Wednesday, November 19, 2008

The Summit Begins

The conference officially begins! A lot of us are already looking rough. I'm not sure if it was wise for Ralph to drink kirsch until 3:30 am and then do the opening speech without notes, but it's all good.

I was given a stack of ribbons to hand out for people to stick on their badges, with sayings like "I read your email", "Slacker" and "I could be president". Since I got first pick, I chose the sole "Worship Me" ribbon. Very useful for waving in someone's face if they won't bend to your will.

I ran into Gilles from Switzerland in the afternoon. He knows my weakness for all things sugar, and brought me Läderach chocolate. Sorry girls, but he may have bumped you out as my new best friend. That chocolate was sooooo good. Brings tears of joy to your eyes.

After a full day of talks, the official party kicked off at 6:00 pm. At 8:00 pm, the second official party kicked off. This one only had beer, which I don't drink, so I thankfully had an alcohol break. Especially lucky since the party continued until about 2:00 am. At party #2, I got into a deep discussion with Adrian from France. We decided he needed to visit Canada and should therefore host the "STP Summit Symposia Week Supreme" in Ottawa during Winterlude, where he would be the sole participant and most of the time would be spent skating and sightseeing. We pitched this several times to Oisin, the leader of the STP project, to obtain funding, but so far nothing is confirmed.

Since 8 hours of partying wasn't quite enough, we went back to the hotel lobby bar. They were actually closed but the servers tonight/this morning were female and we had enough men to convince them to reopen.

4:30 am bed time. So tired. Many, many conference participants were not looking good by the end of the night.

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