We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

Here is a quick update from the wonderful city of Wien:

• German keyboards aren’t that different than American keyboards; the hardest thing to get used to (and it is driving me nuts) is that all the non-alphanumeric characters are all in different places.
• London is a lovely city. I should spend more than 24 hours there and I should visit more often than once every 27 years (roughly).
• Vienna has free bicycle rentals. I cannot stress how totally awesome that is.
• I am not sure how British Airways managed it, but I was the second (or third) person on the plane on the flight to Vienna but my luggage did make it on the plane at all. In fact, it also managed to miss the next flight from Heathrow to Vienna, and the one after that as well. It did not show up at my hotel until 12 hours after I landed.
• In general, this has not been a terribly good trip in terms of misplaced luggage. One of my teammates had a bag that didn’t make it on time to Hong Kong, and I know of at least two other people in Vienna for this competition who also had their bags go missing, if only for a short time. As an interesting datapoint, British Airways and Heathrow seem to be implicated in a large number of these cases.
• I was underwhelmed by my hotel in London, but the pensione here in Vienna is quite nice. Now if only the WC were in the actual room…
• Pictures from LDN and Wien probably will not get uploaded until after I get back to the US. Hey, that’s the breaks…