Still alive!

I'm still here - I survived my experience on the Lativian roads. A bit rough in places and a few hairy moments but it was OK. We arrived at the conference just as the keynote was starting. Atis said he'd planned it to avoid wasting time :-) The Conference is a little out my my normal area but as the keynotes progressed I realised that a lot of what we are trying to do at Swansea in building a community of practice and the follow up from the benchmarking, fit well with the concept of making things sustainable - in all senses of the word.

After the keynotes we had dinner followed by a recital by a local opera singer, who also sang some very impressive jazz.

Although I had booked into the conference hotel my colleagues from Riga Technical University told me that they had decided to rent a small house by a lake. The invited me to spend the evening there with them. What they had actually rented was a house in a former complex for Latvia Communist party apparatchiks deep in the woods near the Belarus boarder. Before we left Atis said I should take my passport with me as one wrong turn in the woods and we would come up against Belarusian border guards and that would be something we didn't want to do.
They complex was actually very nice, as you would expect for party bosses although the two rows of fencing each with an imposing set of gates was a little unnerving.