my institute retreat

Last week I was at an institute retreat from Monday through Thursday. Last year it was only three days, but they decided to extend it so that it was less hours of sitting through non-stop presentations per day. It was less, and the day was more pleasantly broken up, but it was still a lot of presentations...The location was pretty nice though, the Ringberg Hotel in Suhl, in the Thueringian forest. The hotel was right at the top of a hill, which made for lovely views, but it was a bit of a hike into town. Unfortunately it really felt like a waste of time, as it really didn't foster the sort of interaction that I think is supposed to come out of this sort of event, and many people were so intent on presenting all the results that they had that they forgot the audience, which ranged from people working with soil microbes to people interpreting satellite data to people designing lightweight sensors to fly aboard aircraft. It's all in one institute, but it doesn't mean that we actually know that much about what the other people are doing.

It would have felt sort of like a vacation were it not for the extraordinary amount of thing I have to finish both at work and at home before I leave next week. At least I got a lot of knitting done during the talks. I didn't take too many pictures, but here are three from when Dabang, Valentina and I were waiting for the bus, some small photographic record of four days that I'll never get back.