Hey Ho, comrades!

I want to share about the days we spent at the #steemstemvirgo meetup.

Who is only here for the the pic, scroll down to the very bottom!!!

As @suesa told you some hours ago, it all started in

Florence.

Actually, it started the day before, when WhatsApp started to show strange messages of people who were late for their flight because of a "bus connection", had problems with airport connections or cancelled because they wanted 100% refunds on their expensive flights.

Unimpressed by the difficulties of those frigging air-hipsters, me and @monie did it old-school. We entered our car and took it to Innsbruck, where we left our son at his grandparent's (yay, freedom!). Then, we continued driving south until they spoke something different.*

We arrived in the early afternoon, so we had time enough to hang out at our little appartment, that we rented 20 min outside of Florence, and to enjoy the beauty of the Toskan countryside with the Prosecco that our landlord had placed in our fridge.
Then, we took the bus to Florence. "20 min outside of the city" now turned to 40 min outside, and we arrived just in time to eat pizza with @lemouth, @suesa, @reggaemuffin, @alexdory, @robotics101, @scienceangel, @egotheist, @fredrikaa, @nicniezgrublem and his girldfriend, @galotta, and I really hope I did not forget anyone, because after all, someone has to read and vote this post. ;-P
What is there to say? Great people, great food. Nice.

With full bellies, we tried to get back to Fiesole. But now, "40 min outside of the city" turned to 90 min as we had to wait more than an hour for the bus. Italy, we love you. And I'm glad I didn't have to make it back to Florence again, as I calculated that it should have taken me around 3 hrs by all laws of extremely valid statistics.
We slept well.

Next day, after getting a lecture on Florentine morning traffic, stressing out our organizer just a tiny bit, and almost ruining our car (thanks @nicniezgrublem for grabbing the hand brake again!), we arrived at VIRGO only 10 minutes late. We were not the last ones!

*^{Who can tell me which movie I cited here wins a share of steem basic income.}

Now what is VIRGO?

In the words of a non-physisist (we had to learn that physician is the wrong term the hard way): They measure "gravitational waves", that occur when heavy objects in space collide and explode. In that way, they can for example observe colliding black holes.
The problem: Those waves are extremely hard to measure. When they hit Mother Earth, the distances shorten by a tiny little bit - it's the equivalent of the change of the sea level when someone pours a glass of water into it.

Crazy shit, yes. But they managed to measure exactly this, by constructing a kilometer-long instrument that looks like that:

Outside

Inside. Yes I know, that's a brewery.

How it works? It's basically a giant interferometer. What that is? Ask @lemouth.

Pisa

I never was in Pisa before. And I liked it. Their tower is so... leaning.

But also the other old buildings were worth a visit. And the city has flair.

rowers on the river beneath an evening sky

Again, we were late for dinner. But it tasted extremely well nevertheless. My compliment to the four restaurant voters. We had a nice evening again with much talk about science & the blockchain and drove back to Florence pleasently tired. And survived driving, by the way.

The group picture

Ah yeah. Sorry, I forgot that one.