Today was the third and last day of the DBE review. I am happy to have spent the whole day inside (the high temperature today has been -21C (-5F), and the sun set about an hour ago), but it’s been a very long day. We’ve just (at 4:50pm) finished the presentation which was supposed to have been completed at 12:30 — fortunately, the rest of the schedule was devoted to “discussion and feedback”, which got truncated. We finished the session at 6:30, though the final readout from the reviewers was delayed until 8:30, back at the hotel where most people were staying.
I joined the crowd to wait for the results — as you might guess, most of the waiting happened in the hotel bar, where I tried yet another local beer, Koff. I didn’t like it as much as Lapin Gold, but it was much better than Karjala.
After the review, the IBM team went to a local restaurant which was not in a hotel — Harald. I wasn’t hungry enough for a full meal, so I passed on the reindeer sword; instead, I had some mushroom soup and a “chicken small bread”. It was good, and I’d happily go back, preferably at an earlier hour — we left at 11:30pm local time, and that only because I insisted.
The temperature was down to -24C, so we took a taxi back to the hotel, where I called Amex and switched my flight home to be Saturday instead of Sunday. I’ll still do some sightseeing in Tampere on Friday, and probably get to Helsinki early enough to see some more of the city, but there will be other trips, possibly even in warmer weather, and a week away from home seems long enough for this round.