Hive Fest - Part Two
I feel the pain of this soaking wet bear as i think that is what i looked like walking around Amsterdam, but with a smile :)
Day Two started early again. For someone who is born and living in the wrong time zone, waking up at 7AM is something that is not happening a lot. Brain functions different when sleep deprived, so maybe that is the reason why this weekend felt like a dream 😂
I am not sure how, but all 4 of us (Leofinance and Actifit winners) met in front of the hotel and started looking how to get to the Zuiderkerk church where the second day of presentation was held. You could see that the last night was fun as not many people were there early :)
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The venue was quite different from the Eye Filmmuseum, but both were interesting places for this kind of events. Presentations and food and drinks were in the same "room".
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After the first part of the presentations we had our first music brake by Steevc
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At lunch time i somehow missed everything that Coldbeetrootsoup were doing. I would blame it on a cigarette brake or Crim being great at talking. After some time of bothering her and she being super nice, she finally said sorry but i want some soup. No idea was she late for it or not. Sorry Crim if you didn't manage to get one :)
But Ruben did a great job at documenting the process of making the Coldbeetrootsoup so i feel less bad :)
It feels like there was more mingling around on day two.
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Brian adding this old photo of young Adam Curry felt like an inside joke :)
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At the end we had TDC Tunes performing live. (if you for some reason need a short 1 minute random clip of the performance, just comment where should i send it to you)
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After the official event in the Zuiderkerk church was over there were two different events organized by several people. One was the Poker Tournament and other was BeerSaturday.
As my Mobile provider wanted 0.60$ for 100kb of data i was mostly living in Amsterdam without internet. It is not a great thing when you have no idea where things are. So i was adopted by a group that went for a quick lunch/dinner first.
After some food some of the people went to the hotel or poker event, and i was then adopted by Soyrosa that led us to the first bar for the BeerSaturady. We got there at the very end so we continued to the second place organized for BeerSaturday.
After several drinks the decision was made to go to the VolksHotel for few more drinks. Soyrosa had to catch the train home so my adoption was passed down to Karinxxl. And on a short metro ride we heard a full life story of an Italian guy living in Amsterdam 🤷♂
After a beer there Andree and i decided to go to our hotel. You could guess that it was raining, heavy.
I was praising the public transport in Amsterdam till that point, but what we found out was that after midnight public transport in Amsterdam turns into a pumpkin. And some of those pumpkins are different from other pumpkins so they want money for transport as the 24 hours ticket is for another company. Andree bailed me out with paying the ticked with a card and i ended up spending HBD on public transport.
Sunday we woke up and it was raining 😲 who would have guessed?
So Alex and i decided to go for a quick lunch and then visit the Rijksmuseum. Great place to visit in Amsterdam when raining. Jokes a side it is a great museum and if you really really want to study all the art there you could spend several days walking around.
Alex had to go and catch a flight home and with all the craziness at the airport he decided to skip the closing dinner and go strait to the airport. With weather goods being not happy and me getting soaking wet for X amount of time i decided to not carry my camera bag with me to the closing dinner.
After almost 7 hours of fun at the dinner and closing party at the rooftop of VolksHotel and a lot of goodbyes there was a small group that still didn't want to say goodbye. We were politely thrown out from the VolksHotel and after a long consideration decided that we have to say goodbye. Ended up walking with Starkerz for a chunk of the road. After we split i realized that i still have 45 minutes of walking and with no internet i had no idea where the pumpkins are going and which one to take. So i said fuck it and got a taxi.
Monday i started with hitting the snooze button several times, but i had to get up as the check out was till 11AM. As i was waking up i checked did any fungus or mushrooms started growing on me with all that rain i soaked in, but fortunately or unfortunately nothing.
Left the bag at the hotel and decided to find a place for breakfast. And it was not raining, for maybe 15 minutes. Weather goods decided that Monday was a drug day all day, so the weather was all over the place.
As the heavy shower started i had a decision to make, and my decision was to get into my favorite place in Amsterdam. Tram No 2. Nice long ride to the city center in a dry and warm place :) Asking Soyrosa to get me a 24 hour ticked while she was getting to the closing dinner was a HBD well spent :)
Got to walk around a bit in a sunny weather, get some food, drove some more on the Tram No 2 (raining) and at the end got on my train at 19:30 to Vienna. I must admit the sleeping compartment was a much better experience than the sitting one. And i did get a good long sleep from 12PM till 9AM.
Decided to visit some old friends that moved to Vienna few years ago and stay for the night. The trip home was a good one as there were only 4 of us in the minibus. 6AM Thursday and the HiveFest was over.
I am not great at this so the conclusion will be short. This was my first HiveFest and first time meeting with a lot of people that i never met before (i know no-one in RL) and i must say that there was no moment for this several days when i felt like a stranger. Hoping we will meet and share some fun times again, sooner or later.
And special thanks to Roeland (and the team) for organizing an amazing event.
If you want to check out more photos from day two, or want to use it for your blogs (or whatever) feel free to check out GDrive folder with more photos, some variations of posted ones and some that did not make this big number of uploads