Today was mostly taken up by welcoming new guests and with various immediate preparations for the initial conference sessions tomorrow. Two large groups of speakers and guests joined us from Moscow and Kiev. At the informal reception at five o’clock Deacon Andrei greeted speakers and guests noting that studies of the history of the Russian Church Abroad provide a lot of food for understanding various contemporary processes and helping us to understand how everything is interconnected.
Metropolitan Mark Arndt of Berlin and Germany arrived later in the afternoon. After a pleasant, reasonably light buffet dinner at Hotel Envoy, we set out for the conference center, where we finished setting up the rooms for the main event and sorted out various technical issues. Fortunately for us, the team from Hotel Envoy responsible for the AV equipment and videoconferencing technology was hugely professional and was able to assemble a very complete setup allowing for both in-person and remote attendance, and English interpreting for both in-person and remote participants. There is a lot to look forward to tomorrow, and in the meantime, it is a relief to know that we are essentially ready to go on the technical front. The guests kept arriving the whole day from America, France, and the United Kingdom.
