17th WPC - Minsk 2008
better late than never? i sure think so.
gotta love road trips.... (long!)
or maybe it's just me, but i don't care. i just like driving long distances to get to a place, even if it's just for a few days.
so, here it is, minsk 2008:
nelly had left for the weekend on friday, and we were scheduled to leave saturday, oct.25th, early morning, in my car (to those of you who have heard other options, they were all discarded at one point or another before, like for example there were no train tickets left when we tried to get those). i had the car looked at, just in case, washed inside and outside, changed the tires to the winter set (who knows how cold it's going to get), some trouble with documents like insurance and what-not was settled, my luggage was mostly packed (turns out i didn't forget anything important - good thing the hotel offered shampoo and soap, although that is kinda expected from a hotel, you never know in ex-communist places). :)
alarm rings at 6:15, then 6:25, but those 10 minutes weren't really needed, as i was half-awake since something like 5:30... nervousness, i guess. i'm up and around, calling people to make sure they are awake as well, final preparations, something to eat in the morning, out to the car, waiting for everyone to arrive at about 7. when they finally get there ~20 minutes later (helped by a taxi that would not come for half an hour when called), we get ready and leave. a brief stop at the local OMV gas station to fill the tank, and i start driving to Ruse in order to go north into romania. the trip is uneventful, we get lunch near ruse (a slight detour suggested by my uncle who said this is basically the only good place to eat in the vicinity), proceed to get a little lost in ruse (something that would become almost a habit in most other cities we had to go through), find our way some 5 minutes later and cross the border. i was surprised at the efficiency and speed with which this happened, but i guess this is the norm since both countries joined the EU a couple years back. also, 8 euro to cross the bridge is a lot, imo. and it's 10 for the other direction! this bridge must have paid for itself several times just in the last few years, i'd think...
cars in romania: 50%(+) are dacias, really. most popular is the 1310 model, which i think is rather ugly, but lately logans seem to be showing up in numbers, too. it's simply unreal how many of those we passed on the way.
then, it is some point around 10pm, we are in northern romania, i have this hostel address we are going to, the gps knows it, gets us there and... there really is nothing on that street. it is completely dark, there are no signs for a hostel or anything, so after looking around for a short while, we decided to go across the border and into chernovtsi, where at least they speak russian and we could find a place to crash for the night. that plan worked really well, with the exception of actually going around the town for about half an hour... :)
sunday, we woke up (time had just gained us an hour, maybe - we never really figured if they use DST in the ukraine or not) and left north again... roads there are not very good for driving, though. unless you are doing 120km/h (75mph), when you can fly over most of the holes. be that as it may, we got near the belorussian border around... 7:30pm. sunday night. so i am driving down the road, you see some lights in the distance where presumably the border is, and then suddenly the car in front stops in the middle of the road and turns off the engine, and all lights with it. huh, what? turns out, all of belarus was trying to get home from visiting friends or family on this side of the border for the weekend. we were something like the 100th car in line, and there was just a single border post working... :( so we did like everyone else, turn off the car, wait a few minutes, start the car, move forward a few meters, turn off the car again. which i guess is a good strategy, unless you have 2 lights on in the car, music playing, and what-not. the battery gave out just over 3 hours later - when we had 'passed' the border - as in, they said 'go', and the car wouldn't start. well, the guys pushed me into neutral territory, the car started well, from the first attempt in fact, and we were headed into belarus... or so we thought. now, normal logic goes like this: presumably the two borders have the same throughput rate. so once a car comes out of the ukraine, it goes and passes the belorussian border too, so there should be no lines in the middle. almost. we were close to the 100th car in that line too. ouch. well, this time we did not turn off the engine in fear of having to push the car again.... and around 2:40am we were finally into belarus! (yay) i had napped for a bit in the car during the wait, because i knew we had like a 4-hour drive after the border too, and a good thing - we came to the hotel at around 6am, crashed for ~3hours, woke up for breakfast, back to bed until just after noon.
minsk is a strange town. communism is very visible in its architecture, but religion is also very prominent there. a huge and beautiful church is right next to an even bigger solid-stone building the likes of which communists built everywhere (some ministry, turns out). there is still a statue of lenin right in the center, which strikes me as a little odd, but oh well. maybe they like their communist period, or maybe UNESCO really has preserved half the town for historical reasons.
the competition itself was... not really good for me. if i can quote the somewhat famous Dr. Thomas Snyder (in those circles, at least - read more from him here), "The first day began with a welcome round that was particularly unwelcoming." and then it didn't get very much better until the end of the second day, which had what i think were the best puzzles in the championship (though i only solved both rounds partly). our team did not do very well, we ended something like 19th out of 22, with only Deyan doing decently well. i never actually looked at the final individual standings, but i presume they are on this cd that i have somewhere. and while the organization was pretty good, the hotel was probably the worst one those events have been held in (for certain in the last 5-6 years), at least for me. for example, there was not much of the food i liked, and it tended to disappear pretty quickly.
the way back was... more of the same. i guess i really like driving, can do it for hours at an end, but then i don't have very many memories. we left a little before noon saturday (slept in after having fun the previous night), stopped at a mall-like thing to get some souvenirs, didn't really like anything (sorry sofie, no magnet for you this time), so we bought chocolate and vodka instead. :)
the rest of the trip back was pretty much uneventful, except for a couple traffic jams nearing bucharest, but those came and went. so there, hope you all had fun reading.
