berlin and oslo

so I spent a week in berlin, and had lots of fun, and was far too tired to blog about it :) and now I’m in oslo, still having fun.

I arrived in berlin on sunday, uploaded my blog post, and collapsed on maelcum’s bed. :) in the evening I woke up, we set up a bed for me, and went out to the music festival with one of his roommates… so of course it started raining soon after we got there. :) it was a nice evening, though. we hid from the rain for a while, then went to a club, where there was dancing… but we arrived at something like 10 or 11pm, and apparently the party doesn’t really get started until 1am in berlin :P I was having too much fun dancing so by midnight I was quite literally falling asleep.. eventually we got home and I slept until 4pm :P

I skipped the drinking monday, just had a nice dinner and went back to bed… then tuesday it was time to meet the linuxtag guys and move to the apartments they had for us. kde, amarok and kubuntu people were all sharing three apartments. I think every bed was full, three to a room. I thought I had blogged at least *something* about linuxtag, but it seems I haven’t… when we were setting up the booth we found one of the signs said “K Desktop Environment” instead of KDE. we tried to think of something to do about this, and eventually I discovered that the letters were actually stickers… :) so I started peeling them off, and we made it say KDE.

and then we had a big pile of sticky letters, so we tried to think of fun things to write with them. :) we were tempted to take the spare k and put it on the ubuntu sign, but people might not have liked that, so in the end someone (frank?) stuck it on his folder and we had “the K files”.

that night we looked for a place to eat near the apartments, and ended up splitting into two groups… I found what I thought was a sushi place, but it turned out to also serve thai and vietnamese. my green tea came with a teabag and sugar. :P still, the food wasn’t *bad*, just not very japanese :) after dinner much drinking happened, and I learnt to count past 9 in german.

tuesday morning I woke up early, found a nice bakery for breakfast, wandered around until the grocery store opened so I could buy soap… and then linuxtag started. ohh boy. so many people! so much stuff! the week is a bit of a blur… I was wandering around and chatting with people and chatting with more people… I signed an FLA, and talked with someone who wants his software to integrate properly with KDE (and ended up helping him make the web client work better in khtml)… by wednesday I was getting kinda overwhelmed by all the people, and started spending more time on my laptop… I made it to a few talks, but only kde/qt ones. :) matthias’ talk on QML made me really really wish it was something I could use right now. will’s talk on what sucks about kde was.. uncomfortable but fairly accurate. I’m not sure why he was talking about it at linuxtag instead of akademy, though; it was really aimed towards the bunch of kde devs in the front rows, not the random users in the back.

the lunch at linuxtag varied just enough to never be boring (omg the strawberries in berlin are sooo good), and most of the dinners were delicious… :)
tuesday night we went to a nice restaurant in Kreuzberg where they had something like indian food… it was yummy… and then we went back to the apartment and drank more. :) it was someone’s birthday. and there was nice vodka. we discovered that the drunker I am, the higher I can count in german ;)
wednesday night was the social event and the qt dinner, unfortunately at the same time. by the end of the dinner (which was.. not very good compared to most dinners that week) I just needed some time alone, so I skipped the social event. it sounds like I didn’t miss much.
thursday I was in Kreuzberg again, and had a delicious.. something.. with dumplings and mushrooms and a yummy creamy sauce… and then we had ice cream. :) I also was at the kdab office that night, where they have a foosball table. :) oh, and t-shirts.
friday… I just plain don’t remember. or perhaps I mixed up thursday and friday.

saturday I went to the ubuntu bbq at c-base, had a mushroom and a piece of cheese, then decided I wanted a full meal. so I met up with sebas and nightrose and some others, and discovered Christopher Street Day. there was cheap chinese food, and beer, and more beer, and dancing, and beer, and pizza, and marge simpson… :) I would’ve liked to stay longer, but was getting very tired by midnight, so me and fredrik headed back to the apartment. it was a good thing he came along, because i fell asleep on the train several times… but then we discovered that the key was with monika, back at c-base. :/ so an hour later (the trains were against her) she showed up, and it was 3am and I finally got into bed and started to defrost :P

sunday the weather was lovely – of course it was, we were leaving. I didn’t really want to leave berlin, it’s an awesome city. :) perhaps almost as awesome as vancouver ;)

anyways, I arrived in oslo, in the middle of a heat wave. I stepped off the plane and it quite literally felt like stepping into a sauna. I’m glad the airport had air conitioning, because the baggage was delayed a bit. after that I found my way to alexandra’s place.

oslo has been pretty nice so far, too. :) I just wish it wasn’t so *hot*. it hasn’t been too hard to find veggie food, the light at night hasn’t caused trouble… the qt office is quite nice. there’s a wii and a foosball table and scooters and food and, of course, qt-ies! ;) I met a bunch of them yesterday, then sat in thomas’ office and hacked until he dragged me out to see a bit of the city… and he’ll probably have to do that again soon or I’ll be hacking all day ;) I managed to have some good/useful conversations this morning, but that didn’t leave time for hacking, and then the internet distracted me for a while…

oh, and I took a few photos in oslo, after being reminded that I had a camera. :)

tomorrow I’ll be off to madrid. :) and then friday, akademy! :) I’m really looking forward to that. I just wish there were more hours in the day – hacking and chatting and seeing these cities and drinking and sleeping just don’t all fit into the time I’ve got…