Week 11/2026

We all gotta pick a place

Nikolaus Forgó

06 Mar 2026 — 4 min read

Church of Zuoz on Sunday afternoon

NSFW

This week's song is from Asaf Avidan.

He will play in Linz/Posthof on July 1st.

I found him on Spotify.

Retrospect

This week didn't go as planned. I arrived, as planned, in beautiful Zuoz in Switzerland on Sunday afternoon and still made it to the first informal conference meeting of Alpineprivacydays on Sunday evening. I was very impressed by the friendliness and professionality of the very international group of participants, met some old dear colleagues, ex-students and many interesting people I hadn't seen before and enjoyed a nice dinner.

On Monday early morning, however, I woke up with a sudden and unexpected (and unknown) health problem that let me first urgently consult the very kind, thoughtful and competent local general practionioner Dr. Franziska Bart who said that I would need further medical checks in a hospital fast.

So, no conference, no keynote and a quite stressful situation instead.

I then learned quickly how non-harmonized so many things in Europe are, despite so many important attempts to improve mobility and exchange - and how annoying this can be in such stress.

I couldn't use my phone and, in particular, the internet, as roaming (with my Austrian SIM) is so ridiculously expensive.

I needed to return to the hotel only to use their WiFi to get me somehow organised.

I couldn't go into a Swiss hospital (St. Moritz would have been quite close) (or was not sick enough to no longer care) - as I would have run into serious costs that couldn't be anticipated and would most likely not be covered by my Austrian social security.

So, I decided to return to Austria via public transport as quickly as possible. But - unfortunately - you can't buy the ticket online in one step - you need one ticket for the Swiss and one for the Austrian part.

and not even time schedules are synchromized so that you have 35 minutes waiting time at the border when changing from the Swiss into the Austrian bus (of course, each bus ends at the border):

I however finally managed to get back to Landeck/Zams, was very relieved when I finally arrived at Krankenhaus St. Vinzenz and very grateful for their instant help. You really learn to love Austrian Social Security and the e-card in such situations.

I've been here since then and just want to highlight how outstandingly friendly and competent this place is - in particular the people working in care here are just amazing. What's not so nice but impressive is the amount of helicopter landings - 1775 in 2025 at this hospital alone. Living below the landing platform for a few days instructs quite impressively about wintersport risks.

Prospect

As I am still in the hospital and don't know yet when I will be fully back to work, I can't make any announcements on my participation at events etc at the moment, my apologies.