Time: 00:22:40 CET 15:22:40 PST 18:22:40 EST 07:22:40 Seoul 06:22:40 Beijing
BLOGS
Reason @ lan79
Waking up to a beautiful sunny day, I felt a sudden butterfly swarm inside my stomach, and that was when I realized, I would be leaving for Jon’s house in a few hours, and after that, to lan79 the following morning!
So I packed up, and headed toward the station. The rest of my journey is pretty much self-explanatory, where I ended up at Jon’s house and we waited for ritch and Hughsy to arrive. They arrived a couple of hours later, together, after both inputting the wrong Postcode into their sat nav’s… We then decided to head out and get some tea; we stopped off at a local pizzeria, and got the most enormous pizza I have ever seen for only about £8! (Pic attached). After tea, we headed round to one of Jon’s friends houses, where we watched Ice Age 2 (HDTV) on his HDTV, and I must say I certainly was impressed with the video quality, it truly was so much better than the normal DVD’s. When it finished, we headed back to Jon’s and attempted to get to sleep, me, ritch and hughsy were all in the same room (what a nightmare) and although trying to sleep, it took a good 3hours to do so, since I couldn’t mute ritch and hughsy like I would have in vent! But hey, its lan79 tomorrow, they have something to be excited about!
We woke up the next morning, giving ourselves about 30mins to get to the station after we all got ready. Since Jon was an expert on trains we trusted his advice that we would only need to be there about 15minutes before and would just have to check in and hop on… He was wrong, since it took Henry a good 5hours to get to Jon’s, instead of taking about 3 like it should! We had to show our passports twice, and go through the metal detector too, causing us to miss our train, OH NOES – yeah we were all thinking the same… However it seemed that it was pretty easy to change our tickets to the next train, which surprisingly didn’t cost any extra, so we sorted that and boarded the train. Thus commenced the 3hour journey to Paris, where we had a lot of trouble finding space for our baggage, weird that a train used mainly for holidays has naff all space inside it… But we finally got sat down, and played our favorite game, UNO! This, and sleep got us through the journey and we arrived at Paris at the designated time. Another dilemma occurred, we didn’t take the name of the airport that we needed to be at for the lan79 bus (thought there was only one airport in Paris). So we had to run into Paris and find an internet café, where we checked online and cleared things up. We then caught the subway to ORLY Airport and got to the bus just in time to head to Bocapole! The most annoying part of our journey was about to commence, the extremely uncomfortable coach which was supposed to take *3-4hours * but actually took a staggering 7hours because of traffic. We stopped a couple of times for food/smoke breaks so it took the pain to my knees away for a little while. Unfortunately I don’t seem to have the talent that Jon has for getting to sleep, he seems to close his eyes and that’s it, he’s under. So Jon slept near enough the whole way, and the rest of us were awake and bored out of our skins!
We arrived at the lan at around 3AM, and proceeded in to set up our PC’s, knowing that we had to be up at 7 to get back to the event from our hotel. Low and behold, another problem! Everyone had switched on their PC’s and they were all working fine, except mine; somehow my CPU Fan had fallen off in the journey (ritch can throw his bag around and it works fine whereas careful old me happens to break his) and some of the pins had broke which meant that I couldn’t insert it back into the motherboard. So I told most of the admins my problem but none of them could do anything at that time. After about an hour of worrying we thought we should just head back to the hotel and get some rest, so off we went outside to wait for the taxi and cadge our lift to the hotel. When we got there it was 6AM, so we could all look forward to a good 1hour’s worth of sleep! Yay! Me and Jon got the room for 2, and Henry, Hughsy and ritch took the room for 4. After all, it wasn’t the first time me and Jon have slept in the same bed together! :-). Since we only had 1hour of sleep, we didn’t want to risk sleeping through our alarms, so Jon kindly offered to let me get the hour’s kip while he did whatever he was going to do :E. We had no clue what the others were going to do, probably mess around for an hour!
