Eve Fanfest 2005 (Incomplete Blog)

So the story of the Eve Fanfest 2005 definitely deserves it’s own blog entry!

Things started on Monday evening before the fanfest with me ‘popping’ around to DG’s for a few hours to surf the net, have dinner etc. Two days, a bag of skunk and some Gregg’s cheese and onion pasties later I managed to get up to go into work for about an hour on Wednesday!

I stopped off on the way home from work on Wednesday to stock up on the essentials for a long weekend in a new drinking location!… a new digital camera, an iPod Nano and a long sleeved England football T-Shirt! DG and I then drove to Heathrow on Wednesday afternoon and got in a good 3 hours of speculation during the drive about geekfests, Eve plans, BNC/BoB strategy etc…

Despite the fact that the long stay car park at Heathrow appears to have been built in Spain it’s that far from the bloody terminals we arrived in good time and met SkaffenAmtiskaw by the Iceland Air desk. Several book purchases and of course a couple of Economics/Business monthly’s, so I at least attempt to pretend I am a grown up(!), we proceeded to the bar in true BNC style.

For some reason it was apparently the CEO’s responsibility to provide the drinks at the start of our little adventure so off I trotted to get in two pints of lager (for DG and I) and a pint of bitter for Skaff. Strange that the two professed northerners were drinking pints of San Miguel whilst the southern jessy was drinking Courage’s Directors Bitter, Skaff obviously feels he needs to prove a point drinking a solid northern bloke’s drink whilst DG and I are comfortable in our Yorkshire-chic approach to lager drinking!

Amusingly we’d been sat down for about half a pint (time after all being best measured in volumes of beer or the mysterious ‘beard’ e.g. “I’ve been waiting about 2 pints for you” or “I haven’t seen you in beards”… but I digress…) when a couple sat at the table behind us and might as well have had “We Play Eve” tattooed across their foreheads! Turned out the lad had met Skaff before at a London Eve get together and was actually in Geeklab, for those who don’t know it Geeklab and BNC have a very long and chequered past – we really don’t like them (see one of my earliest blogs about my story in Eve to find out why!). Like any other arch enemy from Eve they were of course perfectly nice people so DG wouldn’t let me gank the guy in public! I’d have taken great pleasure in bogwashing an Geeklab pilot for real though :D

Three pints and the usual take off delays later we were happily sipping champagne on the plane all three of us with iPods plugged in and Skaff handing around drunken teamspeak recordings for our airborne entertainment. The recording of Rohann’s brother (or whoever it really was) on teamspeak remains as funny today as it was back then! Funnily enough sat directly in front of the three of us were about 10 girls whose sporting kit all bore the label “Canarie Islands Netball Team” (well pretty much that but in Spanish of course!). I think we quickly came to the conclusion that 7’ tall girls with mustaches and adam’s apples were not attractive no matter what sport they play!

Landing in Iceland we collected our bags and walked out into the airport to be met by a guy in a BNC baseball cap with ‘Hegemon’ printed on it, Hege looking pretty much exactly as I expected him to and was exactly as laid back as I expected. So we’ve only just landed, it’s still two days before the fanfest proper was due to start and we have four BNC together in Iceland – looking good!

We also met a young guy working as a porter at the airport who apparently played Eve and when questioned admitted that he was from Imperium! Yay, our first encounter with someone who should hate us for wtfpwning them in game!! We chuckled as he told us he’d lived in the Outer Ring until recently, I wonder why on earth he moved out ;) Only later in the weekend did I discover that was actually Zelota, a well known Xirt fanboi and maker of many utterly terrible Eve movies!

Skaffen headed for the bus to his hotel, the Nordica and we trundled off in Hege’s little hire car into Reykjavik as he told us everything we needed to know about tourist life in Iceland i.e. it’s very quiet, fairly easy to navigate around, everyone speaks English and you need to re-mortgage your house to buy a beer!

The hotel was a comical experience as we pulled into the car park on the wrong side of the hotel and for a few minutes I could have sworn the place was actually closed! Finding our way inside and waving Hege off, it was getting late and he stayed at a different hotel, DG and I checked in and went up to our room to discover to our dismay…. it had a double bed!! After several comments along the lines of “we might be family but we sure as hell aren’t that close” we managed to get a change of rooms to one with two single beds but in another moment of comedy the hotel had lost the key to our new room, so let us in with the master key and had to get another one cut to give us after breakfast!

The morning of the first day DG and I got up, had breakfast, got our room key, sussed out the wireless internet in the hotel on my laptop and then wandered into town. We had a wander around the city centre, the docks and then down towards the fanfest venue. Hege found us wandering about down there about 2 hours before registration for the fanfest was due to start so we jumped in his car and went to find Skaff.

Skaff had a carebear in tow that he’d met at his hotel, so we picked them both up as they wandered along the sea road in Reykjavik and went into town to find a bar for food and beer. So began our four day relationship with Nelly’s bar a very pleasant and apparently cheap by Icelandic standards bar in the centre of town. Naturally we hit the beer immediately and then after a few pints wandered down to another bar in search of food (this second bar was the information centre for the Iceland Airwaves festival and was next door to Pravda, I can’t remember the name of the place, so I’ll just call it the Airwaves bar from now on!). We sat drinking beers, eating lunch and forum whoring on Skaff’s wireless Mac (half of Iceland seems to have free wireless internet!) for another hour or two before deciding we were ready for the fanfest i.e. were half cut!

We strolled down to the fanfest venue to get ourselves registered, pick up our wristbands, generally check the place out and have more beer. Quite a lot of people had turned up to register on the Thursday despite the fact that the fanfest proper didn’t start until Friday.

..... might finish this one day and include the bit how I managed to throw up in Minmatar alley during the first proper day of the fanfest due to the first day/night's boozin' session) just as Oveur walks past with about 10 other Eve players in tow and I'm wiping snot, tears and vomit from my face.... very embarassing!