Whew what a day!
We had breakfast in our room before heading off to face day one proper of the MACNA conference. First up we went to hear Tony Vargas do the welcome speech, after which we spoke to him finally after some year or more of Pete interacting with him on FB., nice bloke :-)
We took our first peek around the displays, so much here and so many freebies thrown at all of us.
We went to hear talks by Matt Wittenrich, Sanjay Joshi, Vincent Chalias and Terrance Fugazzi. We're both now suffering info overload lol
Between all those we what back through the other displays, saw some awesome corals and checked out some innovative equipment. We got to chat properly to the guys from tanked and got a pic with them.
Back in our room between the end of the day in the display area and the function tonight we surveyed our booty, we might need an extra suitcase to get it all home at this rate lol
The evening was awesome. All included in our all inclusive ticket we had a buffet dinner by the water, two drinks each incl and there was a bit of a show. There were some street style performers who came out as mermaids, a pair of lobsters, a fire twirler chicky and a couple of women dressed as some sort of non determined sea dwelling creature. People (mostly men lol) queued up to get pics with them, they did look awesome.
There was a really cool calypso band which was later replaced by a disco DJ blasting forth from the night club which from the look of it was poorly attended. We spent fair bit of time talking to Marc Levenson who was hilarious, could've had something to do with the levels of alcohol he'd consumed lol and had a quick chat with Chingchai.
Te crowd thinned so we headed back to our room about 11.30pm, got changed and went for a swim in one of the pools here to freshen up.