h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As the title suggests, I'm in Geneva at the moment. I think I may be getting accoustomed to overseas travel because I don't have the feeling of wanderlust that I usually get whenever I go abroad. I may be judging the place harshly and I'm sure I've yet to see the best Geneva has to offer, but so far I'm pretty underwhelmed by what I've seen.

Before coming here I had a fairly busy weekend. I spent most of the day on Saturday shopping with my girlfriend. It's funny, I'll happily run for a couple of hours and feel no ill effects, but the same couple of hours spent browsing in shops and I'm usually exhausted. On the other hand we were sorting out Swiss currency and other things for the trip so I shouldn't complain.

In the evening we went to the cinema and saw a film called Festival. As the title might suggest, it's set in Edinburgh during the Fringe Festival and it follows some comedians and critics on their various misadventures. It's quite a funny film, but the humour is extremely dark at times and at other times it's downright weird. I guess it's a bit like the festival itself in that respect.

One purely trivial aspect of the movie that I did enjoy was that, having been to Edinburgh a couple of times, I recognised a lot of the locations. Quite a lot of the movie was filmed in various pubs in the city and I'd swear I've been in a lot of them.

Once I'd packed on Saturday night I was fairly late getting to bed and fairly early getting up on Sunday too. We had an extremely entertaining taxi ride to the airport during which we were treated to the amusing anecdotes of our taxi driver who, with very little encouragement from me, told us all about his exploits at various music festivals and his experiments with a pharmacopia of illegal drugs.

We were somewhat relieved to arrive at the airport in one piece and were checked in by a girl who also seemed to be on some controlled substances. Thankfully the pilot seemed to be drug free and the flight went without incident and we soon found ourselves in the bright Geneva sunshine. We quickly located our hotel in the "red-light" district and marvelled at the array of strip clubs and sex shops conveniently located nearby.

After we'd dropped off our bags and registered at the conference, it was time for the welcome wine reception. I'm afraid I took rather too much advantage of the free beer and not quite enough of the free food and was rather drunk when they turned us out into the night. A few hours and several more large beers later I staggered back through the seedy streets to my hotel.

I set my alarm wrong and overslept by an hour and ended up missing part of the first lecture. I spent most of the morning feeling extremely rough and I have to confess that I shamelessly napped in a couple of the longer talks. By lunchtime I was really beginning to struggle and was looking forward to some food. Unfortunately all I got was one small sandwich (and I wouldn't have got that if I hadn't jumped the queue) before the food ran out. You have to wonder about someone who arranges five-hundred litres of beer for one night, but only one sandwich per delegate.

A little food worked wonders for me and I felt infinitely better in the afternoon and actually paid attention in some of the lectures. I was quite amused to note that the audio-visual people seemed to be as well organised as the caterers. There was a comedy of errors during the day as the projector broke, remote controls either didn't work or worked too well and I was quite enjoying things at times.

My boss was giving a talk in the afternoon and I was certain that any remaining gremlins in the system would surely be found by him. He did suffer one or two disturbances, including someone loudly drilling something for a significant part of his presentation, but he coped very well in adversity and several people later said they'd enjoyed his lecture.

After about eight hours of lectures I was exhausted, but we still had a two hour "poster party" to attend. This basically consists of standing next to a poster of your research while no oone asks you any questions. It didn't help that our poster was upstairs about as far away from the food as it was possible to get and consequently we didn't get many visitors.

It was after eight when everything finished at the conference centre last night so we ended up just going for a quiet drink and I was in bed before one in the morning which was far earlier than on Sunday night.

After such a long day yesterday they are letting us off with a half day today. Once I've finished writing this there's one more lecture and then I think we're going to go for a swim in the lake. After that I intend to spend some time wandering round the old town and doing a little sight seeing. Hopefully I can change my mind about Geneva. The this evening I think we're planning on going out for a group meal.

Right I guess that'll do. I've already run over my fifteen minute limit and there are a few disgruntled looking delegate queueing up next to me.