BloggEd

Leaving home

Sanna just took me to the bus station with Samuel. I thought I’d be much more happy to leave for RailsConf Europe; I am happy but then again, leaving Sanna and especially our two-years old Samuel was much heavier than I would have thought. I feel at loss.

...and as a geek I feel compelled to mention that this bus to airport boasts a free, beta-stage WLAN. However, it doesn’t seem to be fully functional yet; my NIC got an IP address from the dhcp server, but for some reason no name server IPs. As I don’t remember any dns addresses by heart, I was unable to use the network. Bummer.

Headed for Bratwurst on Rails

The flight was nice (a twin-engine Boeing 737-800), and for my surprise it was still summer in Germany (at least in Berlin). I should have expected that, however; Germany is rather a southern country compared to Finland, at least. But it was a nice realization nevertheless.

When taxi took me to pre-conference meeting, I met my friend Antti and after chatting for a while we bumped in. The immediate atmosphere was very nice. People felt excited - I mean other people as well, not just me! :) And many people were very social as well (context reminder: I come from Finland, and as such I could regard any person emitting any interpretable, non-hostile utterances as “outward” or even “friendly”) and so it was easy to chat with whomever you wanted. Setting social mode to friendly-but-aggressive, wei immediately made an acquaintance with Tom from Münich, Leon from Holland, Ian The Londonean Almost Become A Japanese (nice guy too) as well as several of his Japanese colleaques, who were nice as well (remember the scale of measurement used for evaluation).

However, the noise level got high rather quickly, and before getting my throat sore I decided to retreat to my hotel, which also appeared nice, being consistent with all my experiences so far. Ok, my first taxi driver wasn’t that nice, but he wasn’t blunt either, just.. uh, maybe tired or something. Talked as much as a finn at a bus stop, which is just longer expression for nil.

Going to sleep

Now I have to prepare my stuff for tomorrow morning. I’ll try to post some pictures later to my Flickr account.