At the Girl Geek Dinner on Thursday night I was surprised to see Peter DeBetta there! He is in London working on a contract and had been told about the GGD by our mutual friend, Rachel Hawley from Red Gate.
I had plans to spend the day with Dave Sussman the next day (now yesterday) and Peter and Dave actually wrote a book together years ago and are pals. But Peter didn't know that Dave was going to make the 1 1/2 hour journey into town.
Dave and I spent the day doing some fun touristy things. Walking through Hyde Park. Seeing the Albert memorial and the Royal Albert Hall.
We wandered the halls of the Victoria and Albert museum, then over to Big Ben and Trafalgar Square.
At the end of the day we went to Covent Gardens and met up with Peter and two guys from Wintellect who he's working with, Steve and Sergio. Dinner was at a very fun Belgian restaurant called Belgo Centraal. And of course it was very geeky talk about .NET, Silverlight, WCF, EF and more. (even VB6). This was after I got the usual ribbing about being a VB programmer. ;-)
Sergio, Peter, Dave and Steve.
I'm a whimpy beer drinker so I had a little half pint of Belgian Wheat beer. Here's my beer surrounded by the real beer drinker's glasses!
We all had classic Belgian dinners of steamed mussels and frites. Followed by the yummiest chocolate cheesecake (more like a mousse in fact) that I can ever recall eating.
Today will be more tourism. I discovered that there's a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Tate so I'm going to see that with Michael Foord (co-author of Iron Python in Action) and his wife, Delia. We may even take a ride on the London Eye for a spectacular view of the city.
