Yes, I arrived back home in Vienna yesterday afternoon. Short roundup: Los Angeles is great. The SIGGRAPH was totally worth it. San Francisco is even greater!

Too tired to write, so just some pictures from the last days.

Alright, I'm in San Francisco now and this city feels much more "alive". The bus ride from Oakland accross the Bay Bridge was most impressive, too bad I couldn't get a good picture of that beautiful skyline. Although the weather is quite windy and cool, I've been around a lot already and took almost as much pictures in one day than in the whole last week. On quite every intersection you want to stop and take a picture in all four directions because the buildings and streets are so nice. Yesterday I've been to Market Street, South of Market, Chinatown and the Ferry Building. Today I've been to the Beach, the Golden Gate park and Twin Peaks. Most of you guys will know this, but the slope of the streets in SF is really extreme. Respect if you can parallel park your car here.

SIGGRAPH ended nicely on thursday with me at the exhibition on a swag hunt. :-)
I also saw some very interesting talks, one of them by Rob Cook about wavelet noise.

Next day, I went Downtown again to see the X-Games which were a bit disappointing to me. I "only" saw the women's skateboard street finals and the men's skateboard vert finals. The view you get from the seating is quite bad and the athletes' performances weren't convincing either.

The Amtrak trip was also not so spectacular as I have been told. The scenery is nice but nothing extraordinary. There is the sea to the left and the Sierra Nevada to the right. The train was late for about two hours which is actually very good, cause people told me usually it is late for 5 hours and more. One person even talked of a 13 hour delay.

So, its day three of the SIGGRAPH and also the first day of the exhibition which means a lot more visitors.
The George Lucas Q&A yesterday was pretty interesting. Lucasfilm will be doing fully animated TV series in Asia and old-school movies in California.
Other than that I have visited a lot of courses and papers presentation. Unfortunately there are so many at the same time so there is always something you are missing.

Today is the first day of SIGGRAPH and to my disappointment there are no cameras permitted. So let me just tell you from yesterday when I visited Long Beach.
I got down to Pike/Long Beach in the afternoon and it was incredibly hot, so I took a ride on the Rocket Boat to cool me down. There is also the famous Queen Mary, the beautiful Pike Avenue, nice parks and other aquatic tourist attractions. Nice place and nice people.

Alright, I'm at Starbucks now and they offer free wireless internet access. Hooray!
So, here is a summary of the last two days:

Due to heavy thunderstorms in New York, I arrived with a four hour delay at LAX (2am local time). Nevertheless I got up early next day and took the metro to downtown, where I headed for the Convention Center. Before I got there I passed the Staples Center and noticed that the X-Games are held there next week. So, if the SIGGRAPH might turn out boring I'll go next street and check out some skateboarders. Before I went to hollywood in the afternoon, I bought the ticket to SF at the Amtrak station in LA, which is a very beautiful and luxurious building.
Next day I took the hotel shuttle to Venice Beach and walked it up to Santa Monica. Yes, the beach looks exactly as in Baywatch with these nice little lifeguard buildings every hundred meters and a cool Mitch inside.
It seems as if in LA everybody owns a car. There are nearly no pedestrians but there are millions of cars.

Sorry for the late post, I couldn't get an internet connection earlier and there are also no pictures so far, cause I'm in an Apple Store right now in Santa Monica.
LA is great and incredibly large. I've already checked out Downtown, Hollywood, Venice Beach and Santa Monica.
Not much time right now to write more or the Apple stuff will get angry, I'll do so as soon as I can.

So, tomorrow morning I leave for LA. The plane departs in Vienna at noon and if everything goes well, 9 hours later I have a 3 hour stop in New York and then a 6 hour flight to LAX. So, by 11pm (local time) I should hopefully be in my hotel room sleeping and you should be hearing from me the next day.

Welcome to my travel Blog!

A short explanation what this is about:
From July 27th to August 12th I will be traveling to the US Westcoast. The first week I will be in Los Angeles to attend SIGGRAPH. After that I will go to San Francisco for holidays and sightseeing. If I can hook up to the internet there, I will be posting updates and pictures here on this website.