SOHO London

Spent a long weekend in SOHO London on my way through to Cape Town. I am sitting on the flight now almost to Cape Town and let me say, it is a long flight!

On the way!

Historical strip club right across the street from Seb’s

SOHO was a pretty good time, I just went hand stayed with Sebastien and his partner David. They were both a lot of fun and I got a chance to head out to the pub once or twice with Sebastien.

Old pub had the smallest stair case ever built!

Sometimes the iphone really does take good pictures.

It was odd going back through the tubes at rush hour on my way to Victoria station. Seeing how all of those people acted in the subway pushing ahead of each other and just the attitudes in general really made me want nothing to do with that whole life style.

Victoria station

Bergen – Retrospective

October 15th.

I am currently writing this (and catching up the Bergen posts) on a plane leaving Bergen heading to London (Cape Town is the next stop). I really liked Norway and will probably go back there for a while (maybe 6-12 months) in the future. I am scheduled to be back in Norway in January and possibly in April as well for the ROOTS conference which could be very cool.

Leaving was a bit weird. I stayed an extra day at Tone’s because flights were cheaper. She walked me to the flybussen earlier and said goodbye (who knows maybe our paths will cross again in the future, I am coming back to Norway and she is heading to Cape Town what’s funny is that we are both going to the opposite place at the same time… seriously what are the odds of randomly meeting a girl in Norway with precisely opposite travel schedules from yourself?)

random political note: even the Norwegians seemed amazed that Obama got the peace prize

I have to say that the weekend at the cabin with Tone was the highlight of my trip in and around Norway. It was so peaceful there and I believe we both had a great time.

One thing I learned on this part of the trip was don’t rely too much on things like credit cards. Keep lots of money in many different places (hedge your bets) you never know what can go wrong.

A bonus for me was that I spent 22 days or so in the same hotel which is a large brand in Scandinavia called Scandic Hotels. I joined up their frequent stayer package and already have amassed a few free nights that I can use in the future. I will try my best to stay with them again when I come back through Sweden and Norway in January.

I will be arriving in London in about 45 minutes though I will not be staying very long. I will be staying with Sebastian Lambla in Picadilly Circus (always better to stay with friends right?). the tricky part will be getting from Gatwick to his house but I don’t think it will be too bad. I will also try to pick up a SIM card for the iphone at the airport even though I won’t be in London long.

Leaving Bergen I grabbed a few souvenirs/presents for people. For Sebastian I got a filet of smoked salmon. For me personally I got some caviar and a wine bottle topper with a troll on it (don’t ask). I guess I received another souvenir because I had to buy a sweater while there as I did not bring enough warm clothes (sweater = 1400kr <> $300 US ouch but hey it’s “special”). Leaving I gave Tone a present, a copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

Since I am going to be back a few times I decided to pick up a book on Norwegian. I won’t put too much practice into it as its a language that only 4 million people speak but having some cursory understanding could be a good thing.

I will be doing a talk in London Saturday for their alt.net group then will likely head south on Sunday to Cape Town where I will hopefully be meeting up with Ernst and getting settled down for a few months.

Cabin with Tone

I was invited to go out to Tone’s family’s cabin. This was not something I could turn down. It is quite rural in most areas of Norway and getting to see that side was definitely an experience.

 

Tone getting her homework ready to take with us (she didn’t do any)

Leaving the city!

This was in fact the sun in Bergen

Almost there

Tone at the dock.

The boat was rather small

Weird distortion from engine on camera but she wasn’t very good with driving the boat so I drove.

The cabin

Fishing! We were only out for about 90 minutes though and didn’t catch anything but that’s ok because it was absolutely gorgeous.

Just gorgeous.

You can’t really tell but Tone is taking her turn rowing the boat here (we couldn’t get the engine going for some reason but it worked fine the next day).

Wine (served finely in plastic cups)

Tone making breakfast (I made dinner)

Me on the couch

Driving back

The weekend was really a great experience. I had so much fun watching the woodstove, being out in the quiet, sitting on the dock at 3:00am talking, driving the boat, and going fishing :)

Bergen – 3

Coming back to Bergen at 4:00 am woohoo. I actually woke up a few minutes late and literally made my plane by minutes but I was well rested!

Sunrise from plane

 

Flying into Bergen

I went right from the airport with Jon Arild to the class for 9:00am. I managed to get in some breakfast at the hotel. The class went pretty well (and on Thursday we decided that there was enough overflow to do a class Mon/Tues as well). I generally teach until 8-9 pm which means my day went from 4-9 it was a very long day!