In came the glaring sunshine through the massive window, my 1hour of sleep was up, and Jon was nudging me to get into the shower, so off I went to get ready for a long tired day ahead! Whilst in the shower, Jon went and rallied the other troops and by the time I was ready, we all were and headed down stairs to catch the taxi back to the event. We arrived at about 8AM to the sound of a chirpy French man of the name ‘Manu’ holding what looked to be a new CPU Cooler in his hand, I jumped with joy as he gave it to me and explained that I would have to give it back at the end of the event, which details I didn’t really care about, as at least now I can play! We went to our PC’s, powered on and signed up for the tournament on the Intranet. Already finding it hard to keep our eyes open, we patiently waited for the tournament to begin. After Henry came back from the team Captains meeting, which lasted an hour, in his Beach get-up (sandals, a t-shirt and ¾ length trousers) on this chilly day (LOL) after about an hour, we were ready to play and got on with the tournament. Our group games were relatively easy, where we just got the wins then left the server - http://www.cssnation.net/index.php?p=coverage&id=1#team_groups. And we were ready for our playoff matches. Our first playoff match was against a French team, unknown to us, and again was a pretty easy victory. Our next game was the one we had been waiting for, the UK grudge match vs r3, we knew we could win this game, but we also knew they would do their best to make it hard for us, and they showed no remorse when taking the first pistol round against us. We, however, didn’t lose confidence and battled on and took the half with ease only dropping one buy round, and were pretty confident going into the Terrorist side of de_inferno. We started the next half and again lost the pistol round, giving them another automatic 2 rounds whilst we were eco, but then we got back in the game and took the needed rounds, again, very easily. We were extremely pleased with this result and were now really looking forward to our next big task, the powerhouse Germans – Alternatte Attax. We played this game with the same confidence, and did extremely well taking the game without much difficulty on de_nuke after we won the T-side 8-7, and then the CT side 8-1. We jumped with joy as we now realized we were finally fulfilling our potential at a LAN. After this it was about 4am and we had time to go get some sleep, so we got a taxi back to the hotel and picked up a nice 3hours of sleep :S before we had to come back for the next game.
Our next task was big, our own bogey team, fnatic… We usually get these guys on train (their best, our worst map) when we play them at LAN, which usually screws us over, we were happy that this time we were given a neutral chance with the map being de_dust2, and looked forward to the game. We played another great game here, winning the first half 9-6, but we just couldn’t gain the needed momentum to take us through to win the game, and it ended up 16-14 to fnatic… We were however very happy with this result, as we knew it surprised many people and the other teams realized that we were up there with a chance among the big guns. We had been knocked down into the Lower bracket and had to face attax again (a chance to prove that it wasn’t a one-off), and we did just that, completely annihilating them with only dropping only 6 rounds, again we jumped for joy and were looking forward to our next match… Until we found out the map, De_train. So we joined up to the server to face another one of the big names (dignitas) on our worst map, train, and begun the game. We lost the first side heavily, 10-5, and were mentally beaten at this point, but we started the next half and were doing extremely well (winning 8-1 at one point) but dignitas managed to get their feet stuck in and hold on to the next few rounds giving them the 16-13 victory. We were unhappy, because we knew we lost some rounds which we could easily have won, but overall we were content with our performance, we had finished 4th place at the biggest European LAN to date, where we were predicted to only scrape the top8. So we went to McDonalds to celebrate, and Jon had lots of fun playing in the kids corner, where he sat in his plastic car :D.
Meanwhile at the event, Jon and Hughsy had been playing in the QPAD 1v1 tournament, and Hughsy managed to get himself 3rd place in the event, gaining some amazing prizes (Intel Core2 Duo E6300 + Motherboard, and lots more) so he was extremely pleased with that, apart from the fact that he couldn’t fit it all in his suitcase, this got me a free pair of wireless headphones though!.
