It's day two at the fair, and we're just as excited as a bunch of eight-year-olds at Disneyland. (Wheeee!) Seriously, it's the equivalent of Graceland for exhibit and event marketers.

This morning, we bid the train journey "Auf Wiedersehen!" and caught a cab to the show. Arriving around 9:30 a.m., we had a little time to settle in before we met the judges for EXHBITOR Magazine's EuroShop Awards.

A total of eight jurors — including five from the U.S. and three from Germany — joined us at the Exhibit Designers and Producers Association (EDPA) booth, where we provided them with their scoring sheets and few last-minute judging instructions. After we turned them loose, the eight jurors spent the next seven hours judging our entries, which hailed from eight countries: Germany, France, Switzerland, the United States, Netherlands, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Belgium. Check back here on March 2 to see who won! (For more information about the awards and our jury panel, visit here.)

Once we got the judges on course, we fanned out to cover the show, heading to the EuroConcept, EuroSales, and EuroCIS portions of this massive fair. While the exhibit halls here may be a bit smaller than some of the giant spaces you see in Las Vegas or Chicago (halls at Messe Dusseldorf range from 13,000 square feet to 82,000 square feet), the show covers 347,000 square feet. (Bring on the Dr. Scholl's inserts — especially since the Germans don’t believe in aisle carpet, so we’re hoofing it atop bare concrete all day, every day.) And while this was only day two of the five-day show, organizers expect it to draw 1,900 exhibitors from 52 countries and more than 100,000 visitors.

Once again, the halls were brimming with attendees. Nevertheless, we had ample opportunity to cover the retail portion of the show — including everything from store furnishings and lighting to IT technology and refrigeration systems.

For the most part, EuroShop is all about one-on-one conversations, and very few exhibitors do much in the way of traffic building or promotional activities. Particularly in halls 11 and 12, filled with lighting products and various shop-fitting tools, product is king, and all exhibitors need to do is to display their products in an attractive and innovative setting. Then, they sit back and watch attendees just like us stop, gawk, and drool.

Many exhibitors in Hall 12 created the kind of closed exhibits you’ll often find at the Magic Marketplace, where exhibitors don’t want attendees (or other exhibitors) copying their latest fashions. Here, shop-fitting suppliers such as Vizona, Visplay, Knoblach, and Schweitzer enclosed their large footprints with towering walls comprising inventive materials such as unfinished lumber, cardboard tubes, and bubble-wrap-like material that was formed into stiff, opaque sheets. Don’t be surprised if you soon see U.S. exhibit designers implementing some of these innovative, attractive, and likely inexpensive material choices.

While the stress and activity of the previous day certainly slowed our steps, we still managed to hit halls three to seven today. One of the highlights was mannequin city, located in hall four. Seemingly filled with more mannequins than the population of South Dakota, hall four featured product displays whose beauty rivaled art installations.

Tonight, we dined with our EuroShop Awards jurors at a quiet Italian restaurant in Altstadt. Here, the conversation covered everything from show-floor finds and exhibit-industry trends to comparisons of the U.S. versus European economy and the effect that the Great Recession has had on exhibiting and events worldwide.

Tomorrow, we'll hit the show floor again, hunting for new trends and inventive exhibit-marketing ideas.