Departing From Flock To Fedora 2023 - Part I
After a relatively late start, I shared breakfast conversations with fellow event attendees. Sumantro and I checked out early and headed off to Cork Central to get some more souvenirs. With loads of collectibles and chocolates obtained for gifting to friends and families, we came back to the hotel.
If the onward journey toward Flock To Fedora 2023 was an adventure, the departure from the event was no short of a race against time. It all started with me waking up as early as 0600 am Ireland Standard Time in the morning on 5th August 2023. As there were not any talks and workshops scheduled for that day, I decided to catch up on the sleep that I would very likely lose out on my way back to India. I got myself freshened up and reached out to Sumantro Mukherjee over a WhatsApp call to check if he was ready. We did end up taking some more time to pack our luggage up way before the designated checkout time. It was around 0800 am Ireland Standard Time that we headed down for breakfast with our backpacks because we wanted to leave to purchase some souvenirs.
As we were not 100% sure that we would be back by 1100 am Ireland Standard Time which was the designated checkout time, we decided to checkout in advance and have our luggage under the receptionist's protection. We shared our breakfast conversations with Davide Cavalca and Adam Samalik who were on the same table. I talked with Davide about how custom operating system images are built for distributions like Fedora Linux, CentOS Stream, Red Hat Enterprise Linux etc. and he helped me with some choices like Mkosi and OSBuild. We were soon joined by Neal Gompa and Shaun McCance for breakfast. As I had some more snacks left in my backpack, I decided to give the mini Bhakadvadi snacks to Adam and Davide and some spicy capsicum-flavoured chips to Davide.
Once Sumantro and I were done with our breakfasts, we got ourselves some photographs with the folks at the table and headed back to our rooms to bring down our luggage. After leaving our luggage at the receptionist's discretion, we checked out and headed for the exit. Here again, we met up with the likes of Jess Chitas, David Fan and Adam O'Brien, with whom we clicked some more photographs. In the parking area, I met up with Amy Marrich whom I gave my last packet of spicy capsicum-flavoured chips, thus dusting my hands off all the gifts I brought from India for the community friends that I met during the conference. Strangely enough, Cork was pleasantly sunny that morning after the previous night's heavy downpour and we decided to make the most of it.
From the nearest bus stop, we decided to take the #114 and head towards Cork Central. In about fifteen minutes, the bus arrived and we took the seats on the ground deck with the heavy backpacks we were hauling. At around 1000 am Ireland Standard Time, the first place we headed to was an apparel store as Sumantro wanted to purchase some gifts for his fiancee. I checked with Lenka Segura on the messaging app in the meantime and learned that she boarded the train from Cork to Dublin as her return flight to Spain was from there. The second place we headed to was Carroll's Irish Gifts shop which I visited previously as Sumantro wanted to buy a bunch of those souvenirs after seeing those from the purchases I made the previous evening with Lenka.
After purchasing the souvenirs, we went to a Centra outlet to get ourselves a bunch of chocolates for our friends and families. We also tried looking for the shop that Lenka and I found to be closed in the previous evening but as we were unable to find it, we headed back to the bus stop in the Cork Central. As the travel did not originate from there, we did not have to wait much before we were on our way back to the Lover's Avenue bus stop. Sumantro and I had an interesting discussion on our way back about the usage of proprietary services for building open-source solutions as well as the people's perspectives towards those, especially in the field of graphic design. We soon reached the hotel's waiting area where we met with Amita Sharma, Anushka Jain and Nikita Tripathi.