1. The workshop takes place from Tuesday AFTERNOON to Friday MORNING, to correspond with the flight that arrives on Tuesday at 1:55pm and the flight that leaves 2:45pm on Friday.
  2. There is ABSOLUTELY NO accommodation in Longyearbyen on Saturday April 10, and there is no flight leaving on Saturday, so you cannot stay in Spitsbergen beyond Friday. However, there ARE at the moment rooms available BEFORE the workshop. Obviously, it is your responsibility to reserve such rooms, although I am of course happy to help in any way I can.
  3. I have reserved, and paid some deposit for, 12 rooms from Tuesday to Friday. The workshop fee basically consists of paying your part of the hotel room. This is a very remote outpost of the most expensive country on earth, and it is high season, so prices are exorbitant. The price for a hotel room and workshop facilities for these three days exceeds 1000 EUR, but I will try to subsidize the thing for overseas visitors so that you do not need to pay more than 600 euro or so.
  4. Given that there are particular flights we need, and that there are anyways not many flights to Spitsbergen and it is high season, it might be a good idea to buy the plane tickets as early as possible (I don't know). Obviously, even if you do not have a paper, or the program committee rejects your paper from EPTCS, then (depending on the number of accepted papers) you might still want to give a talk. This is a workshop after all.
  5. To accommodate any extraordinary situation (i.e., plane unable to land on Tuesday), we have planned the event with one day, Thursday, without any fixed scientific program.
    Given that it seems impossible to stay longer, we could try to have some excursion on Thursday. Some of the options are:
    1. All day (7-9 hours) snow scooter trip around Spitsbergen. (There are two different options) This cost 2150 NOK (around 250 EURO). You MUST BRING DRIVER'S LICENCE!!
    2. Ice caving: walking inside a glacier! (3 hours; 690 NOK (85 eur))
    3. Dog sledding (4 hours 990 NOK)
    See http://www.spitsbergentravel.no/ for more information.
    Again, April 6-9 is extremely high season, and especially for snow scooter trip, it is recommended to reserve in advance. _At the moment_, we could all go on a long snow scooter trip together, but it is highly recommended to reserve in advance. Please let me know IF you want me to reserve an activity (obviously, it will have to be paid by you :-).
    Dog sledding is great fun, but obviously the long snow scooter trip is the real experience. The prices are atrocious, but you are only here once!
To summarize: this is not a convenient or cheap workshop, but seems to be one where one needs to think ahead, unfortunately it might also be good to act before knowing whether a submitted paper makes it through the program committee, but then it is in a truly exotic location. See the polar bears before they disappear!

Looking forward to seeing you in Spitsbergen, Peter