The second to last day of Ubicomp 2011 included a banquet. After the last session of presentations, we were taken in buses, comfortable coaches, to the lake by the Summer Palace. The driver was absolutely ruthless, driving fast, honking his horn and rarely steering away from bikers or pedestrians. Not even kids were safe from this beast of the road. Biggest goes first I guess. Well, no casualties at least.

Went downtown to see the city a bit more and decided to go to their equivalent of Bangkoks MBK: the Silk market building. Despite the name, there were not much silk and the harsh signs in the roof condemning piracy (sth along the lines of "Buy original brand, do not buy fake copy!") had little effect on the offers, customers or anything at all. Don't know if there were anything original there, "original copy" perhaps.

Starting off strong with the SmileCounter system! By being encouraged to smile, this will eventually make you happier, even if the initial smiles are not natural. Funny! Japanese (of course ;)) <a href="http://www.bithappens.se/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/20110919-104423.jpg"><img src="http://www.bithappens.se/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/20110919-104423.jpg" alt="20110919-104423.jpg" class="alignnone size-full" /> The main hall of main buildning. CoDine, featuring a ketchup-printer for remote dining. FlyingBuddy! You can send it to see ahead, or tell it to go buy things if you are in your car and out of food!

Keynote by Christopher Mustafa Kirwan Some other presentations: Our own presentation went very well! We knew the stuff, were lagom prepared and acted with confidence. Got great critique from Kirwan. Well done both of us! :) And here is the Google sponsored reception. The banquet is on tuesday though. And finally a few of us ended up on a reggae bar. Lots of pushy peeps on the way in.

Yesterday we (Jordi and I) mostly worked on the presentation for today, but in the evening we took the subway downtown. We went to see the Forbidden city and the Himmelska fridens torg (a few call it Tianamen square though), or rather we just took the subway there and walked from there. At the street there were many guys walking around selling their service of snapping a pic of you and printing it on a portable printer.

The flight with Qatar Airways went well. Got an ok seat, but what makes them slightly better is all the complimentary stuff, like free drinks (incl whiskey :) ), and the nice entertainment system. No dancing bears, but a screen in front of you with a lot of movies to choose from. 6h to Doha, cap of Qatar, 2h wait, then 7:40h to Beijing. Took a taxi to the hotel, Park Plaza Beijing Science park, only ca 100Y (~100kr).

These are some leftovers I haven't written about before. There were some eerie, creepy animals in the Cambodian forest that scared the s!!t out of us when we were exploring a temple that had closed for the day and was void of people. The sun had just set when these animals, called "rajj" started synchronizing their sound in time and frequency. Like being in a horror movie. VID HERE, fix later.

We took the Jetstar late evening-flight to Da Nang. It was the most cramped flight I've ever had. I had just a few cm left for my legs, and the Vietnamese man sitting next to me was very friendly, a little too friendly so to speak. First I thought that he was just rude and taking up space but when I was almost falling asleep I felt his hand caressing my bare knee and I briskly woke up.

Cu Chi is the area (district? Village?) where, among other things the Americans had a big army base during the war and the VC built an intricate system of tunnels, 200 km of them. The reason was to hide VC fighters, covert regrouping and surprise attacks. As the US used B52 bombers with 200-450 kg bombs, carpet bombing large areas at a time, the VC built the tunnels in levels. First level was <=3m deep and would not survive those bombs.

The night before we left Saigon/HCMC we decided to head on out, making the city the most insecure since the '70-ies. Turns out Saigon had a few surprises itself. According to Google searches, the best clubs would be Gossip club, Apocalypse Now, Lush, and Velvet. We decided to start at the supposed THE place to go to: Gossip. No entrance fee, nice! Thank you pale falang-skin and shining smile ;) The music was reeeeeally heavy, the volume was insane and there was a crowd dancing on a small dance floor podium in the center.

We arrived in a intermittently very rainy Saigon. Or Ho Chi Minh City/HCMC as it is called now after the latest war but many still call it Saigon. Traffic in the rain: There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it. We got a really nice hotel room but stayed only one night before we moved on to next one. Might have said it before but the hotels.

Oh, and Facebook is banned in the free-thinking peoples republic of Vietnam. I can of course get around via proxy but… Well well.

We went to see the War remnants museum, which is a museum for the Vietnam/American war. There were some fighter jets, tanks, old bombs and equipment and guns on display but most moving was the very many photos and stories from both V's and A's. Saw a woman/girl that took photos of many of the nasty pics of mutilated bodies etc. Interesting. She seemed focused on those. There were also devices from one of the worlds first wireless sensor network deployments on display, the ADSID.

So, we have now left Cambodia behind us. We visited some more temples, but left many behind. There are simply too many! Bantey Srey is an area which is supposed to be good, but 37 km from Siem Reap so we didn't have time for it. Siem Reap is a small town, ca 10.000 inhabitants, but it has a club I feel Stockholm is lacking. We joined some locals for some interesting dishes, and I quote, "Egg has baby".

We took the Tuk tuk to Angkor Wat early in the morning. Good to get there so early but it was unfortunately cloudy. More tuktuk We didn't stay at AW, instead we left for Ta Prohm which is considered a sunset temple, ie looking better at the sunset. Thus, it's more empty during the morning. Also visited Ta Keo. Saw a cool centipede which fortunately enough was slow and didn't seem to have an appetite for human flesh.