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1] It's a great place to organize a physics conference -- you can just relax and think and there's an ample amount of white noise all over the place from birds, and the wind etc. to make this possible. The conference structure also helped -- just 7 half-hour talks a day, and at most 50 people attended.

The hotel is like a dorm-house.

Daily walk to the Physics center.

Hiking around the place is a goddamn pleasure.

And yes, there are plenty of reminders everywhere that this is weed town.

2] The air is thin and you can often feel out of breath. I was fine after the first day but many people had trouble sleeping throughout the conference.

This place is high up -- 3000 ft. and the air can be thin.

3] The most common bird here is the Magpie. Here they have a very nice blue plumage and are exceptionally fat. The fatter they are, the more sophisticated they look, in a weird way -- the word that comes to my mind is sophistacado (fat like an avocado, but sophisticated, because of it).

A sophistacado striking a very elegant pose for my camera.

I think I pestered them a lot because I sort of hung around trying to reach them for 10 minutes at times. But these birds weren't aggressive. I probably wouldn't have been so pesky had I first seen videos of them harassing people on youtube.

The sophistacado looks better when it has more fat on it.

4] Skiing is actually super-duper easy -- at the bunny hill level at least. The boots are kinda weird because they literally force your legs to bend forward at all times -- that took a bit getting used to, but it helps with the balance.

That said, I felt like a total pro amidst all the cool-as-fuck 5 year olds. I sort of ditched (aka cool-as-fuck) the instructor right away and went down the slope at full speed but I didn't fall! A little bit of that, I'll admit, happened without me knowing what was happening. Later on, I did fall, I think 2 times, when I was learning to do pizza/french-fries/turning but it's no problem because you land on a bed of snow.

I think I have realized my ideal week-long vacation: go to a ski resort, ski for 5-6 hours a day (should be enough to become a mid-level pro, if that makes any sense) and then, in the night, find a place where you can see the Milky Way.

Bunny slope (honestly, it seemed steeper than it looks, so much steeper).

Pro-ing it up amongst little kids.

5] You can see a bunch of stars here -- it was easy to spot Orion, Big/Small Dipper etc. but you can't see the Milky Way. It's strange but I never really looked at the stars as a kid. The only association I had with the sky growing up in Moscow was the cloudiness and lack of sunlight -- it was clear to me even at that age that I used to get depressed because of the lack of sun. And somehow I never looked at the stars much in Delhi either... strange. But now that I've looked at a decent sky full of stars, I really want more and seeing the full Milky Way has become the most important short-term goal I have in life.