After a more leisurely time in Frankfurt and Berlin, I had a lot of rushing about to make it to Munich and then Hamburg on time. There wasn’t much time for site seeing, unfortunately. But the people were as friendly and helpful as ever.
In Munich, I joined my Quest colleagues Fabian Fulle and Dirk Muller. Then we headed out to BMW for a sales call. After that, we went to a suburb to the Microsoft offices to speak to the Bavarian SQL Server user group. We also had the pleasure of being misdirected 4 or 5 times by the navigation system in our rented BMW. (I’ll never use that one, I’ll tell you that much!)
The local user group in Munich is headed by my friend, Helmut Knappe, and he arranged a nice dinner event for us after the seminar. I’d never had spetzel before, but I wish I had. It was wonderful. (I’d been to Munich a couple years ago, and I believe I’ve already posted some pictures of that experience here on the blog. So I won’t post any here today.)
Hamburg was quite an amazing city. The city is quite big and very wealthy. I think this comes from Hamburg’s history as a major city in the Hanseatic League of medieval times. The Hamburg SQL Server user group was composed of people from many different industries, including some huge shipping companies with many large ships. After the user group meeting, a large group of us were able to enjoy a wonderful evening on the Binnenalster (“Inner Alster”) lake where some sort of big festival was taking place (pictured above).
We ate Italian food on a very nice restaurant/house boat right on the Binnenalster. Towards the end of the meal, around 11:00 pm, there was an extraordinary fireworks display right over the lake. What a finally for the evening! (The houseboat is right in front of the church steeple in the picture.)I very much enjoyed the evening there in Hamburg, as well as the day in Munich.
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