Windsor - London trip, June 2008

No, that pic is not the famous Windsor castle :-P In fact I could not manage to get there during my two-day stay in Windsor, England. I had a team building activity with the Product-Development group in our company... We had a great program, though we, from Duesseldorf, had to be at the airport around 6am to fly to London Heathrow. We arrived at the Oakley Court, our hotel in Windsor at 9am and was totally excited with that awesome hotel...that's the pic of the hotel from the backyard, btw... It has a huge garden and in the backyard, there's Thames river flowing...

Our first activity was karting, not my fave one to be honest. At first they planned to have a dragon boat racing at Thames for us, but due to rainy days several days before (at that time we had a perfect weather, sunny and warm which was quite special in England :-)), there was a warning announcement to have any activity on the river. (Wie schade!). Seriously I prefer to have something on the water than karting, I don't like racing or driving (which is a bit strange considering my driving experience, i.e. Bandung-Malang or the most recent one Malang-Denpasar). But the karting event was okay finally, it was my first time and to me it's a bit scary (especially because Arpad told me before that one of his previous colleague broke her ribs because someone hit her during the race) but in the end I could enjoy it...a bit :-P.

After lunch, we went to London, was so excited that we stopped in Soho area which was one of my fave area in London. Our second activity was to get a cocktail recipe in some bars around Soho and to demonstrate how to make it in front all of us. It was cool, and my group even got a crazy idea to kidnap a bartender to present "Manhattan" recipe (with the budget that was given to us, 30 Pounds). It was quite a nice walk to find some bars on the list that was given.. it's a pity that I could not drop by at some interesting shops (or should I say.. I was lucky hehe).

The cocktail presentations was okay, funny ones :-), we had dinner after that and then had some free time for about 1.5 hrs before returned to Windsor at 10pm. We used the free time to stroll around the area to find Tesco hehe... Daniela and I wanted to buy some choco-caramel shortbreads... we passed through the Chinatown on our way back.

The next day was more serious activity, some speeches and group discussions and presentations. But it was not that bad as I imagined before. I got to know some other colleagues from Harpenden (besides the BA group for sure), Oslo, and Warsaw. There were almost 50 people joined the event. It was indeed a nice experience..though I wish I could spend more time at that hotel and to visit the Windsor castle or Eton college or Legoland... think I should go back there again :-P.