Preamble

I thought writing a short blog about my experience at the NAC would be interesting, so here we are. This year's NAC was held in UCF from March 18-23. This is the third time in a row that the NAC is hosted in UCF. I will put all comments regarding the problems in spoiler tags, since this contest may or may not be used in a future universal cup.

Since this is my third year at the NAC hosted at the exact same place, there is a sense of familiarity with how things are run. For example, the food, hotels, and contest location hasn't changed much in the last couple of years.

Arrival Day

The flight to Orlando was very eventful for our team. We had a tight connection at Toronto and our initial flight was significantly delayed. It was so bad to the point that during the flight all of us received emails that we got rebooked to different flights. Despite this, we tried our best to make the flight to Orlando. We ran across the airport to catch our flight, which we made because our second flight was also delayed.

Being the team with the furthest flight to Orlando, we were actually the first to arrive. We were the first team to get our T-shirts and also picked as the first team during registration! As usual, the arrival day is pretty relaxed. We had lunch at a Texas BBQ place close to the hotel. When we were eating, tourist, lperovskaya, and xiaowuc1 sat at the table next to us. Funnily, none of my team members recognized them and I only told them when we finished eating and were exiting the restaurant. They immediately went back and took a photo with Gennady, which was quite amusing.

Best Food at NAC

Later on, we head back and took a bit of rest, then continued on with dinner and registration. The dinner was the most common dinner that they serve at the Celeste hotel, which was decent. Registration went relatively smoothly, although as the first team coming through the pipeline, there were some minor hiccups here and there but overall relatively smooth. Finally, we got a chance to talk to some of the sponsors of NAC. I met some familiar faces, some from last year's NAC and some from IOI 2025.

Day 1 (Opening Ceremony)

The morning was quite uneventful for me as a coach, as I did not have any mandatory events to attend. I ended up just chatting with other coaches and some organizers for most of the morning until the career fair. I had some fun conversations with some of the sponsors and even got recommendations for my next trip.

The evening pretty much went the same way as the morning for me, wrapped up by the opening ceremony. That was not the case for the contestants. They got to participate in a fun activity organized by one of the sponsors.

The dinner this day was a JS game/activity night, so there were several games that could be played.

Day 2 (Programming Camp)

The morning and afternoon this day was not that eventful for me, I just did some work and chatted with some people. I also attended the coach meeting and got to know a bit more about ICPC.

Since there was a bit of a gap between the group photo and dinner, I ended up just hanging around at the lobby.

credit: chenjb

Later on at night, I ended up going to get boba and just hanging out there.

Going back from getting boba, I did a CF Blitz round with yunz_qiao, the University of Toronto (student) coach this year. I was quite rusty, as I haven't practiced in quite a while, but it was still quite fun.

Day 3 (Dress Rehearsal)

I didn't do much this day, I just came to the dress rehearsal, then I needed to catch up on a lot of schoolwork that I haven't done and I ended up taking a very extended "nap" and skipped some of the events later in the day.

Day 4 (Contest Day)

Team Diamond Dust: Ryazimn, cran, SnowLucario_Z

After the contest, our team went out for dinner to celebrate. After that, we went to get boba and met the usual nightly boba crowd at the nearby happy lemon.

credit: chenjb

Back to Reality

Unfortunately, reality is often disappointing and I have to go back to not being in a competitive programming event. The trip back was uneventful and everything went smoothly. Overall, this NAC was a really fun experience and I got to look at NAC in a different perspective compared to my previous two years as a competitor.

Thank you to everyone that made this NAC such a wonderful experience, I hope to see you again in other competitive programming events :)

In my opinion, IOI 2025 has been one of the worst run IOIs. Here is my personal experience of the issues as a (Deputy) Leader that I felt/heard at IOI 2025 from other leaders/contestants. I will attempt to stick to a somewhat chronological order when talking about these issues, but this might be easier said than done. This blog is the first part of a series of three blogs, highlighting things that went wrong at IOI. There will also be another blog highlighting the positives of this IOI.

This blog will contain parts describing the food and opening ceremony.

There were pretty bad issues with the food available. Our contestants did not get enough breakfast during the second day because they ran out of scrambled eggs. As a result, two of my contestants that were muslim could only eat bread. The other two non-muslim contestants could only eat bread and ham. The breakfast available for both the contestants and leaders is quite appalling, especially for people from countries where eating only bread, eggs, and ham is common. The breakfast available never changed and eating the same breakfast for 8 (+ 3 days in my team's case) was not very pleasant. It would be nice if the organizers tried to accommodate more people and have protein other than eggs and ham, maybe chicken or something else.

Compared to the breakfast, the lunch and dinner were better but still bad. One of the things I found really weird at this IOI was that all the lunches and dinners were not a buffet. As someone that now lives in Canada, I find the portion sizes in Bolivia quite small. As a result, I often feel quite hungry between meals (especially lunch and dinner) or late at night. From all other events that I have attended over the years (both national and international) I feel that this is quite a weird thing to have. It is usually easier to have a buffer with several options to account for dietary restrictions that people might have.