When we got back we picked up our prizes and shoved them all in our bags, and then loaded them into the bus. Now we had the super long journey back to the Airport, but we had lots of sleep to catch up on. So on we got, and off we went, straight away we went to sleep and before we knew it we had arrived at the airport, where we had to wait about 4hours until the metro re-opened so that we could get to the train station and catch the Eurostar back home. This 4hours went fast, where we played Hughsys card game “Scabby Queen”, which basically involved the loser being hit countless times on the knuckled with the deck of cards, and trust me it hurts! After I had lost twice in a row, I knew it was someone else’s turn, and yes it was, everyone racked up a loss except ritch, so we started teasing him about how his turn was next, ritch being the hard man that he is, said to us that it really didn’t hurt him, and we could all have 10go’s each, we were delighted! And proceeded to smash ritch’s knuckles in until they were red-raw and throbbing. One of the highlights of the whole lan was seeing ritch’s face after he got to the 20th hit and realized what he had got himself into :D. Time passed quickly and we were ready to board our metro and go to the station. We arrived at the station with about 25minutes to spare so ran to the Eurostar and managed to make it on just in time and set off back to En-ger-land. After a lovely 3hour journey we arrived in Waterloo and Hughsy and ritch parted ways with us to find their lift home, while me Henry and Jon went back to Jons. After putting our bags away, we helped Jon put together his new Conroe setup (whilst sleeping for a little while) and then went out for dinner at the same pizza place. When we got back Henry decided he was going to drive home so we bidded each other fairwell. Me and Jon could look forward to going to see Spiderman 3 at the Cinema the next day (although we wouldn’t have if we knew how bad it was going to be). After Spiderman I raced to Kings Cross and caught my train, then car, and got set up for the Logitech match which was in half an hour! After the Logitech match I crawled into my bed and got some much needed sleep.
Overall lan79 was excellent, apart from the language barrier and sleep depravation we had no concerns at all, I think I speak for the whole team when I say we really enjoyed it, and look forward to next years version!
By Tom 'url-' Chenery
May 12, 2007 01:36
Waking up to a beautiful sunny day, I felt a sudden butterfly swarm inside my stomach, and that was when I realized, I would be leaving for Jon’s house in a few hours, and after that, to lan79 the following morning!
So I packed up, and headed toward the station. The rest of my journey is pretty much self-explanatory, where I ended up at Jon’s house and we waited for ritch and Hughsy to arrive. They arrived a couple of hours later, together, after both inputting the wrong Postcode into their sat nav’s… We then decided to head out and get some tea; we stopped off at a local pizzeria, and got the most enormous pizza I have ever seen for only about £8! (Pic attached). After tea, we headed round to one of Jon’s friends houses, where we watched Ice Age 2 (HDTV) on his HDTV, and I must say I certainly was impressed with the video quality, it truly was so much better than the normal DVD’s. When it finished, we headed back to Jon’s and attempted to get to sleep, me, ritch and hughsy were all in the same room (what a nightmare) and although trying to sleep, it took a good 3hours to do so, since I couldn’t mute ritch and hughsy like I would have in vent! But hey, its lan79 tomorrow, they have something to be excited about!
