Last night everybody met up at the official Meet N Greet party. It feels more like a family reunion than a competition about to start. It was great to see so many friendly faces (and there’s too many for me to mention them all). Of course the Nordic countries are over-represented, but we also have visitors from Colombia – three people who I met yesterday at Kaffismidjan. One of them is a farmer, and showed me some incredible pictures of his farm and coffee lab. There’s also a lot of familiar faces from the US. Jay from Intelligentsia is here with his girlfriend, Bronwen (US Barista Champ 2004) is here as a volunteer. Mike Philips (also Intelly) is present and I met Liz Clayton for the first time yesterday. Many of these people already feels strangely familiar because of the strong internet community, but I look forward to getting to know them all better.

Right now I’ve packed my bags and are heading down to the art museum where todays event will take place. we have to bring our luggage, because at 1700 hours we’ll be leaving Reykjavik and go stay in huts !! Somewhere in the countryside…

The NBC is usually kind of a crazy event and the Icelanders are know to ‘think outside the box’, so I’m looking forward to see what we’ll be doing out there. I know there’s a pool party and Barbeque, but have no clue why they’ve stressed to bring warm and rain proof clothes.

For the same reason I don’t dare to bring my computer along, so you’ll have to wait for pictures and such until I get back. I will Twitter from my iPhone though and of course you all have Ken and Sarah blogging the whole thing.