The Conference Gets Underway in Copenhagen

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Thursday morning was fortunately a bit quiet to start, as I still had a migraine. I finally heard from my hotel contact (she gets to work around 10, and definitely leaves before 4). We agreed to meet at 11, and ultimately did. I was satisfied with our conversation, although she didn’t have sufficient answers to some of my questions, and I was hopeful that the guests wouldn’t experience the same kind of hoopla as we had.

Not so much the case though – we later heard from one of our directors that he’d been told upon check in that we had paid for his room (not the case), and when he requested a bathrobe, he was told that only people on the 6th floor got bathrobes unless he wanted to purchase one. It was so very strange.

We’d also had a conversation that morning with the front desk about handing out the welcome packages (which actually was mostly successful), and then with the concierge about the evening’s room drop for the gifts we’d gotten the delegates.
First, I learned that they had no idea where the gifts were. Fortunately, the assistant I’d been dealing with from our local host had detailed records of deliveries and all of that, and was kind enough to email them to me so I forwarded that on. But I later learned that somehow our conversation had translated to them believing that I would be doing the room drop myself. Um, what? How was I supposed to get a key to everyone’s room and put the gifts in there? Why on earth would I do that? Very odd…but we worked it out.

At any rate, once we’d finished with the hotel, we joined one of our delegates for a lovely lunch in Nyhavn again. This time, we sat outside like the brave Danes (gotta have the full experience after all!), but I did end up getting a cheeseburger. Which was served on bread, so I only ate the meat (it’s bun or nothing for me!) and the French fries. It was great to catch up with our friend, and soon we were headed back to the hotel to do a bit of work prior to the board meeting.

The first official activity for the entire conference was a buffet dinner at the hotel. We were to start with cocktails just outside the room for dinner, and unfortunately, the hotel hadn’t well sign-posted the area as promised. In fact they’d posted the wrong information. So my dad got them to correct that, but we still felt as though we were stuffed in a corner behind another event and among racks of coats.

But everyone just seemed genuinely happy to see each other, and spent a good deal of time chatting and catching up. Soon, the hotel invited us to move inside for dinner, where we realized that they only had cold food put out. Our group is famous for eating too much of the first course because they believe it to be the only course, so we pushed the hotel to bring out the hot food as well. They didn’t want to, but we forced the issue and out it came.

I had some lovely beef and very tasty new potatoes – I don’t even like new potatoes, but these were excellent. I found that for the most part, all of the food I ate was right up my alley and totally delicious. So I was very happy about that! We had some laughs and lots of conversation at dinner, and finally it was time to go to bed before the business session got underway in the morning.

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