We Got Served

One of the cool things about the MVP Summit is that you get to stay in a pretty decent hotel. The deal is, you pay for your travel expenses (funded mainly by Virgin air miles in my case) and Microsoft pick up the tab for your hotel. There’s over 1700 MVPs here in town scattered across 4 big hotels in the city, and I’m staying at the Grand Hyatt.

So I wake up Sunday morning ridiculously early (thanks jet lag!) and decide to wander down to the hotel lobby where there’s a Starbucks to pick up a coffee and a croissant (given the density of Starbucks in town, I’m surprised there isn’t one in my room. Maybe one will have opened in my shower later in the week. Stay tuned.)

I walk in and the place is filled with police - there’s 25 police mororbikes parked outside, and a series of police cars of various shaoes and sizes. Either this Starbucks does the best donuts in Washington State, or there’s something going on. Turns out, the Dalai Lama is in town, and he’s staying here at the hotel.

Sure enough, a little later on I meet up in the lobby with Andrew Edney, Grey Lancaster (WHS MVPs) and a couple of SBS MVPs including - Nick Whittmorethe Naked MVP and sure enough, in walks the Dalai Lama himself!

He walked through the lobby assisted by many large chaps looking slightly menacing with ear-pieces, blessed a few of his followers who were dotted around the lobby, and went on his way to the press conference linked above.

A slightly surreal start to the MVP Summit, then.

Anyway, the rest of Day Zero was spent wandering around Seattle getting a little shopping done, gatecrashing an SBS MVP boat trip around Puget Sound up to Bill Gates’ house (Hi Bill!) and then hitting Rock Bottom (a bar) for an evening’s pool/beer/food fest at Rock Bottom, at which I got to meet a number of very nice people, including another WHS MVP, Ken Warren (you’ll find him on the WHS Forums) and a huge number of SBS MVPs. There’s about 70 of those guys and just seven WHS MVPs. Maybe we can recruit the Dalai Lama this week to be our eighth….