leaving liberec

a slide from my SUSE Labs presentation

I’ve been in Liberec, Czech Republic for the past week at the SUSE Labs conference. It’s been great linking names and faces, stuffing ideas into my brain, and enjoying quite a bit of Czech beer as well.

I haven’t seen much of Liberec, mostly being trapped in the crazy hotel where the conference is taking place, although I did take a walk about downtown, and it seemed like I wasn’t missing all that much. As with many European towns, there’s a beautiful gothic cathedral in the town square, but other than that, there isn’t much else to see. I did manage to make it out to the local climbing gym with some SUSE guys, and that was heaps o’ fun.

Hm, right. Crazy hotel. It’s like a little bit of Las Vegas meets Yakov Smirnoff, but I mean that in the nicest of ways. The Hotel Babylon have managed to cram a TON of amenities into a single building, including (but not limited to) a casino, water park, bowling alley, 6 restaurants, indoor mall, beer vending machines, night club, weirdo adult saunas, and much more that I’m probably forgetting. And while the styling is nice, it’s simply not opulent and over the top like Vegas. Add in the fact that (obviously) all the signs are in a mix of Czech, German, and English, and it’s basically impossible to lose the (entirely apropos) Kafkaesque feeling of surrealism while trying to get un-lost for the umpteenth time.

Anyhow, the conference is winding down, and I’m headed back to Prague for one more night before flying PRG-FRA-SFO-RNO and then RNO-SFO-PDX on Sunday. Ugh.