After all the anticipation I am now writing to you from the wrong side of the A4U European Expo in Amsterdam. Despite having got back yesterday morning I am still feeling decidedly jaded from three solid days of meetings, networking, manning the stand, and entertaining clients.

Monday

Daniel and I arrived at our hotel (the Holiday Inn which is a 10 minute walk to the RAI centre) at about 3pm and after a rather embarrassing incident with a revolving glass door we headed to the exhibition hall to oversee the set up of our stand. Another moment of extreme clumsiness (and I assure you this was clumsiness and not sabotage) nearly resulted in me felling a competitor’s stand so we decided that perhaps we should leave the stand build to the professionals and headed to the Ignite Party at the rosarium bar which was also in the business district of Amsterdam (I never quite made it to the rather more famous district of the city).

The drinks were much busier than I anticipated with apparently 200 people beating the morning queues and getting their conference badge here instead. We went with the intention of having a relatively quiet one given that Daniel was due to speak the next day and we had to be at the stand at 8.30am. Best laid plans and all that – we of course ended up in the Novotel Hotel Bar in the early hours of the morning where we finally managed to find a beer which wasn’t the size of a shot glass.

James from Match.com, Lena from Marriott and Daniel from CJ

Tuesday

A little bleary eyed, Daniel and I headed over to the RAI where our European colleagues (Nacim and Cyril from France, Albrecht from Germany) were waiting for us. Then the doors opened to the delegates and from that moment on the stand was absolutely manic – with a constant stream of prospects and existing clients from across Europe.

Cheryl, Jason and Dipa arrived at the stand later on in the afternoon and Daniel went off to do a final practise run of his presentation with David Harding from Argos. Daniel is going to blog in detail about his presentation in the coming weeks – it was about managing success in a downturn and has some really useful information.

Right – that’s it for now. I will fill you all in about the latter half of our trip next week so for now have a lovely bank holiday weekend.