WPC 33 was held in Helsinki, Finland. Know for, among other things, being the home of Nokia and being a place where the sun barely sets.
This likely will have been my last WPC meeting. Scott and I announced a few weeks before that we would not be up for re-election as chair of the LPWG and MPWG respectively. This is both happy and sad for me – being chair of a workgroup was not my favorite thing to do, and I will certainly enjoy getting back to more ‘real’ engineering. I did enjoy, and will miss the travel and fun that the group had though.
Sunset was at 10:55 and sunrise was at 3:55, so there were about five hours of night, but it never got dark enough that you couldn’t comfortably walk around without any artificial light. This meant that we did a lot of walking around and drank a lot of beers, and ciders – the Finns are apparently fond of both apple and pear cider. We ended up staying out until after 2 the first two nights and staying up until sunrise 3:55 the last night.
The first night, after some difficulty, we had dinner at Savotta – a restaurant remembered by Scott and others for being in what appears to be a converted bomb shelter and serving reindeer steaks. Oddly, when we arrived, they turned away a couple saying they were almost closed, but then decided to let us in. I can only assume that they decided we were tourists and would spend enough money to make it worth their staying a bit late. I think we lived up to their expectations.
The next few nights we basically just stayed up, running around the city from bar to bar. Sometimes with a group of our WPC friends and sometimes on our own. I’ll leave most of those pictures to be explained by their captions below.
We flew out through Amsterdam, so we had one night to kill there – which, in being consistent with the past nights, ended up going until 4AM or something.
