It was a real privilege to be asked to be keynote speaker at the revamped SAOUG, and it was a real whirlwind trip! When they asked and said it was end of October, I checked my calendar and thought, that’s great, then once I had made the commitment, I turned the page and realised I had to be in Dallas for a meeting early on the 1st November. But I had made the commitment and "Commitment is doing the things you said you'd do, long after the mood you said it in has left you" Bear Grylls.
The flights to South Africa are overnight both ways so I flew Saturday arriving early morning and Tony Cook from FudgeLearn collected me. As my friends know I am not good as a car passenger (blog on my travel woes) and I am a bit nervous about the reputation of public transport in SA. I saw Tony on the agenda so reached out on the off chance he was on my flight and we could travel together but he has a team in SA and was already there but would have someone to pick me up. When I cane through passport control, there he was. A great welcome, thankyou Tony, and to your colleague who drove us.
The event was at Misty Hills outside of Johannesburg, I have been there before with Dina Blaschczok who was the first person to host me in South Africa. The location has an amazing restaurant Carnivore which `I didn’t have time to eat in this visit but highly recommend.
The event kicked off with a dinner for those there the night before the conference and it was great to meet people and learn a little bit about what they were using Oracle first.
South Africa has something called ‘Load Reduction’ with planned power cuts, but in all my visits what I have learnt is that power cuts come unannounced and hopefully your hotel has a generator. This hotel did but for power cuts after 11pm they don’t use generator until 5am and my biggest 1st world worry is that my phone goes dead, so it was always plugged in. Obviously locals are used to this, and when the power went off the first time (happened 4 times in the 50 hours I was there), everyone just carries on chatting and wait for that generator to kick in which is about 10 minutes. That included the band at the gala dinner who were cut off half way through a song.
I got to meet lots of amazing people but one that was really exciting was meeting a colleague of my ODTUG mentee. Kim Kannemeyer from Brovanture.
On the final day, I had hoped to stay till the end but British Airways bought my flight forward and along side the city traffic, took the opportunity to have a lift back to the airport with the SAOUG super volunteer Daniel Robus, who was the event MC.
And there it was, just 2 1/2 hours in South Africa for every hour flown. But worth it.
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