Many of us here at DNJ Online are big fans of TechEd food. It's plentiful,
it's free and it's everywhere you turn. Lunchtimes are always a big deal,
and not just because the lunches are eaten in huge, voluminous halls the
size of aircraft hangars.
Lunches are one of the few times you sit facing other
delegates, and one of the few
times
you get to talk with any of them. Usually you are sitting in rows
listening to someone else talking, or you're walking about between
sessions trying to see the screen of your iPaQ using the overhead
lighting.
You can talk to anyone at TechEd, although it's only
about 10 to 1 they'll be a native English speaker. But it's listening
that's the most fun. You can also hear some of Europe's most ancient,
lyrical and fantastic languages being spoken through food. Hearing excited
discussions about .NET in Spanish or Dutch while the speaker is eating
coleslaw must be heard to be believed.
Cup of hot mud anyone?
The coffee is quite nice, although we can heartily recommend getting to
the thermos flasks before the end of the supply so you don't get treated
to the sludge of doom (see above).
We admit that we miss the evaporated milk they use in
Amsterdam to make even the worst stewy coffee taste creamy and dee-licious,
but the local leche is just fine and dandy. The biscuits fill a
gap, but we feel that even the crispest biccies get a bit stale and soft
in this climate. And as for the chocolate on top you can forget it... choc
is made to melt at body heat, and as even an air-conditioned room over
here is about 22 degrees, chocolate has a hard time hanging together long
enough to get to your mouth.
But
the food hit of the show, especially for our resident pastry expert "Dr"
Dave Chadwick, is the pastries. We hesitate to call them Danish, because
they are Spanish. The favourites are the custard tart ones with the odd
green thing in the middle, which looks like a slice of pepper. We don't
actually want to know what it is, so let's just move away from that and
not even point at it any more.
times
you get to talk with any of them. Usually you are sitting in rows
listening to someone else talking, or you're walking about between
sessions trying to see the screen of your iPaQ using the overhead
lighting.
Cup of hot mud anyone?
licious,
but the local leche is just fine and dandy. The biscuits fill a
gap, but we feel that even the crispest biccies get a bit stale and soft
in this climate. And as for the chocolate on top you can forget it... choc
is made to melt at body heat, and as even an air-conditioned room over
here is about 22 degrees, chocolate has a hard time hanging together long
enough to get to your mouth.
But
the food hit of the show, especially for our resident pastry expert "Dr"
Dave Chadwick, is the pastries. We hesitate to call them Danish, because
they are Spanish. The favourites are the custard tart ones with the odd
green thing in the middle, which looks like a slice of pepper. We don't
actually want to know what it is, so let's just move away from that and
not even point at it any more.