My WSIS 2005 - Day 3: Famous and boring
There is not too much to say about yesterday I guess, but let’s see what we find.
The morning, the time before getting to the exhibition halls, was extremely chaotic. To hotel staff kept communicating about every story from “The bus will leave in five minutes” to “there has never been a bus planed for today”; the only thing all their announcements had in common was that the whole mess was not only because of the heavy traffic this morning, but also “Due To Security Reasons…..”.
Now, since not only buses did not seem to show up but neither the hall manager who was supposed to bring Leo and me to our stand, even I tried to be something like nervous. Well, it then happened after waiting much too long that still one of those buses made it to our hotel at all and since nobody knew how long the hall manager would take to show up, we took this bus - YEP, and this time, it worked fine. Of course, the bus driver and some passengers almost died when they saw my funny Labrador, wearing his brand new badge, but I guess everybody survived and we made it safely to the Kram Park.
At the WSIS 2005 gates, we found like the longest lines ever, but still made it in within an acceptable time.
The reason why especially the Swiss people were supposed to be exactly on time was the visit of the president of our confederation, Samuel Schmid. Throughout the morning, until he finally did show up, everybody, including me, seemed to be in this stupid “Let’s kind of plan every move that he and us are going to make and every word to say” mood; and of course, when he actually came to the Access For All/OFCOM/Design For All stand (90 minutes or more delayed), nothing was put into action as planed 
At least I was able to notify him about the fact that Leo was most intelligent, about some mistakes on his web site and about me finding it nice to meet him and stuff.
Before visiting us, by the way, he held one of the opening speeches to the summit, in which he addressed Tunisia and once more the whole Human Rights Scandals going on day by day. He expressed his expectations that it should be possible to have freedom of speech and freedom of press within and outside of the summit areas. That this was definitely not the case, I found out when trying to access the Swiss Info web site, which probably reports some facts that the Tunisian Government rather would not like its people to know about - The site has been inaccessible for multiple days; and the error message (which is absolutely not typical for Swissinfo) is displayed in French only (which is what they speak here), but in no other language.
Well, the rest of the day was indeed rather boring. We had some cool guests though, including some blind ones from Tunisia and Chile, and sighted ones from a couple other countries, such as France or Liechtenstein.
Leo was being cuddled from time to time. He had a better day in general, at least during the summit; it is now easier to enter the hall with him and moving around.
In the hotel, on the other hand, there still seem to be skeptical glances thrown at us when we are hanging around with the animal. The other part of the staff is opening up slowly. And the rest of Tunisia I would say is still the same.
The dinner was just normal; I got a bunch of fish tonight and a Strawberry called but like apricot tasting juice.
Tomorrow, we might get visited by another high Minister of the Swiss government, who, as I was told, should have more time to spend with us than the president himself 
I generally hope that tomorrow will be different than today, like more fun or whatever, at least something more than just famous and boring.
PS: Oh yep, for those who do speak more French than I do, check out this Article from the Le Temps Newspaper featuring, among other stuff, our stand and a very certain dog…