We woke up the next morning, giving ourselves about 30mins to get to the station after we all got ready. Since Jon was an expert on trains we trusted his advice that we would only need to be there about 15minutes before and would just have to check in and hop on… He was wrong, since it took Henry a good 5hours to get to Jon’s, instead of taking about 3 like it should! We had to show our passports twice, and go through the metal detector too, causing us to miss our train, OH NOES – yeah we were all thinking the same… However it seemed that it was pretty easy to change our tickets to the next train, which surprisingly didn’t cost any extra, so we sorted that and boarded the train. Thus commenced the 3hour journey to Paris, where we had a lot of trouble finding space for our baggage, weird that a train used mainly for holidays has naff all space inside it… But we finally got sat down, and played our favorite game, UNO! This, and sleep got us through the journey and we arrived at Paris at the designated time. Another dilemma occurred, we didn’t take the name of the airport that we needed to be at for the lan79 bus (thought there was only one airport in Paris). So we had to run into Paris and find an internet café, where we checked online and cleared things up. We then caught the subway to ORLY Airport and got to the bus just in time to head to Bocapole! The most annoying part of our journey was about to commence, the extremely uncomfortable coach which was supposed to take *3-4hours * but actually took a staggering 7hours because of traffic. We stopped a couple of times for food/smoke breaks so it took the pain to my knees away for a little while. Unfortunately I don’t seem to have the talent that Jon has for getting to sleep, he seems to close his eyes and that’s it, he’s under. So Jon slept near enough the whole way, and the rest of us were awake and bored out of our skins!
We arrived at the lan at around 3AM, and proceeded in to set up our PC’s, knowing that we had to be up at 7 to get back to the event from our hotel. Low and behold, another problem! Everyone had switched on their PC’s and they were all working fine, except mine; somehow my CPU Fan had fallen off in the journey (ritch can throw his bag around and it works fine whereas careful old me happens to break his) and some of the pins had broke which meant that I couldn’t insert it back into the motherboard. So I told most of the admins my problem but none of them could do anything at that time. After about an hour of worrying we thought we should just head back to the hotel and get some rest, so off we went outside to wait for the taxi and cadge our lift to the hotel. When we got there it was 6AM, so we could all look forward to a good 1hour’s worth of sleep! Yay! Me and Jon got the room for 2, and Henry, Hughsy and ritch took the room for 4. After all, it wasn’t the first time me and Jon have slept in the same bed together! :-). Since we only had 1hour of sleep, we didn’t want to risk sleeping through our alarms, so Jon kindly offered to let me get the hour’s kip while he did whatever he was going to do :E. We had no clue what the others were going to do, probably mess around for an hour!
In came the glaring sunshine through the massive window, my 1hour of sleep was up, and Jon was nudging me to get into the shower, so off I went to get ready for a long tired day ahead! Whilst in the shower, Jon went and rallied the other troops and by the time I was ready, we all were and headed down stairs to catch the taxi back to the event. We arrived at about 8AM to the sound of a chirpy French man of the name ‘Manu’ holding what looked to be a new CPU Cooler in his hand, I jumped with joy as he gave it to me and explained that I would have to give it back at the end of the event, which details I didn’t really care about, as at least now I can play! We went to our PC’s, powered on and signed up for the tournament on the Intranet. Already finding it hard to keep our eyes open, we patiently waited for the tournament to begin. After Henry came back from the team Captains meeting, which lasted an hour, in his Beach get-up (sandals, a t-shirt and ¾ length trousers) on this chilly day (LOL) after about an hour, we were ready to play and got on with the tournament. Our group games were relatively easy, where we just got the wins then left the server - http://www.cssnation.net/index.php?p=coverage&id=1#team_groups. And we were ready for our playoff matches. Our first playoff match was against a French team, unknown to us, and again was a pretty easy victory. Our next game was the one we had been waiting for, the UK grudge match vs r3, we knew we could win this game, but we also knew they would do their best to make it hard for us, and they showed no remorse when taking the first pistol round against us. We, however, didn’t lose confidence and battled on and took the half with ease only dropping one buy round, and were pretty confident going into the Terrorist side of de_inferno. We started the next half and again lost the pistol round, giving them another automatic 2 rounds whilst we were eco, but then we got back in the game and took the needed rounds, again, very easily. We were extremely pleased with this result and were now really looking forward to our next big task, the powerhouse Germans – Alternatte Attax. We played this game with the same confidence, and did extremely well taking the game without much difficulty on de_nuke after we won the T-side 8-7, and then the CT side 8-1. We jumped with joy as we now realized we were finally fulfilling our potential at a LAN. After this it was about 4am and we had time to go get some sleep, so we got a taxi back to the hotel and picked up a nice 3hours of sleep :S before we had to come back for the next game.
