One Night in Paris

The daystarted at 8amwhen our three alarmclocks went off with 10seconds between them, making it absolutely impossible to snooze them allwithout waking up. After a quick shower we realized that the shops did not opentill after 9, so no breakfast for us. We then went to the room where theXplayN.com guys are staying and went with them to find a better way to theevent location, as our legs did not feel like walking a centimeter more. Wequickly found that the bus was near optimal, and after 1.40 euro, and 10minutes we were at the Palaise Omnisport, first thing we spotted was the Danishguys from Played.dk sitting in the sun. After a brief talk they explained thatthey had arrived at 9amto be sure to get in first, but they were toldto wait till 10am, but 10amcame and went and after 30 minutesin the line without getting told what was going on, we were all getting a bitannoyed. So was the Gotfrag staff, who were standing right behind us, and theGermans from Blank. Finally at around 10:45things started moving, and fromthere it was smooth sailing, we went right in and got our press cards, andcould then look at a press area with at least 40 computers, all for us! We thenquickly got the 1^stentry of the diary and the first picturesuploaded. The net was up and down a lot in the start, but after a few hours itbecame rock stable, and with great speeds, excellent!

We thenquickly realized that nothing at all would happen before 16:30where Nvidia was throwing a pressconference, so we got comfortable with the computers, and got a bite to eat. Wealso got a hold of our shirts. Micha from Freaks4u was so kind to bring them toParisfor us. Pictures of the shirts areavailable in our “Day 2” gallery. Wethen went to see a rather dull Nvidia press conference where they talked expensiveSLI stuff for the new Intel Core 2 Duo’s, all stuff mere mortals cannot afford.Soon after the conference the opening ceremony started, with a lot of loudmusic, and a really cool movie showing of the past events. A few French guysthen said a lot of unimportant stuff. Afterwards the last seeds for the competitionswere drawn. You can see the final groups on the HLTV.org event page.

After theopening ceremony there was food and something to drink. After drinking onESWC’s expense we went back down to our computer and started preparing the HLTVcoverage for Friday. We then quickly realized that we were to be out of thehall at 10pm, which was a tad too soon for our liking, luckily we agreed ongetting in earlier tomorrow to get the last things done before the matchesstarted. We then went to grab a bite to eat, and after eating a pizzaconsisting mainly of cheese we went to get back on the bus and back to ourhotel. To our great annoyance the busses had stopped running for the night, soour only option was walking.. again. This time we decided on taking the road wethought might be shortest, and we finally had a little luck, and actuallymanaged to find a ‘short’ route, yay!

All in all,the day was pretty successful, and we met a lot of nice guys from the othersites around the world. And we got most of the HLTV sorted. Things also lookedto be working very well, so we are all looking forward to tomorrow which will(hopefully) run without much delay.

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