CCC Summary

Thu 01 January 2015

To be honest, this CCC was mental healing for me. I went on a trip with a lot on my mind and I just couldn't relax. I didn't relax until the last day of the congress. Why? For 8.5 years of my professional carrier as a system administrator, I've never heard "good job, man" in as many words as "what did you fuck up?" kind of critics, so it finally got to me. On the other hand, CCC is all about sharing knowledge and telling interesting stories to other people. It relaxed me because I realized that, although I'm totally weird for people in my country, I'm nothing strange on the conference. I was accepted. FINALLY!!!

Let's start from the beginning. My fiancé was so excited about CCC. I still can't understand her, as she's something like a child psychologist. There are topics covering e-learning and stuff like that, but she understands hacking, programming, administration, security, privacy, etc. So, for the first time in my life I'm with the girl I don't have to explain what my job and hobbies are all about. What a relief! Second, she booked us tickets for hacker tour of DESY, particle accelerator. What? My girlfriend not only understands me, she's pushing me in the right direction? I must be dreaming. Let me repeat. My fiancé was excited about seeing particle accelerator more then buying new camera (she's also amateur photographer). How cool is that?

OK, we're at the airport. As I've never flew in an airplane before, I had no idea what to expect. It was fun, of course. Seeing the clouds from above, seeing the Sun, as it's winter and it's cloudy every day. The G force when taking off was something I should have anticipated, but I was so surprised. And most of all, the size of Munich and Hamburg airports was astonishing. Let me explain. I was born and I still live in a town of 300k people. We don't even have an airport, so seeing something that huge was great. Oh, and seeing that even Germans get some things too late was so precious to me.

We're in Hamburg. As my fiancé and I can't speak German, it's fun. It's so well organized that we can not comprehend it. It took me 4 days to figure out how to properly read S bahn maps. Germans are looking at us like Martians when we ask something like "in which direction is Dammtor station?", because it's so obvious to them. Let me tell you, I don't mind. I come from a different culture, if you can call it a culture at all, and having diversity in almost everything is something I find useful. Of course, you feel like a jerk at first, but it's an adventure.

We're at the Congress Centrum Hamburg, finally. It's so huge I didn't get to know my way around it in 4 days. I still couldn't find my way around, and we heard from an older W Holand member that they maybe return CCC to Berlin, but to a proper congress center big enough for 50k people. I was like "What? That's 1/6 of the population of my town! Do you rent a bike to go around it?". Anyway, they have few solutions in mind when CCH becomes too crowded (it's already a bit crowded). You can download all lectures from CCC FTP. To be honest, I can point at only one lecturer, a friend of ours from Varaždin, Croatia: UNHash - Methods for better password cracking.

After congress, we had new year eve celebration at our friends house from Hamburg who speaks really good Serbian, so we finally could forget English. He was super nice and prepared beer and dinner I will never forget. Even if it was the worst night ever I would still have to say it was the best ever, because of his kick boxing black belt. No kidding with this guy. :o)

For the end, I have few things anyone traveling to Germany and not knowing German language should know. First, Turkish food is THE BEST! Sorry folks from other countries, but Turks prepare insanely large and delicious dishes. You can't compete with that. Second is, if you want to ask a random dude on the street for directions or help in English, ask the black guy, as Germans and English are not really tight. It's not about racism, it's just that there's a huge chance that black guy is actually from USA and can understand you. Of course, we decided to take German classes once we get home. Ideally, knowing English, German, Spanish and Chinese, you're prepared for the world. We'll see how good we'll become at learning new languages, but hey, I learn new programming languages once a year. What's a new spoken language compared to that. :o) We're preparing for the flight home, as tomorrow morning we're departing. It was nice, useful, helpful and fun. Thank you for all the fish!