Today is the second day at Wikimania in Esino Lario, a small town several kilometers up a narrow road full of switchbacks in northern Italy.
During the first day, I met some Kiwix developers. CScott, especially, was talking about a use case that Kiwix doesn’t address well right now — offline editing. We talked a bit about that, the International Space Station, WikiEM and I mentioned the mediawiki remote for git.
I had never actually tried it out, though. I found several bugs and got caught up in fixing those rather than the other work I had planned. More about this later in a separate blog post.
I worked on it too late.
When I finally decided to go to bed at 1:00 in the morning, I couldn’t find the house where I all my luggage was and where I was supposed to sleep.
I walked up and down the roads around the hills here, but finally had to give up at 2:00. I walked back to the polizia station and asked for help. I was hoping they had shared a list of the places that the registered attendees.
They had not shared the list.
It was 2:00 in the morning and a man I later found out was the vice mayor of Esino Lario was driving me around while I talked to his niece on his cell phone — the only person he could find that could find at that time that could translate.
Because of the absurd comedy involved — a stupid American didn’t know where he was supposed to sleep at 2:00 in the morning — his niece, Amelia, and his 80 year old mother quickly made up a bed for me and gave me her apartment while she went to stay with her uncle.
As I told them, it was a great privilege to experience Italian hospitality. I could tell that Amelia’s grandmother (who reminded me of my own grandmother) was really pleased by this — even through translation. She jokingly told me I should let everyone know about her bed and breakfast.