gotta love road trips.... (long!)
or maybe it's just me, but i don't care. i just like driving long distances to get to a place, even if it's just for a few days.
so, here it is, minsk 2008:
nelly had left for the weekend on friday, and we were scheduled to leave saturday, oct.25th, early morning, in my car (to those of you who have heard other options, they were all discarded at one point or another before, like for example there were no train tickets left when we tried to get those). i had the car looked at, just in case, washed inside and outside, changed the tires to the winter set (who knows how cold it's going to get), some trouble with documents like insurance and what-not was settled, my luggage was mostly packed (turns out i didn't forget anything important - good thing the hotel offered shampoo and soap, although that is kinda expected from a hotel, you never know in ex-communist places). :)
alarm rings at 6:15, then 6:25, but those 10 minutes weren't really needed, as i was half-awake since something like 5:30... nervousness, i guess. i'm up and around, calling people to make sure they are awake as well, final preparations, something to eat in the morning, out to the car, waiting for everyone to arrive at about 7. when they finally get there ~20 minutes later (helped by a taxi that would not come for half an hour when called), we get ready and leave. a brief stop at the local OMV gas station to fill the tank, and i start driving to Ruse in order to go north into romania. the trip is uneventful, we get lunch near ruse (a slight detour suggested by my uncle who said this is basically the only good place to eat in the vicinity), proceed to get a little lost in ruse (something that would become almost a habit in most other cities we had to go through), find our way some 5 minutes later and cross the border. i was surprised at the efficiency and speed with which this happened, but i guess this is the norm since both countries joined the EU a couple years back. also, 8 euro to cross the bridge is a lot, imo. and it's 10 for the other direction! this bridge must have paid for itself several times just in the last few years, i'd think...
cars in romania: 50%(+) are dacias, really. most popular is the 1310 model, which i think is rather ugly, but lately logans seem to be showing up in numbers, too. it's simply unreal how many of those we passed on the way.
then, it is some point around 10pm, we are in northern romania, i have this hostel address we are going to, the gps knows it, gets us there and... there really is nothing on that street. it is completely dark, there are no signs for a hostel or anything, so after looking around for a short while, we decided to go across the border and into chernovtsi, where at least they speak russian and we could find a place to crash for the night. that plan worked really well, with the exception of actually going around the town for about half an hour... :)
sunday, we woke up (time had just gained us an hour, maybe - we never really figured if they use DST in the ukraine or not) and left north again... roads there are not very good for driving, though. unless you are doing 120km/h (75mph), when you can fly over most of the holes. be that as it may, we got near the belorussian border around... 7:30pm. sunday night. so i am driving down the road, you see some lights in the distance where presumably the border is, and then suddenly the car in front stops in the middle of the road and turns off the engine, and all lights with it. huh, what? turns out, all of belarus was trying to get home from visiting friends or family on this side of the border for the weekend. we were something like the 100th car in line, and there was just a single border post working... :( so we did like everyone else, turn off the car, wait a few minutes, start the car, move forward a few meters, turn off the car again. which i guess is a good strategy, unless you have 2 lights on in the car, music playing, and what-not. the battery gave out just over 3 hours later - when we had 'passed' the border - as in, they said 'go', and the car wouldn't start. well, the guys pushed me into neutral territory, the car started well, from the first attempt in fact, and we were headed into belarus... or so we thought. now, normal logic goes like this: presumably the two borders have the same throughput rate. so once a car comes out of the ukraine, it goes and passes the belorussian border too, so there should be no lines in the middle. almost. we were close to the 100th car in that line too. ouch. well, this time we did not turn off the engine in fear of having to push the car again.... and around 2:40am we were finally into belarus! (yay) i had napped for a bit in the car during the wait, because i knew we had like a 4-hour drive after the border too, and a good thing - we came to the hotel at around 6am, crashed for ~3hours, woke up for breakfast, back to bed until just after noon.
minsk is a strange town. communism is very visible in its architecture, but religion is also very prominent there. a huge and beautiful church is right next to an even bigger solid-stone building the likes of which communists built everywhere (some ministry, turns out). there is still a statue of lenin right in the center, which strikes me as a little odd, but oh well. maybe they like their communist period, or maybe UNESCO really has preserved half the town for historical reasons.
the competition itself was... not really good for me. if i can quote the somewhat famous Dr. Thomas Snyder (in those circles, at least - read more from him here), "The first day began with a welcome round that was particularly unwelcoming." and then it didn't get very much better until the end of the second day, which had what i think were the best puzzles in the championship (though i only solved both rounds partly). our team did not do very well, we ended something like 19th out of 22, with only Deyan doing decently well. i never actually looked at the final individual standings, but i presume they are on this cd that i have somewhere. and while the organization was pretty good, the hotel was probably the worst one those events have been held in (for certain in the last 5-6 years), at least for me. for example, there was not much of the food i liked, and it tended to disappear pretty quickly.
the way back was... more of the same. i guess i really like driving, can do it for hours at an end, but then i don't have very many memories. we left a little before noon saturday (slept in after having fun the previous night), stopped at a mall-like thing to get some souvenirs, didn't really like anything (sorry sofie, no magnet for you this time), so we bought chocolate and vodka instead. :)
the rest of the trip back was pretty much uneventful, except for a couple traffic jams nearing bucharest, but those came and went. so there, hope you all had fun reading.