes. But I should say *extremely* tasty casserole. There had been much discussion about my diet because Margot is a great cook so it was difficult finding something that I would eat that she could also be proud of. Job done!

A comfy night's sleep with a cool cat for company and I was done.

I had a great time so special thanks to Marco, Jacco, Eva, Margot, all of the AMIS people and those who came along to either presentation.

Cheers!

(Thanks also to Wesley Schneider for being the first goal scorer. If only the Netherlands could have added two more goals, I would have been in the money ...)