I taught class again the next day and again it went pretty well. We grabbed some beers for the last part of the class (the 2 hours or so  extra at the end). We couldn’t do this at the hotel so we moved over to Reaktor, I think I will continue doing this as it went pretty well.

I saw Tone a few times in between, we went some interesting (and not so interesting places). She had two cats that *loved* to play with the laser pointer.

Topsy

Sofi

 

I did another class Monday and Tuesday then kind of unplugged for a few days. Classes are really exhausting. I was gonna leave on Friday but I received an invitation from Tone to head out to her cabin!

Bergen – 2

Oct 5: Jon Arlid and talked after the user group meeting about perhaps running a class the following week through NNUG (the user group) with the main benefit being that we would be able to offer it much cheaper than otherwise and there were lots of people interested.

I agreed to do the class (we ended up scheduling for Thursday and Friday). It was limited to 10-12 people. I was also invited to come up to Trondheim to speak to a user group there (with costs covered) so I decided to do that as well.

Saturday night I met Tone who was out for her birthday where we were (more on her later). She ended up calling me on Sunday and I went to go meet her for a rather quiet evening hanging out on a terrace.

Jon Arlid and I went to a Norwegian restaurant I believe Tuesday night. I had the …whale. That’s right I ate shamu get over it. It was actually pretty good (tastes like beef). How many chances do you get to eat whale?

Whale and potatoes au gratin

I left for Trondheim first thing Wednesday morning (4 am wake up!)

Bergen – 1

Sept 27th

Arrive in Bergen. Picked up by Jon Arlid at the airport and went out for geek beers with John St-Claire, Mark Nijof, Oivan, others. Brought some liquor chocolates from Holland for Jon and Mark.

I only made it about 20 minutes into geek beers before some random Norwegian girl was talking to me (and separated me from the group). Apparently I have set the bar high for speakers meeting Norwegian girls.

The conversation was hilarious, she was trying to set me up with one of her 4 friends. By complete random chance she spoke reasonable French so we just sat at her table and she told me everything about her friends at the table with them sitting right there.

She ended up coming with John, Mark, and I for my first experience of a nachtspiel (or drinking after you drink). There is a similar concept called a forespiel (yes in German that’s foreplay) which is drinking before you drink. This is a necessity in Norway as it is not uncommon to pay 80kr (16$USD) for a beer out.

Mark (The Dutchman) Nijof

John St-Claire

Of course I was not just here for geek beers though there were many and they were quite interesting. I went to work with Reaktor for a day doing some training on DDD and building systems. I did 2 short classes there that were mainly about the importance of language in building systems.

Wednesday I did my Unleash Your Domain talk for the user group. It seemed to go over very well (more about how well it went over later).

Thursday and Friday I was at Frende which is an insurance company. They have a system that they had been building that they wanted to get some input on in terms of their domain and perhaps some guidance for how to better deal with their domain.

Parking lot of Frende (quite a pretty area)

I thought Jon Arlid would cry when I told him that I would not actually recommend them to use the domain in the way that they were (it actually simplified many of their problems not to do it). I left him somewhat discouraged to the solace of his wife and child.

The next day at Frende I built up some slides of general things that the development team could use to help improve their system. Examples of this being SRP, DI, Value objects, etc…

I also ended up with a new slide to end the presentation i.e. a “questions” slide as Norwegians are notoriously difficult to get questions out of during presentations (unlike Mark but he’s dutch).

Click through to read it. It is pretty funny, a few people just started laughing after.

 

 

Street

Typical Bergen street (very small and hard to walk on)

Sunny in Bergen!

The harbor (and still sunny!)

I also saw a creole restaurant one day down by the fish market. I just had to go check it out. It was lacking spice but was still quite tasty. The other weird thing about it was they put a langoustine in with the jambalaya, I have never seen a langoustine in jambalaya before. I wasn’t  completely disappointed though it was 274kr (just under $60 just for a jambalaya, Norway is expensive!)

This takes me to Friday, I was originally intending to head out (well I really had no idea when I would leave but the weekend would have been a good time) …

Dronten

Hung out for a few days in Dronten (yeah I know nobody has ever heard of it). It is a small village in the center of Holland. Pieter Joost and his girlfriend Alien (pronounced Ahleen, though we would jokingly pronounce it wrong) we nice enough to let us crash on their couch/air mattress for 2 nights before we had to head out.

The town had a little pub, we found it rather quickly (about 15 minutes after arriving) and it became a centerpiece of our time in Dronten. We were even on a first name basis with the bartender Johnny. It is quite possible that Zach and I were the first Americans to go to this pub :)

What a mug!

