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Published: July 22nd 2014
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San Sebastián beach I
View towards Monte Urgull Right after the week of my disputation I was at a conference in San Sebastián, the
9th Conference of the International Test Commission (ITC). We had four poster presentations there, two of the posters I had to design. I did that just in time, prepared them on Sunday evening after getting back from the Karl-May-Festspiele in Bad Segeberg, took them – with Achim and Richard’s posters – to the copy shop on Monday morning on my way to work, and picked them up on my way to the airport on Tuesday morning.
Richard and I arrived in Bilbao on Tuesday evening and met our Swedish colleague Mats at the airport. From there we caught the shuttle bus to San Sebastián, the journey took a bit over an hour. The weather was horrible, it was raining and the clouds were very low. And it was cold, you would not imagine it in the middle of summer in Spain! However, I did not mind it too much. I had been to San Sebastián the previous year and had had a lot of opportunities to explore the city because the conference had not been that interesting, but the weather had been awesome. But we did not let the weather spoil
San Sebastián beach II
View towards the old part of town our evening and took a walk into town to have some tapas. The good thing this time was that Richard speaks very good Spanish, so it was easy to order nice food! The first tapas place was a bit interesting, though. Initially we sat on a table, but then when we said that we were not going to have a full menu we had to move to a bar-style table and were not allowed to remain in the more or less comfy area of the restaurant. But we did what you do in Spain: We moved on to the next place and had more food and drinks there and got back to the hotel all happy in spite of the bad weather.
The next morning Richard and Mats went to a pre-conference workshop in the morning, they had booked one morning and one afternoon workshop. I had only booked an afternoon workshop, so I had time to go for a morning run and do some work and then went to the conference around noon to set up our company’s booth and to meet Richard and Mats. The conference took place in the wonderful historic Palacio Miramar, built in the
San Sebastián city centre
Town Hall with the statue of Jesus on top of Monte Urgull in the background. 19th century. Great setting! The afternoon workshop was super interesting and really instructive and of course after it we walked back into town along the beach (it was still raining though). Later in the evening we met with Achim and my colleague Jakob from Sweden who had flown into Bilbao the day after us. We went to a super nice place we had discovered last year and enjoyed way too many way too tasty tapas…
Thursday and Friday we were busy at the conference, presenting our posters, attending presentations, and meeting up with people. The conference is dedicated to tests and testing, so it is very specific, but it is super interesting to see what kind of research is going on in the field. It is also very nerdy, but I guess you guys all know that Katha loves nerdy stuff. I am not going to bore you with that kind of stuff, just wanted to let you know what we presented: Richard presented his master thesis on the effects the order of items has on the result participants get in an online personality questionnaire. We presented a study on the impact systematic training has on ability test performance.
Palacio Miramar
The congress venue We introduced a new instrument that can be used to predict counterproductive work behaviour. And I presented the results of my PhD study.
So we spent Thursday and Friday at the conference. Thursday night it was raining so hard that Achim, Richard and I caught a taxi into town for dinner – to a particularly nice restaurant where I had some kind of white bean stew, apparently a traditional dish and what was so special about it was that the beans were fresh because it was bean season. Mats and Jakob met with a client, that is why they did not join us that evening and I have to say that they missed something.
Friday afternoon the weather finally got better. We walked along the beach into town and had some fantastic ice cream. When we went on to have some coffee we came across a demonstration. People told us that the demonstrators were family members of imprisoned former ETA members and they were demonstrating for the prisoners to be moved into prisons not too far away so that it would be possible to visit them. The region has become peaceful after many years of horror due to
Marina
Yachts at the bottom of Monte Urgull ETA terror, but just because it is not on the news any more does not mean that it is not present in the region any more.
The FIFA World Cup was still on and so later in the evening we watched the game Germany – France in a restaurant with a bunch of French guys sitting right at the next table. And, well, Germany won. It was a fun and exciting evening.
Achim left early on Saturday morning which was a pity because he missed a wonderful Saturday afternoon with Richard, Mats, Jakob, and myself. The weather was beautiful, sunny and warm. After the congress was over we had lunch in our hotel and then walked into town for an ice-cream. Then we went for a little walk around the Monte Urgull on the east side of the bay. And finally we went to the beach for a wonderful swim. When we got out of the water some locals asked us whether we wanted to play volleyball with them. I had not played volleyball for maybe twelve years, but I did okay and enjoyed it. We played three games altogether and afterwards I really needed a cool down
Tapas
Hmmm... in the water and some time to relax with my book. In the evening we had a super-late (normal time by Spanish standards), but absolutely wonderful dinner in town, perfect for our last evening.
It was perfect having had the day on the beach because on Sunday when we left it was already raining again. In Hamburg, however, the weather was nice and Mizzi and I went for a walk along the Alster lake and then had… some tapas because I had not had any of those in… hours 😉
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