I've not been blogging much lately because I've been buried under a ton of work. One of the things I've been busy with has been developing a full day of content on Exchange 2007 to present in Lisbon (May 30th) and Oslo (June 8th).
Astu Are thte readers will have noticed the timestamp of this entry, done some math, and realized that I'm probably not in the US anymore. Those readers would be correct. I'm sitting in one of the food courts (near the B and C concourses) of the Amsterdam Schipol airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Lisbon in just under three hours.
This is my first international flight, and other than some business trips to Hawaii, my first time off the North American continent. Since I'm sorta wiped out and still have work to do before I take off, I'll share just a short list of observations (in no particular order):
- Airports look like airports, no matter where you are.
- I'd not realized exactly how much I appreciated the US airport (and Washington state) total ban on smoking until, halfway through my meal, the nice people at the next desk lit up.
- What's up the the "T" gates (Transfer) they have here? What are those for? They look like ticket counters...but surely you buy your tickets ahead of time, not hop-by-hop, right? Are they an Amsterdam peculiarity, or are they an EU thing?
- Wifi providers here are just as willing to take adavantage of your wallet as they are in the US.
- Amsterdam is flat. Really flat.
- You don't hear announcers in US airports naming specific people for specific flights, telling them that they are delaying the flight and threatening to offload their luggage. You do here.
- They have a Star Wars Transformer in one of the toy shops here. No shit. Anakin's Jedi Starfighter turns into a fighting Jedi mecha. Who knew? And it's using the real Transformer brandname -- has the trademarked "More than meets the eye" tagline and everything.
I might do more later, if I'm not complete tapioca after 17 hours of travel plus an afternoon of session prep.