PetaMedia first kick-off workshop and adventures with Swiss airline

PetaMedia (Peer to Peer Tagged Media) is a Network of Excellence consortium funded by the European Commission in the area of integration between Social Networks, Peer to Peer networking, and Multimedia Content Analysis. More information about PetaMedia can be found at the following url:
http://www.petamedia.eu/

The kick-off meeting of the project took place in Delft, on March 13-14, 2008. I took a few pictures of the event and put them on the following url:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/PetaMediaDelft
The kick-off meeting was very productive indicating that PetaMedia will be a successful project.

The trip to Delft was by itself some adventure and full of interesting lessons.
In case your Swiss airline flight happens to land too late at Zurich airport and you miss your continuation flight, which is helas becoming now a standard pattern in Swiss flights from Geneva, expect waiting up to one hour before anybody takes care of you if you don't have the privilege of access to first class counter. If you have the privilege to first class counter, the wait is only 30 minutes, but definitely avoid some lady called Mrs Gonzales. She misses the DNA code for politeness in her genes. Don't even think about complaining if after making you wait almost two hours and up to virtually mid-night, they tell you that as you will have to take the plane leaving the next morning at 6 am, you should take a bus ride for 40 minutes to some small village called Zurzach near the German border (http://www.planetware.com/switzerland/zurzach-ch-ag-zurz.htm), sleep in a room which is hardly big enough for putting a tiny bed in it, and you have to get up before 5 am, take another bus ride for 40 minutes to come back to Zurich airport. Of course, if the hotel staff forgets to wake you up at 4:30 am as you asked them to do just a few hours before, don't be surprized. They will tell you they are sorry! At least you discover that not all people from German part of Switzerland are like Mrs Gonzales! If you have time and can stand to be treated like a criminal, after harassing you enough, the Swissport personnel may eventually consider exchanging the bus ride for a taxi, but consider yourself specially honored and lucky if this happens. This is a unique privilege for only the best customers. I just wonder if the best customers are handled like this, how the less best customers are treated!

By the way, did I mention there are cheaper direct flight from Geneva to Amsterdam offered by other companies?

I won't be complete if I did not tell you a similar adventure that happened during the pre-kick off meeting of PetaMedia.

The pre-kick off meeting of PetaMedia took place in Queen Mary University of London on February 11th 2008. As this was a one day meeting, I took a Swiss flight from Geneva to London City airport (http://www.londoncityairport.com/) in the morning with the intention of returning on the same evening. Not surprizingly, the flight was delayed due to fog and bad weather and after much delay in take-off, and then a couple of hours in the air circling around most of the time, Swiss decided to finally land instead in a very remote airport called Stansted (http://www.stanstedairport.com/). This is of course the type of things that can happen, so one cannot really blame anyone for this at first sight. The real problem was that Swiss airline has absolutely nobody nor whatsoever in that airport, and they don't tell you anything about it. So, they land you at a hundred kilometer distance from where you are supposed to be landed, and you are on your own, in an unknown airport, and unknown place, trying to find out how to get where you are supposed to get to! Do you think you receive a letter of apology or any compensation? I let you guess. I can only wish that one day Lufthansa which fully owns Swiss, will decide to change the name of this company, so that at least with the type of services they offer, they do not damage the image of Switzerland by abusing its name!