Arrived in Melbourne
Just a quick posting before I wander over to the training center for the first seminar. I arrived in Melbourne yesterday morning about 9.30am, about 30 hours since I left Heathrow on Friday. This is the second time I've been in Australia, and again I can't help wondering why everyone in Britain doesn't just move to Australia, it's as much like home to make you feel comfortable, but there's much more room, the scenery is fantastic and the weather's better. After braving Australian customs (much stricter than immigration, with sniffer dogs wandering round and big queues to get your bags x-rayed) I jumped in a taxi and was at the hotel, the Langham just by the river, by about 11am.
Australia's always been a tough one to pin down for me. When I came here before, back in 2000, it was after two weeks backpacking in Thailand and my overwhelming feeling when arriving in Sydney was how much it was like the UK, how much of an oasis of sanity it was compared to the rest of South-East Asia. If you're from the UK, you do immediately pick up on the influences from back home - there's lots of Victoria streets, places and so on, lots of the shops are the same as back home, and of course there's lots of intermingling of British and Australian culture back home (think Neighbours, the Wiggles and of course the cricket, rugby and so on). Of course once you're here for a while you realize that Australians see themselves much more so these days as part of Asia, the far east and so on, and of course the proximity to America means that much of the culture, architecture and so on is American-influenced.
Melbourne is a good example of this. It's very european in some ways - there are trams, cafes and so on - and there's lots of architecture and so on from the 1850's, 1900's, probably the oldest (or at least most distinctive) architecture in Australia. But then again, there's lots of skyscrapers, freeways and so on, and certainly coming in to Melbourne from the airport, it seems much more like coming in to San Francisco or New York than arriving at a British city. I had a good look around in the afternoon yesterday (well as much as I could, not having slept much in 30 hours) and I'll try and have another poke around after the seminar finishes this afternoon.
That's it for the time being. I'm just about to leave now for the seminar, not sure what time it's starting actually so I'll get there for 9am, that's usually a good time (although I did that once in Slovakia, I got there any everyone was sat down waiting for me to start, which meant I had to do the introductions whilst cranking up the laptop). Not sure how many will be there also, 10 is not a bad figure but we've had 50 in the UK and places like Croatia, where they marketed the event quite heavily. I was up at 5am this morning making a few changes to the material, I've incorporated some of the material from the BIWA keynote into the first session, and I've added stuff on BI Publisher / Discoverer interoperability, together with embedding Answers portlets in Portal, so hopefully it should be interesting. I'll update the blog once the event is over and I'm back in the hotel.