Back from the ILO #1

Oh my, I guess it would only make sense if I wrote about the trip and the olympiad and just this last week in general... with so many impressions and experiences, don't know where to start. I suppose the beginning is always a good option?

So then...

The day before, July 30

Took the bus to Tallinn, where Indrek came to meet me etc. I needed to spend the night in Tallinn, as we had to start moving really early next morning. Everything worked out really well somehow. We had a pretty good time together, talking about different things and just... I don't know... I guess meeting up with Indrek was just what I needed to get in the right mood for the olympiad. I actually managed to get some sleep that night before came...

Day 1, July 31

...and I had to get up at 4.30 am to get on the bus to Saint-Petersburg in time. Some "lovely" cold, wind and rain on the way there, too. (I actually believe that was the only time I encountered these three phenomena during this trip.) Six hours on the bus went amazingly fast. Then we reached St-Petersburg, which looked like it hadn't changed at all since the Soviet Union days... or, well, actually pretty much all of Russia looks like that from what I was able to see. From there, we had to take this... um... minibus-taxi thing, we were on it for a bit more than an hour, and now that hour did not go fast for sure. I was starting to consider the best direction for regurgitation, when our stop finally came and we reached the hotel.

Now the hotel actually looked like something from the 21-st century... well, to some degree anyway. To not get into pointless details, the opening ceremony was at 5 pm, followed by some drinks and sandwiches, and then right after that by dinner. There were 3 new countries participating this year, Sweden, Spain and the US. I gathered up the courage to go and start talking to some of the American participants, and from there began at least for me a week of intensive and interesting international communication. The Americans also ended up being the main foreigners I interacted with, if not in terms of intensity, then at least stability - that is, we did something together every day, and I actually ended up feeling relatively comfortable around them, while with the members of other teams, contact was more sporadic. Anyway...

Day 2, August 1

The day of the individual contest. I did everything I knew to be helpful in terms of making thinking more active etc. I'm not sure if it failed to work, or if it did work and the results would've been worse if it hadn't. I basically failed to solve two of the five problems, and even though I managed to do the remaining three almost perfectly, so did almost everyone else... But problems #3 and #4 did turn out to have been... shall we say problematic... for most others as well. So I felt a bit less like an idiot after hearing about how everyone else felt the same. :-P

In the evening, they had games, which definitely served to bring people closer... very much so and very literally so. Some were pretty challenging, others just fun. In the end, everybody got a piece of watermelon, and I met the only non-American I'll be likely to at least try to keep in touch with. Have I ever mentioned how Holland's soil seems to be fertile when it comes to interesting people? :-P So then of course, after the officially arranged things we went on to play games etc with people. I don't really remember what exactly we did that night. I'm sure we played lots of "psychologist", which is pretty much the only game I can be bothered to play these days. Most of the Americans probably played card games. It is very difficult for me to imagine how it's possible for people to play cards for hours every day and not get sick of it. Of course, those are probably just my own feelings of aversion speaking here...


Well, I actually just got back home a couple of hours ago and just thought I'd write everything down while it's still fresh, but it's getting long and I'm getting tired and I'll continue this later (at least I hope I will!)