Day 3

I finally finished a reasonable draft of slides for my talk tomorrow. I also did a quick check of the room that I am going to use; it is the kind of ancient European-style lecture hall with cascading rows of chairs so that the lecturer is essentially at the bottom of a tiny coliseum. Very interesting configuration. I will see how the effect is tomorrow.

I also attended a session for the first (and probably the last) time of a half-hour fast-forward for short papers.

For dinner, I went to Prinz Myshkin. It is claimed to be the best vegetarian restaurant in town, so of course I will have to check it out. Overall, the décor is excellent and I saw several of “the kind of chicks with blonde hair + white skin + long figure + luxury clothing that you would expect to see in either a German fairy tale or a posh vegetarian restaurant”.


(Prinz Myshkin)

For food, I ordered “Sojamedallions”, described as “In a deliciously creamy mushroom sauce, served with fresh arugola spätzle (german noodle speciality)”. In plain English, it is mushroom sauce over fake meat and irregular lumped shaped noodles.
The food tastes quite good, but a bit pricy, even compared with “Pure Lotus” in Beijing, one of the poshest vegetarian restaurants that I have visited. The service is also a bit slow; obviously the waitresses have too much to deal with.


(Sojamedallions)


(Spanish Fruit House in Marienplatz)


(Marienplatz at night)

Day 2

I finally got my registration done. For some reason, my badge shows only my name, not my affiliation. It is kind of nice as for people who do not know me they would not be able to figure out where I came from.


(My badge; just my name there, nothing else.)

I spent most of the day chatting with people. Here is the interesting thing. The conference took place during the final week of SIGGRAPH review before the committee meeting, so we all know we are not supposed to talk about it. But without that, it is kind of hard for people to talk about something else, and eventually the conversations came (dangerously) close to SIGGRAPH.

To avoid this pitfall, I decided to spend some time sliding down the tubular chutes inside the TUM informatik building where the conference located.


(Entrance of TUM Informatik building)


(Chutes, birds eye view)


(Chutes, side view)


(Chutes, floor view)


I went to Voila Café for dinner. The lonely planet guide described the restaurant as having creative vegetarian dish, so I decided to give it a try. The décor is a definite local bar, and the menu is in German. Initially I thought I would have to scramble to find the “creative vegetarian dish” but I got very lucky; the menu has a designated section for “vegetarisch” and I simply pick the one containing the restaurant name. later on the waitress dropped by and asked me if I need a English menu, and I surprised her by telling her that I am ready to order.


(Menu)

The dish consisted of the usual materials: potato, broccoli, chili, cucumber, tomato, and eggplant, but it is superbly cooked. The potato is probably the best I have ever had for a long time; “juicy” is probably not the word that one would usually associate with potatoes, but that is exactly how the dish tasted like.


(Vegetarian dish)