As far as you probably know, just before Milan we visited Moscow hero-city, where we managed to meet legendary Anry and his team, passed through negotiations in Deluxe Interactive (quite successfully), one more time met Ivan Dembicki and his guys from NeoQB discussing current projects, and spent a night at Red Keds office, during their crazy party, discussing common future plans.

After three days stay in Moscow you begin to have trouble with militia we finally got into new aeroflot airbus and teleported to the heel of Italy.

Artemy and Vladimir from Flexis joined us on board a plane and then shared a lot of funny minutes with us, so thank them very much.

Italy met us with a milky fog, and a pilot even had to push the brake on a runway because of suddenly appeared another plane close to us. The road from Malpenza to destination point was filled with foggy sightseeing throught the bus window.

Fiera Milano exhibition centre is unbelievable — this is a huge anthropogenic complex five metro station away from the center of Milan. Here are a lot of parking places, a lot of halls with few events taking place at the same time, and a lot of other stuff. We even got to some fashion exhibition by misleading our way one time. There are a lot of hotels in the area, that is very useful for attendees not to mess with the transportation issues around.

Now it is popular to host small specialized parties just before big events, and Adobe MAX Europe 2008 followed that good tradition. After a registration, having our badges worn, we got to FlexCamp, where we saw a lot of people already discussing latest development issues and sharing their thoughts on the future of Flex. We especially liked very well structured and performed FDT presentation, at the end of which Michael Plank made cool live speedcoding show, recreating the whole presentation project from scratch. Good job!

Meanwhile, the preparations in halls were about to be finished, and people were arriving to get their registration before tomorrow morning rush, and there were even some free stuff given away already.

After attending a couple of sessions, meeting with guys from sMeet game, and asking some hard questions “about Flash 10 coming to mobiles” to Adobe bosses, we departured to get our dinner. Pasta was fantastic, and local dry red wine became a great finishing chord to our first day in Italy.

Tomorrow: opening ceremony, first meetings, competitors session, unofficial Flash 3D beer party.