Yes, I know day 1 of the contest already ended and is probably a more interesting topic to blog about, but I finished writing this last night just before the internet was cut off to quarantine the contestants from the leaders, who received the problems and began translating them. I didn’t know about this until it was too late, which is why I’ve been waiting since yesterday to post this.

To provide a counterpoint to the last post, one of the many, many advantages of entering an international competition is that you get to meet a lot more people you already know, so there’s less time spent being socially awkward. While waiting for stuff to happen, aside from all the expected time spent with the Taiwan team, I also talked to, played games with, and otherwise entertained a whole lot of people I already knew, including my schoolmates (no less than fourteen of them were volunteers) and some of the college students who had shepherded us around during olympiad training.

Which is a good thing, too, because there was a lot of waiting.

First I waited for my teammates; my parents had decided to take me to the hotel (Fullon Shenkeng) directly, since I had a lot of stuff, and I had arrived early. This took about an hour, after which we had lunch. Then I waited for the hotel to give us our room cards, which took about five hours, after which we had dinner. Finally, at night, I waited for the Codeforces system tests. Very nerve-wracking. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Advantage #2 of being the home team: you can talk to all of the organizers and volunteers fluently, so you can get them to help you more quickly. Although we waited for our room cards for an obscenely long time, I got the volunteers to replace my pinyin-name-card with a legitimate one that said “Brian” on it really quickly.

Unfortunately, after I talked to a few more people, it looks like they aren’t going to change my name in the database. So if anybody reading this chances to look at the IOI live ranking and is unable to find me, look for the first name “Po-En”.

We finally arrived at the hotel at 3:30, meeting another local from Taiwan, Mr. Chen, who helped us carry some of our stuff off the bus. Po-Chiang, our guide, was waiting inside. We took more pictures and finally lugged the meager stuff we had off to our hotel rooms.

At least, we tried. I started to realize that there was much more to this hotel than it seemed.

Firstly, of course, was the confusing placement of rooms with numbers starting with 4 and 5 on the fourth floor (which would be the fifth floor by our numbering system, where the lobby is floor 1; but here the lobby was assigned 0. Off-by-one errors just waiting to happen here.) Secondly were the completely indecipherable signs. I don’t remember the details, but the first signs we saw read something like “560 ~ 540: left; 520 ~ 540: right”. Occasionally there would be weird slashes or half-slashes between the numbers instead (later I finally realized they were slanted, Comic-Sans-style capital Ys, or “and” in Spanish). Are these closed, open, or half-open intervals? And why the heck are their upper and lower bounds in a different order!?

We wandered through the corridors, peeking down each one, trying to figure out whether the numbers were increasing or decreasing and whether a parity argument (for those of you not fluent in math lingo, that means odds and evens) allowed for the existence of our room. Who knew the simple act of finding one’s living quarters could be so mathematically tasking? In the end, our rooms were in the last corridor, just about diametrically opposite to the elevators on the half of our floor. Oh well.

The room was pretty nice overall. The furniture and basic facilities were quite complete, with a sparkly bathroom and a couple tables and chairs of various shapes. The closet was big and had a safe, which was rather important because just about everybody we had met had warned us over and over again about all the incredibly skilled thieves, muggers, and pickpockets in Argentina. It was probably much safer (no pun intended) in the hotel, but with all of these warnings (later we would even find a notice from the hotel warning us to lock our doors) I was never entirely certain. There were lots of lights controlled by a set of confusing switches on either side of our beds. There was at least one white immovable divider cunningly disguised as a switch, one switch that didn’t ever seem to do anything, and one that turned everything off. The last one made a little sense after a while because it had pictures of stars and a moon on it, but the whole setup was still pretty non-user-friendly in my opinion.