Today is Day 2 in Orlando. As you can see, I’m kind of going to do a mini travel blog about this working trip to Orlando for the Cisco Live conference. I flew in to Orlando with a colleague. We did some shopping on Day 1. On Day 2, we went to SeaWorld, and in the evening did more shopping.
SeaWorld, in short, wasn’t as great as I had imagined it to be. There were not enough rides. I guess perhaps SeaWorld isn’t about rides. Wrong expectations. The exhibits of the stingrays, dolphins, and in particular, the Wild Artic walkthrough, were great. The Dolphin show was great, although perhaps half the show wasn’t about dolphins. It rained, at times quite heavily, while we were at SeaWorld. We were drenched and it made moving around the park a little inconvenient during the rain. It rained yesterday too (which made our moving around at the Premium One Outlets rather inconvenient (it was mostly unsheltered between the shops).
When it doesn’t rain, it’s actually pretty hot. The weather here doesn’t seem very different from Singapore.
A nice thing I’ve noticed here is that the people are generally quite friendly and willing to strike up conversations. A cashier at SeaWorld who chatted with us was quite delighted to learn we were from Singapore, because that’s where she came from too. The SQ staff who attended to us at Orlando airport spent some time talking about N95s, iPhones, and phones in general. Then, there were the ticketing staff at Florida Mall who sold us our park tickets, helped us save substantially from the gate prices.
I certainly hope the people at Cisco Live would be quite chatty with strangers too. In the past Networkers (in Australia), I find that most attendees already have their large cliques or networking groups. When a few (or one) loner attends these sort of events, it is usually not terribly easy to find company. The people are not unfriendly of course, but you know, the atmosphere I feel is not as warm as it could be.
We’ll be hopping over to the convention centre to register early. I expect to be impressed by the magnitude of the event. There are currently over 11K “active participants” on its social networking portal. I have figured that “active participants” does not include registered conference attendees who have yet to login to the social networking portal. So actual number of people at the conference would be even more. Oh and they’ll bring us to Universal for the main social evening activity!
Next: Disney’s Magic Kingdom
Seaworld is a wonderful place but as you say not packed with rides, a nice place to walk around and take at a slower place than other theme parks. The Convention Center is a huge but very impressive place!