There were a lot of issues with dietary restrictions in the first/second day. My team leader has a halal dietary restriction but somehow the restaurants gave me the tag for the dietary restriction instead, which I subsequently gave to my team leader. At the first/second day, everyone with halal dietary restriction was given vegetarian food. This is technically halal, but it is still a very lazy way of handling this particular dietary restriction. Eventually, after some advice from my team leader in Matrix (and numerous complaints from other team leaders), they provided more proper halal meals using seafood, etc. Other than halal, they also didn't know what gluten-free meant, so initially there was quite a lot of confusion about that.

Continuing later on the second day, there were a lot of issues with the opening ceremony. Firstly, the opening ceremony livestream was only available on Facebook. I mean, who even uses facebook as a platform to livestream? Maybe I'm just a zoomer that doesn't use facebook but I still feel that the standard for IOI should always be livestreams on Youtube (as per the precedent set since 2021, or earlier, not sure). Second, the leaders and participants were separated during the opening ceremony for no clear reason. It would make sense if there was a space restriction that caused the leaders and participants to be separated, but that didn't seem to be the case, as the leaders/participants were sitting in the same area, just separately.

There was a lot of abnormalities in the opening ceremony itself. For one, most of the opening ceremony was in Spanish, so it was very difficult to understand what was going on. Translation devices were only provided to leaders if we gave them some form of ID/Credit Card (initially it was the same for participants, but after a brief argument they gave them to participants without need for any ID).

During the part of the opening ceremony where every country is called, there were several issues that were faced. For one, the camera was blocked by a pole when spotlighting the UK team. Other than that, for some reason the host decided to call all the countries a second time for no clear reason. It was clear that during the first round of mentioning all the countries, they mixed up some of them (this is bad but still somewhat understandable). It was very awkward when this happened as everyone was quite tired and hungry and we all didn't understand what was going on.

Hopefully, future IOIs can accommodate various dietary restrictions (halal, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc) and allergies better. Furhtermore, the opening ceremony should be well-rehearsed in an attempt to make it smoother and less awkward for everyone involved.

P.S. I am not calling out the IOI at all, I know that they can't fully control the hosts and they try their best to ensure that the hosts will do things correctly. This is just a personal rant/blog.

I am the Deputy Leader for the Indonesia IOI 2025 delegation this year. I can't fathom how IOI 2025 has gone so horribly wrong before IOI has even started.

Firstly, I will share the experiences of the Indonesia team when traveling/arriving in Bolivia. Afterwards, I will mention some accounts provided by other countries about their struggles in Bolivia.

Before the journey even began, BoA cancelled one of the only flights from Sucre to Santa Cruz during the departure day, we are a bit concerned about the alternative flight as the transit time is only 1h10m especially after our recent experiences.

Our team's journey began on July 23rd before dawn, flying from Jakarta to Sao Paolo, we arrived the evening of July 23rd in Brazil without a hitch.

The following afternoon (July 24th), we got on our flight from Sao Paolo to Santa Cruz, departing at 14.00. During our check in process, we had to wait for some time because they were checking our documents (I would say roughly 15-45 minutes). We were not very surprised by this as we are a group III country under the Bolivia visa policy. Unfortunately (but at this point, not surprisingly), the flight was delayed by 2 hours. We made it to immigration in Santa Cruz around 17.50.

During immigration, we ran into an issue that we do not know exactly because none of the immigration officers could speak english (not even broken english, apparently). They were asking us for a document that no immigration document/information or even any guide from the IOI committee mentioned (the visa receipt). We spent around one and a half hours waiting in immigration until they let us in to the country. We were quite disappointed with the non-existent IOI committee support in this process, as they promised this in their arrival guide.

After exiting the immigration zone, we met two IOI representatives. One of the representatives helped us buy a SIM card and offered to help us exchange money with a rate 1 USD to 10-11 BOB. The other representative remarked in a somewhat pleading/desperate tone for us to learn Spanish. Personally, I don't think learning the language of the host country should be a prerequisite for attending the IOI. At the airport, we found a souvenir store that would exchange at a 1 USD to 12 BOB rate (thanks to help of team ITA as well ❤️) and we went back to our hotel using the hotel shuttle.

The following day (July 25th), the check-in process and flight to Sucre was quite uneventful (other than the flight being delayed, but at this point we're not surprised). After arriving at Sucre, there were was an IOI representative at the airport that could not speak a word of english. Eventually by using ChatGPT/Google translate we managed to understand that the price of the taxi to our hotel (San Marino Royal Hotel) from the airport is 10 BOB per person (for a total of 60 BOB). Once we arrived at our hotel, the taxi driver demanded 60 BOB extra. Due to being exhausted I just gave the taxi driver the extra 60 BOB and went to the hotel.