We hung out quite a bit and did geeky stuff including recording a podcast for devnology about Domain Driven Design which was quite fun.

Zach and PJ @ PJ’s

Erik and PJ being geeks.

PJ, Alien, and Erik

The second day Zach and I found this amazing chinese “trailer” that apparently moves daily. We got big plates of great noodles for next to nothing. We were quite sad when it was not there the next day :(

We had to drop Zach off at the train as he was flying the next day to Russia and needed to pack. We made it with 0 time to spare, he literally ran onto the train and was off.

Dronten was a very cool place, a very different feeling than the big cities, much more authentic. I managed to get some pretty cool pictures one night as the sun was setting, it was just gorgeous.

So cool!

I will have to go back to Dronten to visit again.

On Saturday PJ was nice enough to drop me off at the airport in Amsterdam. It was time to head off to Bergen!

Xebia

Zach and I hung out around the town getting rid of our hangovers on Wednesday. We found the best breakfast I had had in a long time very close to the hotel, it was truely amazing and only like 10  euros each including coffee.

Zach realized that it wasn’t actually the girl’s legs that he liked but the fact that she was wearing a short skirt… the taxi driver got quite a laugh out of this.

We boarded a train in the afternoon to head out to Hilversum Sportpark which is where Xebia is located. Pieter Joost came to pick us up but apparently there were two train stations in the town.

Travelling…

I did my Unleash Your Domain talk for the user group and it went over pretty well I think, many good questions. I also in answering a question came to a new realization about aggregate roots, they solve the global lock problem but I will write a blog post on that later. One funny part of the talk was that there was nowhere to put my laptop so I put it on the floor, took off my flip flops and used my feet to change slides. It was a great ice breaker with the audience.

Xebia also provided food for the talk … and man was it good, professionally catered, quite different than the pizza I am used to. They also provided free beer for the group after!

After the talk I saw xebia’s bookshelf. It was mostly books about  tools but there was one gem hiding at the bottom, I re-arranged it to put it in it’s proper place.

I have since talked to Xebia and hope to be heading back out there perhaps in January.

After the fun Zach and I headed out to Dronten with Pieter Joost who we would be staying with for a few days.

Rotterdam

Stayed in Rotterdam for a few days to teach a class. The train ride was quick from Amsterdam (about 2 hours). I didn’t grab a whole lot of pictures as I was only there for 2 days and was teaching but I did get a few.

 

Ride to Rotterdam

Hanging out after the course.

This was my first time teaching the class in its current state. I had taught it once before but changed drastically the format. I really like the new format of not following a schedule and allowing all of the developers to use whatever environment that they want for exercises but I have to say it is really like herding cats.

Zach came to visit me from Germany and hang out at the hotel. I hadn’t seen Zach since I moved to Vancouver and he was heading to Russia so it was quite cool.

Durgerdam and Amsterdam

Sept 11-13ish:

Left Oslo and flew to Amsterdam through Copenhagen -–Yes I remembered to take the train this time to get to the airport—.

I arriving in Amsterdam realized that there was no train that would take me near my hotel, why you ask? Well because my hotel was just south of the middle of nowhere, it was a tavern with 3 rooms about 15km outside of Amsterdam (it was a 20 euro taxi ride each way to the nearest store). Here are some pics of the tavern and the area.

 

The tavern

The town (left view)

Across the street.

 

This was actually a welcome break from the constant going that happens at all conferences. I actually had a great time here and would love to head back one day. Keep in mind though that you have to be well behaved at this tavern or they put you in this:

 

The rooms at this tavern were not numbered, instead they were animals! I got to stay in the Cow Room as you can see by the door.

It was decorated with lots of cow paraphernalia but the creepiest thing was the picture over the bed.

 

I think they put the drapes there so when you saw scary cow you had the ability to close the drapes and forget he was there.

This tavern is the only thing in Durgerdam so finding it should not be too hard and I would highly recommend it for a quiet weekend. Across the street there is a dock that you can sit and hang out on. I would recommend going when its warm though as it seems like a not so nice place in the winter. Just remember to be good or you may get a close up view of the shackles ..

Side comment: Heineken actually tastes good in Holland who would have thought. It North America.

 

On Saturday I met up with Erik Pragt and then Lucia for a while in Amsterdam at a little Irish pub.

Erik at pub.

 

On Sunday we went to Erik’s house to play some guitar hero then I jumped a train to Rotterdam as I was to be teaching a course Monday morning there…