Our next task was big, our own bogey team, fnatic… We usually get these guys on train (their best, our worst map) when we play them at LAN, which usually screws us over, we were happy that this time we were given a neutral chance with the map being de_dust2, and looked forward to the game. We played another great game here, winning the first half 9-6, but we just couldn’t gain the needed momentum to take us through to win the game, and it ended up 16-14 to fnatic… We were however very happy with this result, as we knew it surprised many people and the other teams realized that we were up there with a chance among the big guns. We had been knocked down into the Lower bracket and had to face attax again (a chance to prove that it wasn’t a one-off), and we did just that, completely annihilating them with only dropping only 6 rounds, again we jumped for joy and were looking forward to our next match… Until we found out the map, De_train. So we joined up to the server to face another one of the big names (dignitas) on our worst map, train, and begun the game. We lost the first side heavily, 10-5, and were mentally beaten at this point, but we started the next half and were doing extremely well (winning 8-1 at one point) but dignitas managed to get their feet stuck in and hold on to the next few rounds giving them the 16-13 victory. We were unhappy, because we knew we lost some rounds which we could easily have won, but overall we were content with our performance, we had finished 4th place at the biggest European LAN to date, where we were predicted to only scrape the top8. So we went to McDonalds to celebrate, and Jon had lots of fun playing in the kids corner, where he sat in his plastic car :D.
Meanwhile at the event, Jon and Hughsy had been playing in the QPAD 1v1 tournament, and Hughsy managed to get himself 3rd place in the event, gaining some amazing prizes (Intel Core2 Duo E6300 + Motherboard, and lots more) so he was extremely pleased with that, apart from the fact that he couldn’t fit it all in his suitcase, this got me a free pair of wireless headphones though!.
When we got back we picked up our prizes and shoved them all in our bags, and then loaded them into the bus. Now we had the super long journey back to the Airport, but we had lots of sleep to catch up on. So on we got, and off we went, straight away we went to sleep and before we knew it we had arrived at the airport, where we had to wait about 4hours until the metro re-opened so that we could get to the train station and catch the Eurostar back home. This 4hours went fast, where we played Hughsys card game “Scabby Queen”, which basically involved the loser being hit countless times on the knuckled with the deck of cards, and trust me it hurts! After I had lost twice in a row, I knew it was someone else’s turn, and yes it was, everyone racked up a loss except ritch, so we started teasing him about how his turn was next, ritch being the hard man that he is, said to us that it really didn’t hurt him, and we could all have 10go’s each, we were delighted! And proceeded to smash ritch’s knuckles in until they were red-raw and throbbing. One of the highlights of the whole lan was seeing ritch’s face after he got to the 20th hit and realized what he had got himself into :D. Time passed quickly and we were ready to board our metro and go to the station. We arrived at the station with about 25minutes to spare so ran to the Eurostar and managed to make it on just in time and set off back to En-ger-land. After a lovely 3hour journey we arrived in Waterloo and Hughsy and ritch parted ways with us to find their lift home, while me Henry and Jon went back to Jons. After putting our bags away, we helped Jon put together his new Conroe setup (whilst sleeping for a little while) and then went out for dinner at the same pizza place. When we got back Henry decided he was going to drive home so we bidded each other fairwell. Me and Jon could look forward to going to see Spiderman 3 at the Cinema the next day (although we wouldn’t have if we knew how bad it was going to be). After Spiderman I raced to Kings Cross and caught my train, then car, and got set up for the Logitech match which was in half an hour! After the Logitech match I crawled into my bed and got some much needed sleep.
Overall lan79 was excellent, apart from the language barrier and sleep depravation we had no concerns at all, I think I speak for the whole team when I say we really enjoyed it, and look forward to next years version!
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