This plan was doomed from the start: leave from work at 4PM and try to reach Antwerp within two hours, so I could collect my badge and goody bag tonight instead of tomorrow morning (together with 2000 fellow JavaPolis visitors). It was worth a try, but I should have known you can’t beat the Dutch rush hour at its peek. Exactly one hour late (an hour spent halfway through in a traffic jam caused by people looking at an accident on the other side of the road) I entered the Metropolis building–only to be disappointed by Stephan himself. So that’s one beer less to drink tonight, in an attempt to go to bed early and be on time tomorrow morning.
Anyway, all will be forgotten when I sit down tomorrow for the first keynote–and after that for all those sessions I’m looking forward to: Gosling, Gafter, Bloch… Sessions about EJB3.1 and Guice and Scala… (Of course, since I didn’t get the goody bag with the program yet, I’m listing all these from memory so I’ve probably forgotten one or two). I’m sorry to say I will probably miss the JRuby session with Ola Bini and Charles Nutter: you can only see so many introductions into Ruby and Rails.
And in the meantime I’ve done a little reconnaissance in Antwerp’s town center after checking into the hotel. As always, the city is great fun to be in Christmas time: nicely decorated and full of life (and beer). I had some Belgian fries at Frituur No 1 and walked around town a little. I nearly bumped into someone looking a lot like James Gosling, taking snapshots of the Antwerp cathedral. Perhaps not the right moment to ask for an autograph…

On the road to Antwerp…