It is evening of the third day and we are still netless - "manyana" is all that we know and people have accepted that. Hacking is being conduced efficiently - the local network is up and there is local Debian mirror in the LAN.

The mornings are very nice here - it is not too hot yet and the water sprinklers also improve the situation further.

I took a walk to the Oaxtepec town itself which is a couple minutes away from the Debconf6 venue. I hoped to find a currency exchange, but I had no idea where to go and the city is planned rather randomly, so I did not find it and got lost. Additionally I was brave^Wstupid enough to take this walk barefoot and by the middle of the day the asphalt was getting very hot. Luckily I managed to find a person who spoke tiny bit of English, showed him the wristband of the hotel and he immediately suggested to drive me there as he was just going to go in that direction. So I got back fast and relatively safe.

People are getting a bit bored without the Internet. And what do Debian people do when they get bored? Right, they start playing Mao. I joined after the game was running for an hour and with a bit of luck won once before the game ended in implosion. My rule went unused.

It is late in the evening but the Internet is finally up. Hurray! In seconds the hacklab become much more quiet - the number of people there doubled, but the talking seized. People flooded the IRC. In an hour the spell was broken - the lunch is here, and the hacklab is to be closed for the night. Hard choice.

After my failure to find a currency exchange during the day, Enrico agreed to help me - he would withdraw some money from a local ATM and give it to me in exchange for my pounds and euros. The closest ATM is in the town, so we went there after the dinner. It is strange that I did not notice the bank with the ATM before because it has an advertisement put up on a ~30 meter pole. It seems that in Mexico the cooler you are the higher your advert is. On the way back operation "thirst clenching" commenced - beer was acquired from the local 24 hour shop. We were told before that the security guards of the hotel did not want us to bring any alcohol from the town following the "pool accident", but the operation went on anyway. It was a long walk and now I finally now some places in the town that have some value to them. Thanks for the help, Enrico!

I will need that money very much tomorrow. Why? Read on :)

Note: I have decided to not put photos inside these blog entries for now because it consumes too much time. Instead I will do an update of these pages sometime after the Debconf is over and will also upload all pictures to gallery.debconf.org at the same time. I will also then make a new post in the blog saying that I did so and having in it links to all appropriate locations.