Seattle - MVP Summit 2009 - Day 1 - Ariving in Seattle 27. February 2009 Conferences, Fun, Reviews Comment (1) Hi Folks, this is finally the post for the first day. I was unable to get the pictures from my camera to my laptop because I forgot that cable. The SD card reader in my laptop also did not help me out as it does not detect anything. Luckily the Zen player could help me out since it allows to use a SD card as a removable USB disk (but it did not allow me to use the Import All feature, it did always crash my Zen, strange ..). Okay, lets get started, this is on the morning of Friday where I started with a train ride to the airport. A familiar sight at the Hannover airport. BTW this airport will be really crowded in a few days when the CeBIT 2009 starts (I will go there too after the MVP Summit next Saturday). I prepared myself mentally for a lot of waiting, but I never waited more than 30 minutes. I played mostly some iPhone games or listened to or watched stuff on my Zen player. This is the first plane, called Cityhopper, which will get us to Amsterdam. The weather was rainy and cold. I checked online and the weather in Amsterdam and Seattle is pretty much the same. Arriving in Amsterdam, not much going on here except rain. But it is a pretty big airport and it took almost half an hour just to get to the next gate. After getting to the gate and answering all the stupid security questions like "Did you pack your luggage yourself?" or "Did you pack a big bomb or did someone give you a bomb?" it was already time to enter the next plane. Much bigger I have to say. I have to spend the next 10-11 hours in there, I did not expect much from the movie selection and was glad I had some own movies prepared for me. But I was surprised to be able to see some new movies and I saw the coolest movie this year so far with the guy from "Shawn of the Dead" Simon Pegg, called "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People". The movie itself does not make much sense and has a little too much senseless romance, but Simon is so incredibly funny, I laughed quite a lot. I also made a few little videos like the following with my camera. The quality is pretty bad, but it will hopefully be fun to see in a few years. Just got off the plane and drove through a tunnel to Seattle in a bus. You can see some real life HDR, other than that not much in this video. I finally arrived at the hotel after almost 20 hours of being awake. I noticed that I carry around quite a lot of hardware. From the left to right, Zen player, my good old MDA Windows Mobile phone, iPod Touch, Zune player, 16 GB Flash Memory and the camera I took this picture with. You can also see my Rubics cube in the picture, which I still have solve ^^ And this is the hotel room. The hotel is actually quite cheap for the Seattle Downtown area, but I liked it a lot. It got a freezer, microwave, free Wifi Internet connection and everything else was fine too. The only annoyance was the thin glasses in the window, which made me hear all the noise from the road at night. But that was not any better at the other hotels I stayed here. After taking a nap for about 1.5 hours I went outside and looked around a bit. I saw this incredible long limo and a funny rotating sign with an elephant on it. A supermarket in Seattle at night. I just got some things I forgot and was quite puzzled by the prices. A lot of take 2 for 1 deals and stuff a lot cheaper if you buy 700 of it. Not really useful for me. Also got some cookies and drinks not available in Germany ^^ And finally the Seattle Space Needle at night. More pictures tomorrow.