Diaster

I wasn’t quite convinced to start writing blogs. But my fellow academics advised me to. So, here goes, one of the worst conference trips I’ve ever experienced.

Imagine this, a first year PhD student, you’ve gotten accepted into, not one, but two, A* conferences. I was looking forward to this trip. Though, I’m not terribly fond of travel. I live in Australia, and it seems that all the conferences are on the far stretch of the Earth.

Never matter, so, a 26 hour flight from Sydney to Paris for the SIGIR conference sounds, absolutely, dreadful. Making matters worse, my phone was stolen within 2 hours of landing. I had no internet, no GPS, and I had to navigate to an AirBnB for which I only knew the apartment number to, in a country where almost nobody speaks English.

More details to follow…