Day 1 - The practice day

After a nice day in Rome and one of the last decent meals we had while away, we early headed back to the airport. The screening process began and after we resolved the problem of Tina apparently having too short surname (Ilc) to board an airplane, we finally took off towards US. We traveled back in time, flying for 10 hours and only arriving to our goal 4 hours after take off. The flight itself was uneventful but it took most of the day and it was quite tiring. We finally got to sunny, yet not so warm Boston. The home of MIT.

greeting sign in Boston, MA

US security checks - as seen on TV

Let the jet lag begin! We managed to get 2 shuttles from the airport to Hyatt, drivers were fun, explained some basic Boston information to those of us who haven't been there before. When we got to the hotel we had a bit of an awesome moment, the hotel was amazing. It was pure win actually, we even got free WiFi as iGEMers, we realized that after Rok C. already paid $6 for the first two hours. Computer guys just can't live without the internet. It's terrible.We'd sell a kidney for it.

the view of the hotel from the lobby up

talking about room distribution, we can see the debate was pretty intense

the view of the hotel from the 11th floor

big screen TV in the room, not that we had time to watch it

It was the day before the presentation so me and Jernej had to practice. We barely made it through the first 'private' practice run, when we already went for a real test run in one of the MITs presentation rooms. It was small, like a class room, but gave us a good idea how scary a presentation in english can be.

g33k battle, main prize: pizza + a soda of your choice

pizza time before the practice run

stop faffing about, get to work

happy time after the official pracitce run

With a few glitches and bloopers we made it through and headed back to the hotel where we did some more practicing and another test run with the entire team present.

unofficial test run

#2 unofficial test run

We were getting quite tired so we decided it would be best to stop there.

The lack of sleep and jet lage was taking over and around 23:00 local time, we went to bed. It is a big day tomorrow. It'll be the first presentation of our project in front of the other teams.

Boston skyline from the hotel

p.s.: Its easy to prepare american food,take what ever you have and just add sugar.