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Amazon has a yearly party celebrating the hard work of their employees; there are usually free drinks, live entertainment, music, dancing, and food—this year was no different.  When Alex & I arrived we received our “drink vouchers” which allowed you to use the open bar, and checked our coats in.  We started walking around and immediately I saw two acrobats starting a routine in front of us where a very small woman was hoisted up and flung around like a rag doll by a very large man.  It goes without saying that I was already impressed.  And that was when we saw the food.

They served some spinach quiche thing, salmon, meatballs, cheese & crackers and all kinds of assorted finger foods.  As if the wide variety of food wasn’t impressive enough, they displayed that they knew who they were catering for when I spotted the large bin of TATER TOTS at the end of it all.  Needless to say, a large line formed whenever fresh tots were made available.  After shoveling party goodies into my mouth, I made my way around and saw this woman serving cupcakes.  It was wild.  She made you whatever kind of cupcake you wanted, along will all the usual accoutrement; oh yeah, cupcakes made to order, and did I mention that she was serving them on the run because this cupcake station was built into her outfit?

Obviously this was the best thing that had been conceived since the wheel so I snapped a few thousand photos of her, none of which came out well since I was also trying to eat a cupcake and hold my food and drink.  But hey, what can a man do when he fleetingly sees the coolest invention ever, and then is forced to decide between documenting it and eating and drinking?  Beyond the women in cupcake serving outfits, lots of “peculiarly” dressed people wandered the museum because that was the theme of Amazon’s party.  Beyond the food selection and drinks, there was a live band who played really good covers of a lot of crowd favorites, and two DJ’s with accompanying dance floors.

No one really danced to the band or DJ’s but it was still entertaining, and the three different music selection were, on the whole, pretty good.  Walking around was interesting because it not only offered different kinds of stimulation in each area of the museum, but also reflected the myriad of people that Amazon employs.  There were the ones who dressed for the occasion by dressing outrageously, and complementing them were the people who thought, “oh man, I should’ve dressed up too!” and snapped tons of photos of those in costume.  There were the more serious business types, wearing nice suits and toting their family around, and Alex even spotted a few of “those couples” who were had clearly more than enough to drink and were, erm… appreciating each other’s presence.  The museum itself was very interesting, and there were tons of planes on display.

It was amazing to see all of the planes hanging from the ceiling.  The ceiling itself was a piece of architectural engineering that was interesting to study, because it’d been constructed to support the 20 or so planes that it supported, possibly planned with room to add more.  The layout was interesting, and directed you to the museum’s different wings in a method that made sense.  It encouraged the crowd to flow towards many informational displays with impressive visual displays for those of us who didn’t really want to read that night.  I got confused a few times when trying to reach a couple of the displays because a walkway looked like it went towards an area that it actually did not.  I’d like to pay the place at least one more visit to check out the paintings and WWII era planes without hordes of people and techno blaring.

In short, Bezos puts on a good show.  Check out the Flickr set for photos, and I’ll leave you all with a small preview: