Michi’s blog

Report from Villars (1 in a series)

• March 5th, 2006

So, I’ve arrived in Villars sur Ollon for the Alpine Operad Workshop. The travel was long and at times annoying, mainly because the heavy snowfall over München and Zürich and some other places in the region triggered extreme delays. As we were supposed to board, the poor attendant at Nürnberg airport told us that the plane had not yet departed from Zürich.

Except for that, though, the travel went fine, and after being treated to some immensely beautiful views (glittering lake of Genéve with rows and rows of snowcovered grapevines in front, anyone?) and reminded of just how much I miss the deep-snow winters, I got up on this mountain in southwestern (very much frenchspeaking) Switzerland to the Hotel du Golf. The receptionist told me, straight off, that a number of my colleagues had already arrived, and then I went to eat (Crêpes - expensive and not even correctly delivered…) and started wrestling the connector dance. Y’see, half of the connectors used in civilized Europe work here. The other half don’t. And those who do work, only do work if they’re impeccably straight. So I had to work for quite a while to actually, y’know, get my laptop, my mp3player, my loudspeakers (I sleep with music, mmmkay? Headphones are NOT very nice to sleep in, mmmkay?) and my cell phone all connected. I think I disconnected 75% of the room lights in the process.

Just before leaving, i.e. yesterday, I discovered that the colleague of Gooseania, Hadi Zare is also coming here to this workshop. I plan on saying Hi.
Most of my raison d’être for this trip has evaporated since friday though. It was supposed to be a threefold thing: Skiing, preparing for an Operadic PhD and looking for application spots to get that PhD position. Since I now HAVE a position (Jena, Group Cohomology) and it’s not in operads, the latter two kinda fell into oblivion. But I’m looking forward to skiing!!

I will do a 30-minute stunt online each day, trying to cram it full of updating here, reading my mail, webcomics, livejournals, blogs, whatever, calling my fiancee on Skype and generally hanging out on IRC.

Don’t count on me being very available…

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