On Thursday I woke up at 4:15 in the morning. Although I only had 2 hours of sleep, I felt pretty alive. I was very excited about the trip to Switzerland and couldn’t wait for Jonny Jelinek (webfeuer | Twitter) to pick me up with the cab. At 5:10 he arrived and together we went to the airport, where we met Thomas Prenner (futurezone | Twitter). From the very beginning we had an awesome time and goofed off a lot. ;)
Arriving in Zurich at 8:20, a nice woman of HP brought us to a little group of people who had already arrived from Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Once everyone arrived we all boarded the bus for a two hour ride to our hotel. At this point we were all quite tired considering we had all been up for so many hours. Thankfully I managed to have a short nap while Jonny and Thomas were talking most of the time about how to get an internet connection on their phones since Jonny wanted to check in almost everywhere on Foursquare. :D
When we arrived at the hotel, we got our lanyards, room-keys and we were told what was awaiting us. So, first thing to do was to bring my stuff to my room. My room was very nice, I had a balcony (which I didn’t use a lot, just to smoke) and a beautiful bathroom. There were a lot of L’Occitane cosmetics in the bathroom and I really liked the design.
The hotel consists of seven buildings and I stayed in the main building. Jonny and Thomas were staying in the building next to mine and so I went to check on them after upacking my stuff and together we went to the pavilion for lunch. Despite being the first guests to arrive in the lunch room, we were very hungry and couldn’t wait another minute. The buffet was very good, all of the food was very exquisite, nicely decorated and the staff working there did everything to make us feel comfortable. :)
A lot of other people arrived and joined us then suddenly someone said to me, “You are Iwona, right?” and I figured out who it was: it was Miggy (blog | twitter)! I had seen her on Twitter before when we were talking about going to the HP Winter Summit. Miggy turned out to be my main company during those two days in Switzerland.
After our fabulous lunch we had two sessions. But before they started, we were given an introduction about the collaboration of Rossignol and HP. The main statement was: “It’s all about design and technology”, something that I could really appreciate. The first session was mixing beats on HP Envy Beats laptops. It was very funny. I had a ball with the British people, especially with Miggy and Tahirah, however, the only thing I somehow missed at this session was the point. The technical view. No one told us any technical details about those laptops! I have no idea how much they cost or even what features they exactly have.
In the second session we got to try HP Touchsmarts and HP Printers of the newest generation. I personally think that when you see a screen and a keyboard in front of it, it’s not a natural feeling for most people to want to actually touch the screen. I think that this will take a lot of time and development to get people to interact with their computers via touch. The screens are huge and the graphics are nice, but here I again missed some of the technical details. After trying the Touchsmarts, we had a wine tasting session. I never have drank Swiss wine before, but I really liked one of the white wines that they had. I didn’t try the red because I never drink red wine at home and Thomas told me that the wine was pretty strong.
After those two sessions (it was 5:30pm already) we had some free time. I went to the room, had a shower and imported my pictures to my laptop. Miggy and Tahirah came to my room and we had a little chat. At 7:30pm we met in the lobby with the whole group and we were taken by bus to a gondola. We arrived at a ski lodge, which was very beautiful and enjoyed a great dinner with fondue, wine and nice conversations with a lot of people.
Back at the hotel we had some beer and went to sleep. The next day some of us went snowboarding/skiing, but the weather was not very good. You couldn’t see anything, because it was foggy, snowing and windy. So instead I had a day at the hotel spa and it turned out to be the better choice. They had an outdoor pool, a hamam, an outdoor sauna, an aroma bath and so on. We really enjoyed it, relaxed a lot and had a great time there.
After a wonderful day at the spa, we had lunch for the last time all together and started packing our things. The first group of people was taken to the airport at 3pm. I had one more hour left, so I spent the time editing my pictures. :)
I also got new headphones (diddy beats), which we won in the beat session. I already tried them and they have a good sound. I like that.
At 4 I met with Jonny and Thomas and we were taken to the airport with some other guys. Our flight was delayed, but we turned the wait into a great time.
Those two days in Flims at the Waldhaus Hotel were amazing. I met so many nice and interesting people from 23 different countries and had a wonderful time staying in a gorgeous hotel in a nice atmosphere in a snowy Switzerland. All in all it was a nice trip and I thank everyone who was involved for making it all possible (especially HP and Rossignol for inviting all of us).
(proofread by @AmericanAnDerTU)
Links:
flickr group
HP
Rossignol
Jonny Jelinek
Thomas Prenner
Others about this event:
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5 Comments
I might have to steal some of your photos (will credit you of course) – they are lovely! Too many of my face though!! aaarrrggghh.xx
HDGL
Feel free to use some of my pictures. I declared them as creative commons anyway :)
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