This morning (July 27th), there was a power outage that lasted for an hour. We are going to depart for our registration soon, hopefully with less disasters.

From other countries, there has been a lot of issues as well, mostly immigration related. One of the other issues mentioned is the Nigerian delegation got scammed by the IOI representatives at Santa Cruz, they were brought to an excahnge where the exchange rate was 1 USD to 6 BOB and asked to pay 60 BOB for a 5 minute taxi ride to the hotel (the hotel has a free shuttle, so this was ludicrous).

Personally, I understand that a country will have some limitations that the organizers can not overcome, but I think that the organizers should not expect delegations from other countries to be able to speak their language and especially to not scam the participants.

Hopefully I don't jinx it, but surely the guide/LO can speak english... right? I guess we'll see soon.

P.S. Sorry for the bad english, there will probably be edits to improve readability in the future if it is necessary.

Edit 1: I hided this post at the request of one of the team leaders at IOI temporarily (to be clear I was not forced to do this). Our guide was amazing, much thanks to her for ensuring a smooth experience for our students during IOI. Will write a future blog about things that happened in IOI.

Hi Codeforces!

As it is already nearing time for world finals I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations on where to visit in either Astana or Almaty as I will be travelling there before the world finals. Also any help on other things related to keep in mind in Kazakhstan would be appreciated :)

Also wishing a safe trip to Astana for all other participants :D. Hopefully the jetlag isn't too bad.

Update (September 6th):

During my search for resources when traveling I found some of these sites useful:

• https://esimdb.com/kazakhstan (for finding e-sim in Kazakhstan)

• https://mobimatter.com/travel-esim/sparks-central-asia-10-gb-esim (the e-sim I am personally using, you can find plans with more/less data depending on what you need)

• https://taxi.yandex.com/en_am/ (for finding cabs)

I'll update on how well the e-sim works when I get there. I am using this particular e-sim because I have an overnight transit in Uzbekistan and I don't really want to buy a separate e-sim for that.

Update (September 7th):

I am currently on my overnight transit at Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the e-sim works great (imo the connection is reasonably good, at least in Uzbekistan). Beware of taxi scams, there was someone offering taxi for 15 USD (although it should cost 1 USD) and someone trying to take me to some place right out of the airport. If you want to run from scammers go to the departure terminal and order your online taxi from there.

Yandex took a while to set up, If possible set this up before arriving as for me it took well over an hour to troubleshoot. The OTP was the thing causing the most troubles. It is more convenient to use card for Yandex but bring cash just in case (my card payment failed and I had to rely on cash).

Be sure to bring small quantities (preferrably exact amount) of USD/EUR if transitting through Uzbekistan, there is a small counter on the left after immigration that has relatively good exchange rates. Otherwise you will have to use an ATM which is fine. If the ATM in the arrival terminal isn't working you can go to the departure terminal where there are 2 ATMs at the international departure area, right next to the vending machines.

I'll update on the e-sim in Kazakhstan when I get there.

Update (September 9th):

The e-sim works great in Kazakhstan, definitely recommend as the price of the e-sim is not too expensive.

Something to note for ATMs in central asia is that some of them only accept debit cards with 4 digit pins. Apparently they can accept contactless cards but all of my contactless cards (from Canada and Indonesia) declined. I only had 6 digit pin cards which made me unable to buy anything for the first night in Astana as currency exchanges already closed and it was a Sunday (if you're desparate like me you can always go to McDonalds/I'm or other major international chains and pay using your 6 digit pin card there). Definitely recommend changing some money at the airport first or immediately exchanging currency when you get to the hotel.

The ICPC team also provided me transportation to the hotel for free (even though I'm not living at an ICPC hotel) which is a nice touch, they mistakenly sent me to my ICPC hotel but eventually they got me to my current hotel. I don't know if it was a mistake or not but it is what it is.

Also I'm no longer going to Almaty because I am a bit ill, probably just going to go around Astana for the week. Most people here can't speak english from my experience so having google translate is a must.

If anyone is looking to exchanging to local currency, USD is the best compared to all other currencies. The spread for USD is less than 1%, for other currencies it is more than 4%. I exchanged money at a local bank, you should be able to get by without speaking any russian/kazakh, just show them your foreign money and they should understand.

Update (September 12th): I just moved hotels to the eastern part of Astana. Definitely something to keep in mind is that different regions in Astana have very different english abilities. People in the northern parts of Astana tend to have much worse english then the central/southern parts of Astana.

Here are some of the places I visited in the last few days:

Palace of Peace and Reconciliation

National Museum

Kazakh Musical and Drama Theater

Unfortunately I only had time to visit the national museum which is very large. I spent around 3-4 hours there and I couldn't even visit half of it. The entrance fee is also relatively cheap, 1700 KZT (~ 4 USD).