Monday: Rendezvous Day 1

The first activity, on the morning of Monday 18^th June was the opening ceremony. It occurred in the Conrad Grand Ballroom with 820 proberians in the audience. The ceremony involved some generally interesting and informative speeches, some blue jokes from the MC and some entertainment from students from a local school. I have a somewhat jaundiced view of the latest crop of teenagers, but the students who performed were very talented. Two of them sang the Flower Duet by Delibe. A fiendishly difficult piece that they handled very well.

The brochure advertised lunch following the opening ceremony and Margaret and I had discussed this. We thought that there would be tables of finger food with hundreds of people crowded around the tables, and had thought that we would give it a miss and find somewhere quiet to have lunch. How mistaken were we as we were about to experience the first of five culliary tours de force.

At the end of the meeting we were all directed to one of three locations for lunch. Margaret and I went to the closest one to us and found a large room with long tables groaning with soup, salad and meat rolls, deserts and tea and coffee. There were a large number of tables where we could sit and eat lunch.

The afternoon was free for relaxing and sight seeing. In the evening was another dinner – the Welcome Dinner. We had not booked for this much to our disappointment when we heard reports of it the next day.

That evening I took the picture of the hotel casino. You can see the monorail in the foreground.