Busy busy busy. It beats death as an alternative, perhaps, but not much else.
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After our little pancakes, once again we walked the various venues, getting peeks at what advance set ups we could, and again touched bases with both hotel staffs. We also found one of the conference company directors, and got out of him what we could, but basically the core of the local team was not yet on-site and generally not inclined to communicate with us until they were.
By lunch, Aqua City, the monster retail borg-like megaplex adjacent to the Nikko Hotel, was open, so we headed over. We walked over along the waterfront rather than via the heavily traveled bridges, and enjoyed what we could of the view. The theme of that section of the development was definitely New Yorkian, replete with Central Park-esque landscaping, a very detailed miniature Statue of Liberty, and in the background, a huge bridge spanning Tokyo Bay that looked remarkably like huge bridges in Manhattan.
One big difference, of course, was the cherry blossoms, no longer in peak bloom but beautiful nonetheless.
We ate at a Japanese restaurant (natch) that specialized in a dish I'd never seen before. Mostly shredded lettuce in a bowl, topped with an egg and some meat, mixed and fried at the table into an almost solid blackened patty. Then something like mayo and something like tonkatsu sauce is spread on top of it like cake frosting, and we eat it with little narrow spatulas and forks.
We got to hook up with more and more people as the day progressed, as the local coordinators and their conference company staff started arriving en force. (The first three days of our meeting is internal business, and thus our chaos begins a few days before the glizy "public portion" which starts tomorrow afternoon.) But, basically, most of the key people were still operating out of their headquarters in central Tokyo. We pounded away on a small number of key points, getting a few answers, and generally bided our time until the rest of my coworkers to arrive to plot our next steps.
The team landed shortly after 5:30 p.m., and they were greeted with a note from David and I regarding the first "pre con" meeting scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Just as they were about to kill us, we received word that our colleagues wanted to delay until 8:30 or so.
So they dumped their stuff, and we headed back to Aqua City for dinner. We ate at Pietro, a restaurant so much like Angelo Pietro's in Honolulu I swear they were one and the same. David and I brought them up to speed on what was done to date, which wasn't as much as we'd hoped. We then got word the meeting was pushed back again to 9:30.
Suffice it to say, we got started late, and the meeting ran past midnight. On the list of things to discuss, after all, was everything. And as we reviewed the program minute by minute, we covered only half the first day in two hours of discussions. We resolved, given that most of our team was still just off the plane from Honolulu, to pick up again this morning at 9 a.m.
The morning meeting started even later, difficult as it was to bring together managers from several different offices together at the same time, and many of us missed separate planning meetings with others as a result. We hit more than a few significant snags, and ended up giving up the meticulous program run-through and going instead for a specific list of questions we'd prepared over the last few weeks. Fortunately, there were answers for most of them, although for some, substantial work remains.
We have some hope, though, as many of these points don't come into play until the big doors open Sunday afternoon. Right now, we figured, was administrative meetings, and we've always run them, and for those we were worried more about the substance discussed than the logistical issues (which some of us could manage with our eyes closed). Internal stuff also takes place in the Nikko, and of the two hotels, it's the one we get along best with.
Administrative meetings kicked off at 5 p.m. as expected, which went as well as expected given some of the challenging issues facing our organization and our office specifically, and the day was capped off with a dinner that, amazingly, we lowly staff actually got to enjoy (after everyone else was finished, of course). We worked together to assemble materials for tomorrow — we collated until we were literally dizzy — and we called it a night a few minutes before midnight.
Anyway. I'm going to turn off Space Shower TV and go to bed now. Three days to go. We have all our limbs. So far a good chance of survival, albeit with a few bruises.
Based on handwritten notes collected Saturday, April 7, 2001, finally reconstituted and posted after considerable delay.
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