This week I got the chance to check out if I could find the bloke that sung "Just one corneto" and I did. He seems to be everywhere in Venice doing his thing in the choppy gondola infested canals and him and his mates are delighted banging out tunes for the in awe tourists. But times have moved on and now he's reinvented himself into a floating 3 piece band, songs in tact, costumes in place but ice-cream no where to be seen! At least not when i was there while the clouds ruled the sky and the rain raised the water levels over the islands many banks.
This time it was work and not pleasure. Well kind of! You can see from the video and a lot of fun was duly had. Monster, the biggest job board in the world were having their European annual conference and I was forunate enough to be asked to attend on behalf of Microsoft in a small group of 40 clients who attended from some of Europe's bigger IT companies like Google, Symantec, Ebay, etc. The event was about watching some presentations, the clients providing some positive and constructive feedback and celebrating a good year and having some fun. It turned out to be a great two days where I met with some fellow recruiters and had a chance to discuss some of our issues and get to know each others businesses a little more. All very generously on Monster's tab.
I didn't get too much of a time to ramble although I couldn't resist taking a taxi boat at 11pm at night with the Google representative, a fellow Irish man, called Dara, leaving our fancy 4 star highly recommended Molino Stucky Hilton hotel and venturing on to the almost deserted main island. My first impression was it's Sevilla or Barrio Gothico in Barcelona except the roads or rivers and their is cool bridges all over the place. The highlights for me where watching some people eating on the rivers flooded banks with water up to their ankles and waiters delivering food in wellies, the Rialto bridge and the impressive Piazzo San Marco. I didn't get a chance to pick up a fridge magnet for my collection but hope to go back again some time, maybe for the mask carnival in March!
