view from a hotel window

I’m in Fontainebleau, France, for the International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC 2018).

I arrived on Sunday, with a colleague from the UK.  We came by Eurostar, which had an exciting 90 minute delay due to a power failure in the tunnel (or as they announced, “operational difficulties”).  It was “exciting” because of the chaos at St Pancras: no-one knew what was happening, and the station concourse was steadily filling with delayed passengers.  Queuing disintegrated.  Once the trains started leaving again, they could move more people into the departure area, and people for particular trains had to snake their way through the crowds.  Fun while trying to manoeuvre wheelie luggage.  The online information was of no help at all: it claimed our train had gone once its official departure time has passed.  We were relatively lucky: others were stuck for longer, or had their trains cancelled.

We were mildly concerned that this would mean difficulties in getting from Paris to Fontainebleau, as we would be arriving later than planned on a Sunday evening.  But there were trains every 30 minutes, so no problem there.

The first two days of the conference have been fun and interesting.  And the food is amazing.

Here’s the glorious view from my hotel window:

there’s a heatwave...

Three more days of interesting talks to go.  Then the Eurostar home...