As always I really enjoyed the conference as much as the social aspect of it. It truly is one of the best conferences in the field. This was my sixth year which as I noted earlier started out a bit weird. I will not cover the limousine story here again instead this is purely about the conference.

The conference started off with the usual introduction by bernd who did it in English this year which I think was nice but quite frankly the usual “food is in the food area” and “conference is in the conference are” I can pretty much understand even in German. As I only speak English I will, as usual, only cover the English track here.

Well, this is an odd post. I find it difficult to start to be honest. How do I write about my adventures without it sounding strange or bizarre? But perhaps it needs to sounds bizarre for that was how it felt to me. I know this is all a gag but it is interesting how well my mind failed to understand that at the time.

I attended the conference for the third time and as always the weather in Bolzano in conjunction with a nice conference made for a great time. I have already mentioned my experiences with the hotel in a previous post so here I will focus mainly on the conference itself and my trip.

Might sounds like a strange title since Vietnam is by no means a part of China but we decided to take a vacation from our vacation and head over to Ha Long Bay in Vietnam. The first part of this trip has already been chronicled in the first trip report: Trip to China: Dong Xing, Part 1 <http://www.medin.name/blog/2013/03/14/trip-to-china-dong-xing-part-1/> and later parts will be published in a bit.

This will be a rather lengthy post about my travels in China. I was planning to blog regularly whilst in China but the internet situation made that difficult (also I was on vacation and being lazy). This first edition is about the first week or so we spent in DongXing before heading down into Vietnam and onward to Shenzhen which will come in the later editions.