Tue 25 Sep
This is the earliest I have woken myself up (0530). Ever. It is insanely dark outside. There are stars outside. We have to be up this early because the buses to Montichiari for the first contest day depart at 0700. Or so we thought. Following breakfast and boarding the buses, the tyres did not move until 0800, and, with a police escort, we arrived there by 0830. Entering the contest hall at 0915, we were told that the contest would only start at 0930, leaving us wondering for 15 minutes why we couldn't have got up later. At 0930, the contest started. Well, for most people. I was hit with a series of 500 Internal Server Error messages for 3 minutes, much to my frustration. Australia ended up doing great as a team, with everyone well above the medal cutoffs so far. We shall see how we go on Day2 (Thursday). Despite the technical difficulties, the contest was made awesome by the large bags of lunch delivered to our desks by the friendly guides, which was an unexpected pleasantry.
Having no appeals, we boarded the buses back to the village. While the rest of my team decided to swim in the lake, I preferred to stay on land and headed out with Jamie (the NZ deputy) to the soccer pitch where we met some other nations' teams. I learned that at the IOI, Eastern European countries only care about two things: Informatics and Football. Teaming up with the Danish team, we managed not to score a goal in all 4 matches that we played, but was still fun. We headed over to the tennis courts, and met up with a Malaysian representative, finding out that this is the first IOI that Malaysia has competed in. Upon arrival at the dining hall, I discovered my team were ever-curious about my whereabouts. They'd been playing bartog with team NZ, which we continued with Logan after dinner.
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