When you become a stay at home mum after years working in a career where you were actually someone with quite an important busy job it can be a bit of a shock. Looking back, managing multimillion pound projects with stakeholders with conflicting requirements actually seemed quite easy in comparison to trying to get a Duracell fuelled two year old to lie still whilst you change a particularly nasty dirty nappy. Even those arguments about conflicting requirements were a piece of cake compared to two children both wanting the same toy.
Back in my working days I would have thought nothing about heading overseas on my own to go to a work conference where I knew no one. But things change and that was then. This is now.
Two weeks ago, partly in an attempt to take my out of my comfort zone and partly to extend myself as a blogger, I waved goodbye to a worried looking Mr C and headed up to Luton airport from where I was catching a flight to Amsterdam to attend my first overseas blogging conference, Meet the Blogger.
Now, I won’t lie, the idea of two nights where I didn’t have to check the baby monitors were on before going to sleep was very very attractive, but I was also interested in seeing what the blogging scene looks like elsewhere and how it compares to the parent blogging scene that I’ve become part of here in the UK. Meet the Blogger advertised itself as being for “interior, design, lifestyle, food, travel, mummy, kids and eco-bloggers/influencers and publishers” so I figured I should fit in. Their working language was English too. Useful seeing as my Dutch is non-existent!
The kick off event for the conference was food and drinks at a local vane called East 57. Now I have to say this place was AMAZING. It’s a weird mix of being a deli, coffee shop, wine bar and restaurant but they served us the most delicious food and it was accompanied by beautifully paired wine. I wish I’d had longer there as it was just such a wonderful place to start my little Amsterdam adventure.
As I stood there with a Dutch gin cocktail in one hand (Dutch courage obviously) and my phone in the other hand (friends providing moral support via twitter) one thing struck me – all I could hear around me was people speaking Dutch. Now arriving somewhere on your own and trying to join in with other groups of people chatting is difficult enough when you all speak the same language. It’s pretty much impossible when they’re speaking a language you don’t understand. Panic hit me and as a result that Dutch gin cocktail didn’t last very long. With a second one in hand I cautiously set off around the room listening carefully for any language I might recognise. Luckily I finally came across two women earnestly chatting away in English and tried to muscle in on their conversation. Even more luckily they both happened to be crochet bloggers! Wink and Nerissa saved me then from a fate with far too much Dutch gin.
When the conference proper started the next morning I at least felt confident that I’d know a couple of people there, and as luck would have it too more Australians came along and I found myself in that unexpected situation of being at a conference in The Netherlands surrounded by three Aussie bloggers (albeit ones that live in Europe right now). But at least it got me over the language problem as it seemed that most of the Dutch delegates I came across all spoke Dutch most of the time, and although the sessions were all supposed to be in English I did need to remind one speaker of this! For now I’ll just overlook that fact that this conference where English was the working language was sponsored by a magazine only published in Dutch…
The conference programme itself puzzled me somewhat. There were some fantastic sessions (in particular the one on the Future of Blogging) which did inspire me and from which I took away quite a bit, but there were also some sessions where to be honest I didn’t understand how it was supposed to be relevant to all the types of blogger that they’d advertised the conference as being for. The hour long keynote by a designer from Trend Union was interesting, but not really relevant to me, or to several of the other bloggers I spoke to. One interior design blogger thought he was amazing and was so pleased to have heard him speak, but admitted that she couldn’t see how that hour would be relevant to a mummy blogger or a travel blogger.
That wasn’t the only session like that though and I’m still trying to get my head round why a session with the following description ended up being about perfume:
Simply Slow is a growing community organizing small gatherings about authentic crafts and pure food. This session will offer you SIMPLE & SLOW REFRESHMENTS. Come be curious, get in touch and leave delighted!
Yes, it was fascinating to learn that the same base smell is in both Chanel No 5 and Persil laundry liquid, but I’m not sure how relevant it really is to my blogging.
Chatting to some of the other people there it seemed that there was certainly confusion from non-design bloggers as to why the programme was set up to be so focussed on their interests, but not to the other bloggers that they had said were in their target audience. Some of them wanted more of the practical blogging sessions that I’ve been lucky enough to attend here in the UK on subjects like YouTube, Pinterest and SEO.
When I got home from the conference, one of the first things Mr C asked me was if it had been worth it. It was a question I’d pondered on the aeroplane home. If I were to answer truthfully on just the conference programme I’d probably say I wasn’t sure it was worth it, but then if I think about all the people I met and spoke to, and the luxury of having 36 hours on my own to think about my blogging and writing and where I want to take it next then yes it definitely was. The session with Katie Searle-Williams, founder of Kinfolk magazine, was a complete lightbulb moment for me work-wise and one that I’ll be visiting again in a separate blog post, but that moment alone made the trip worthwhile.
But where does the kitchen bin fit into all this? Well, one of the Meet the Blogger sponsors was Brabantia, those Dutch people that have managed to make kitchen waste sexy. They were running a little competition whilst there where you could win a bin by sharing a picture on Instagram and using their hashtag. I did that and won. Although, going up onto a stage and being presented with a large kitchen bin that you’re then expected to take home with you there and then seems a little strange at an international conference.
I wasn’t sure trying my luck in getting the Easyjet staff to take it on board was really worth it and having watched someone else on my flight be charged €55 to take the Duty Free she bought at the airport on board I probably made the right decision. Luckily my bin and I were reunited a week later thanks to the Meet the Blogger team and a European courier.
As far as a conference freebie goes though – a new sexy kitchen bin is a pretty good one!
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