Bencham’s new child

Last night Bencham (Benelux Chamber of Commerce) organized a new event: Young Professionals Network.

The event has been “created” to serve the growing crowd of young(-ish) people that are part of the Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg community. What the organizers want to do with it exactly, they also don’t know yet, as they were asking for input from the attending crowd.

That is probably also the reason for their brilliant and original choice of name for the event…

This first event was generously hosted by the Dutch Embassy, therefore free and therefore also quite a big turn-out of around 90 people.

The speaker was an old-hand, being in China already for many many years, but his speech was utterly boring. The idea was that he would inform his audience about all his experiences working for and with different companies and organizations throughout the years. As Ilse put it nicely: “who talks about his own life for more than an hour, by reading from sheets of paper?”

The Q&A at the end of the hour was actually the most interesting of it all, as they also let others answer the questions asked.

After that the networking started with lots of booze and delicious finger food prepared by the ever enthusiastic kitchen staff of the Embassy. Naturally some people asked me whether it was me who organized this event…yeah with a name like that, I cannot blame them…

At 10pm sharp we were kicked out and of course everyone went to the Tree for some more “gezelligheid” (dutch word which cannot really be translated, fun will have to do)!

Their next event will see Bettine Vriesekoop as speaker and we have decided to go there if only to ask her the reason why she still hasn’t approved the comments I made on her blog in October last year (see previous blog entry).