All-Ukrainian Student Programming Olympiad. Semifinal. Day 1

I'm starting to publish a few short notes about the semifinal of the All-Ukrainian Student Programming Olympiad among students in the southern region, which is being held in Simferopol.

We got to the city pretty quickly, since the trip isn't long, and I even managed to sleep about three hours on the train. The competition organizers were already there to meet us at the station.

Since all the Odesa and Kherson teams came on this train, and maybe some others too, a bus had been booked for us, which took us to the hotels — thanks to the organizers for that.

We were put up again in the cheapest hotel, and again in a hotel at the stadium; it's notable that only two Kherson teams were placed there — it seems the Odesa universities aren't as stingy about paying for their representatives' accommodation as ours are. The second team is the KhSU team, it'll be interesting to see the level of their preparation.

Although the spots are the cheapest and roughly the same price as in the Kharkiv "Metalist", this "Sportyvna" hotel makes a much better impression and shows more care for its customers. We got a triple room, matching the number of people on the team. There's one bathroom per room, not per block, there's a TV — although it's a Soviet-era "Foton" brand and still in working order, we didn't risk keeping it on for long. Besides a couple of outlets, there's also an extension cord with three more, which is very convenient given how tech-heavy the occupants are. Aesthetically the room doesn't look great, since the walls are scuffed and there are holes here and there, but it's clean and fairly warm thanks to the heating being on. Apart from the walls, everything else is in good condition and looks it.

One of the hotel's drawbacks is that it's pretty far from the university and you can only get to it by a single route, 41. There was no squeezing into a "Gazelle", but we got onto the next "Bohdan" fairly normally and made it to the Vernadsky Taurida National University in about half an hour. The facade of the main building is currently under repair, and to get to the main lobby we had to weave between the buildings and through them. It's notable that there are guards at the entrances to the buildings who only let people in with student IDs or passes. But with the organizers we managed to get through without problems.

At registration everyone was given a badge, a schedule, a sponsor's notebook, a pen, and a questionnaire about preferences in programming languages and technologies — in general, the standard set, but conveniently packaged, and the notebook even has the competition schedule on its first page — also very convenient — though the badges turned out plain and not interesting.

After that we headed to the canteen, where we appreciated the wide selection and had lunch. On the following days we'll be eating separately from the other participants, and there shouldn't be any problems with queues or finding a seat. After lunch we got into a half-empty minibus and headed back to the hotel, where in the supermarket we bought food for dinner and breakfast.

There was nothing special at the hotel itself, we just spent a couple of hours trying to solve a problem from the Winter School and figured out reading from and writing to a file, since the team's core lineup has changed and now it consists entirely of programmers, not systems/network people. Then we watched a movie, ate, slept, watched a movie, ate, hung out, and went to bed :) Well, and each of us also managed to do something of his own. All in all, we spent the time well; if we'd gotten more sleep at night, maybe we'd have walked around the city, but as it was we weren't in the mood, and besides we didn't know what interesting places we could go to.

Tomorrow will be more interesting — the opening and the test round of the competition; it's also convenient that the schedule isn't packed yet and we only need to be at the university by lunchtime.

Edited 19.04.2008