3 cool events of the week

There were 3 very interesting events on this week (during my official vacation):

• a Russian - Finnish workshop dedicated to our project related to management of hazardous part of household waste.
• An "International" conference named "An Environmental Equilibrium"; and...
• OSM mapping party in Volhov town.

A workshop passed as always: Russians posed themselves as know-all persons (despite no one was prepared because all the materials were in English...), talked a lot but ineffective; and Finnish did the real job. For the first time in my life I had to be a parallel Russian-Finnish and a Finnish-Russian translator. A hard job, I have to admit...

"An Environmental Equilibrium" conference (which first day I missed because of the workshop) exceeded my expectations... a little, actually, but nevertheless. The funniest thing was that the first face I saw when entered the lecture hall was the face of my scientific adviser, who new that I will participate but didn't tell me that he will be a participant too O_o. He leaved quickly so we were unable to talk.

There were not as many people as expected (because of the summer time and a poor feedback from organisers, who didn't provided participants with the time table in advance, I suppose the main part of scientists who sanded papers preferred to be somewhere else) - organisers even had to merge together all the sections because of the lack of speakers. The good thing was that the publications were ready and I was able to enjoy my article on the subject of illegal dumping monitoring at St. Petersburg with implementation of high-resolution satellite imagery. The bad thing was that my scientific adviser had already left the conference when I demonstrated my presentation.

An unexpected finding was that the map in my Garmin, which expected to be fresh, had a poor an outdated information about location of the conference and OSM was also poor, but up to date.

OSM mapping party in Volhov was my first mapping party. Despite there were few  participants (actually if there were more of them I wouldn't be able to participate at all because in that case party would took place a week earlier, when I was on vacation in Narva... and mapped it; collected data became more important due to imagery for Narva won't be available soon) and heavy rain (from time to time) we were able to survey western part of town.

After 2 hours of mapping we gathered at the cafe to discuss our survey. I've made an attempt to find an answer for the the question about mapping managed green areas, but it seems that I'm the only one who care.

The most unpleasant part was an attention from drunken ex-prisoner in cafe, who started to ask questions about our activities and then begged for money for beer. In Narva my wife and I brought attention of the local drunkards while survey too...

In the end we had a nice attraction on board of Zverik's jeep - a survey of the Russian roads ;-)