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Finally our team managed to meet. And I’m not talking about meeting on AIM, only-for-oldies IRC or anything virtual. We realized that we’re made of flesh, bones, blood and all those things that a human is made of.
For me it was also first time to meet our not-so-new boss, Bob. He turned out to be a huge, huge guy. Like two meters or so… hard to tell from AIM usually :-). We had a really good time, lots of laughing, Adam playing with *things* in restaurants, James talking with his nice texan accent, Przemek not talking at all, Rysiek trying to fix some weird JSF stuff, Paweł being a bit to serious and Rebeca (Bob’s wife) trying to tidy this crazy bunch of geeks up.
We looked like tourists sometimes…
There was also Mark Newton, but had to leave ( 🙁 ) soon and I haven’t even got a chance to shoot him with my camera.
From JBoss side I met few new guys (Emmanuel, Thomas Heute, Stefan Trojanowski who turned out not to be Polish, but Macedonian – yes – they end with -ski as well and Sasha Labourney) and got a chance to talk with well-known Julien about food, especially foix gras, and joke about .ORG <-> Portal stuff as always :-).
Antwerp itself was something between Kraków and not-so-big-and-very-ugly medium town in Poland – old town with outstanding Cathedral is very very nice. Outside full of blocks of flats in it’s ugliest way. Just look at those:
It’s not what i expect from Western Europe :). Anyway. The funniest part was when we decided to visit some crazy metal café. There was a huge skeleton hanging, music I don’t usually listen too played, anorectic black, pierced waitress etc. Bob started turning into a vampire…
So James invented clever Plan B – In Case Of Vampires . We had a really good laugh there :-). Some of us survived.
Work-wise we made a huge improvement so in all fields the trip was a success.
Oh – and this happened when we tried to buy tickets in Brussels 🙂
Yeah, you are pretty right about the architecture.
While you may find plenty of “gems” in the old town of Antwerp, but truly there are not many architectural jewels around…
Heh you’re pretty right :-). Lots of gems everywhere 🙂 And by the way – while in antwerp – don’t use hotels that are close to central station 🙂