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I am in NYC, attending one of the most important conferences of the year. I have a talk, and I am a room host for several sessions. And everything that happens at the war front is a dark background.
I can’t be fully involved in this spectacular professional celebration, and I feel so weird feeling like I am the only person among these 200 people with this dark background… and I still have to do all the conference-related social media.
The next day after I left for Europe, Chicago was hit by a heavy storm, and four inches of water dropped over the Northern part of the city, including Rogers Park. Both garden units in our building, the storage rooms and the gym, were flooded.
Somehow, I was not included in the original email chain and learned it all postfactum.
The damage is massive, and I have no idea when everything will be repaired:
I wrote this post yesterday and forgot to post it. I am not pretending I didn’t suspect what was going to happen, but still, what happened today, didn’t happen yet….
A very disturbing thing happened when I went through the border control in Helsinki on my way back. First, I was happy to see they now have the same machines as in London, where you can scan your chipped passport. Then I saw that I still had to present the passport to the officer. On my way back, I never ever encountered any questions. This time, the office started to scroll through my passport pages and asked me which countries I had visited and whether I was in Russia. Just to be clear, since I am a naturalized citizen, my country of origin is indicated in my US passport, but still!
The office kept scrolling, found the stamps from 2019, and looked at me inquisitively. I said – I haven’t been there since 2019. He kept scrolling and finally said: good; I see your entrance stamp. Because if you visited Russia at that time, we would have to question you (and he waved in an unspecified direction).
It was very disturbing but understandable. I know I have my share of guilt with everything happening, and it’s in Finland where I feel it even more.
And since I am posting it today, not yesterday, I want to reiterate – we stand with Ukraine! I saw these flags in the Southern part of State Street, quite unexpectedly:
We toured the Schonbrunn Castle (and decided not to tour the gardens). Any photography inside is strictly prohibited, which felt surprisingly good 🙂 – we could focus on looking at the rooms!
Thinking about this week in Spring when we had both Nordic PG Day and PG Day Paris, I can feel the difference – there was too much travel for me this time! I didn’t need to travel anywhere for Nordic because I was already in Helsinki, and there was a one-day gap between Nordic and Paris. And now, I had to travel to Amsterdam and then skip a part of Uptime to travel to Vienna. And I was so tired! I will never do it again! Probably, I should have just traveled to Amsterdam directly from Chicago.
The PG Day Austria went really well. Although there was no emerging dessert table, the conference venue was splendid, and the talks were great.
Both conferences’ schedules were packed, and there was not enough time to see the cities where the conferences took place. It was fine for Amsterdam because we visited it more than once, and also, we had several free hours on the day of arrival. We walked around, bought some souvenirs, and tried to find where we stayed in July 2019. I can’t believe it was a little bit over two years ago – it feels like another epoch.
Pictures from the conference
Uptime 2022 by Aiven was the best-organized conference I ever attended! all the talks I attended were very interesting, my only two regrets are that 1) I could not attend two tracks at the same time and 2) I had to leave earlier to attend PG Day Austria.
The recordings of the presentations will be available soon, and here are some of the pictures I took during the event.
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For this conference, the organizers booked the rooms for speakers at Hotel Jakarta, which is located very close to the conference venue. It’s the most unusual hotel I ever stayed!
I was in Helsinki for only one and a half days. On the first (half) of the day, I visited Natasha at her home and met with the whole family – the last time I saw everybody was in March!
This time, the situation in the world (and on the war front) was different, so our conversation was much happier, even in view of the European energy crisis.
On the second day, I did some work, mostly interacting with our London-based team, and then Boris and I biked to IKEA – something he had wanted to do for a while. He already made a couple of solo biking tips there, and he wanted to do it with me as well. We declared a late lunch to be our primary purpose, but it is impossible not to browse what’s out there!
On Tuesday, we had a very early flight to Amsterdam. Since Boris has Finnair Gold, we could hang out in the Finnair lounge and have breakfast there (and I forgot to take pictures :)).
Also, I upgraded us to Finnair Plus, so we had these cool seats with lights and elevated leg rests 🙂
I read the third book of the Climate Quartet first, unaware of the previous two, and then came back to read the Life of Bees and the End of the Ocean.
All three of the books impressed me greatly. How Maja Lunde draws connections between what happens here and now in today’s world and what can happen in the near future due to today’s actions is incredibly convincing.
I can’t think of a better way to explain how we, the people of the planet Earth, can impact our nearest future, not on what will happen many generations ahead, but on what could happen to our children.
Foto, travel, St.Petersburg, Stokholm, Tallin
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