The first week of the on AIR Tour Europe is behind us and today we started on the second week with the event in Brussels. The first week by all accounts was a lot of fun and reached a lot of developers. Most of the team is still talking and we’ve only scared a few people away from our train cars.

We started out in Madrid and some of us arrived a day early to get used to the time change and eat some Tapas. Enrique Duvos showed us around Madrid and then gave the keynote in Spanish. The crowd was really great and enthusiastic about everything. Joao Fernandes recorded every single session throughout the day. We also has a very good mix of crowds. We had about half Ajax developers and half Flash/Flex developers. Fernando Comet had a good blog post on the tour. Pictures are here.

The next stop was Paris, France after a huge 13-hour train ride with no power. But after surviving that we ended up with a good crowd and a cool venue in Paris. We were at the old stock exchange and had a huge auditorium. Despite all of the speakers giving their talks in English we got a good reception from Paris. We only had one night in Paris but we had a blogger dinner with some of the bloggers in France (including Fred Cavazza) and then a few of us walked around the Louvre at night and then a smaller few of us caught the last shuttle to the top of the Eifel Tower. Photos here.

The last even of the week was in Amsterdam. There is a great writeup of the event here which breaks down each and every presentation. Despite the fact that it was on a Friday most of the crowd stayed to catch the last session of the day (Lee’s). We got some great questions and I was really impressed with how enthusiastic the Amsterdam developer community is. We had another 50/50 Ajax and Flex/Flash split and I think a lot of the Ajax developers came away impressed with what you can do. Pictures here.

After the event in Amsterdam we spent a weekend in Amsterdam. Some of us got bikes and rode around, some of us went to the Anne Frank museum and we all got together and tried Indonesian food for the first time. It was a good break after a week of non-stop touring and speaking.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 5:15 am and is filed under General.