I'm using real names for this post by the advice of others.

Last day

I woke up with great effort at and went down to breakfast. After breakfast I went back to my room, where I played some slope and got a score of , which is both my new PB and beats Feodor's pb by We then went down to the lobby, met with everyone, and started walking to the old town.

Along the way we passed a statue of a guy on a horse. We passed a starbucks with an ad outside depicting pistachio coffee, which lured Feodor in to try. While we sat here, Rohan shared a very interesting anti problem. We kept walking and decided to go to a museum. While walking we passed a car whose license plate started with CT 17.

Soon we got to the Museum of Communism. It was a very cool place, talking about life in Romania under the rule of Nicolae Ceausescu. There were rooms designed to look like living rooms and kitchens at the time. It was also cool that we could touch most of the things in the museum, for example I got to use a typewriter, read an old math book, and smell their coffee substitute. While we were touring, Daniel and John told us that p5 coordination was happening soon, so Apra and Michael opened geogebra on their phones and started trying to find a finish to Rohan's progress while we toured.

Next I wanted to see the palace of parliament, so we walked there. We had previously heard from Daniel and John that it was the heaviest building in the world, to which we debated why the Great Pyramid wasn't considered a building. However when we finally saw it it was massive. It took us like a few minutes just to walk from the edge of the building until we were facing the center of it to take a picture. Apparently it's like the weight of the great pyramid which is pretty crazy.

We then walked back to our hotel. Along the way, we passed by a pastry shop and Feodor bought one. Then we kept walking back. Feodor told stories about how he made a bunch of money from math contests.

Next some context is that the day before, as we were walking to lunch, Rohan and I had been approached by this guy who asked us whether we were here for an olympiad. When we answered that we were on the US team, he then said that we had to join DOGE. Anyway then we avoided him and ran back to join the rest of the team.

So as we were walking back from the old town we saw this guy again, and he recognized us, so we tried to avoid him and he didn't say anything sus this time. Eventually we got back to our hotel and played card games again for like minutes. Then we went to lunch. As we were leaving lunch, we talked a bit with other teams, and we found out that Hungary was predicted to beat us by point (they had to our ). We also talked about predicted medal cutoffs. I had thought silver would probably be like but they said it was more likely going to be .

As we walked back medal cutoffs were posted, and it turned out they were . This meant my score of had won a silver medal! That was pretty unexpected to me since I didn't think I did well enough. On the other hand it was really unfortunate that we had no golds, with Feodor being our highest score with . Even more unfortunately, he had been docked one point on p5 due to a typo in his complex bash. With one more point we also would have gotten second place and tied Hungary, since team results were also just posted and it was confirmed they were one point ahead of us. Unfortunately getting first place would have been impossible since China beat us by points.

Afterwards we played some card games and soon John and Daniel came back with stuff like our solution scans that we could keep. At we all went upstairs to change into suits and get ready for the awards ceremony.

At we came downstairs, where our guides were waiting. We walked to the bus station and took the bus because we were too late to walk. Then the awards ceremony started. First there was a talk by Citadel where they talked about some stuff the company does to try and recruit students (although tbh the talk was pretty boring. According to John, they had failed to say the one thing they needed to say: the salary). Another thing about the talk was that there were four questions at the end where you could get prizes for answering them the fastest. Three were about the company and the last one was a math question. Our team ended up answering out of the fastest (although maybe this wasn't surprising since earlier Citadel had asked everyone to raise their hands if they had heard of them and our team was like the only one that did). The prizes ended up being like air pods and speakers which was crazy.

After that some people with important roles said some stuff. I don't remember most of it but there was one guy who told us some funny statistics. One was that someone (CHN3) had swept day faster than the jury could get coffee that day ( and a half hours, which also happened to be faster than I solved p1). Another was that someone had submitted pages to a single problem and still got zero points. Apparently it was an incomplete bash or something.

Finally the awards part of the ceremony started. They first named all of the honorable mentions. Then they handed out all of the bronze medals, and Rohan went on stage holding the US flag. There were a lot of bronze medalists and it was really cramped onstage by the time everyone was up.

Next all of the silver medalists were called up, which included everyone else on our team (Andrew, me, Michael, Apra, Feodor). It was really cool being on stage, but as we were called up it became increasingly hard to fit all five of us behind even the large flag we had. After a while of standing up there we went back down.

Then the eight gold medalists were called up. This included four members of China's team. I expected they would have some big flag for the four of them, but instead the first guy who went up was carrying an ipad and after getting his medal he just opened the ipad and it had a picture of China's flag on it. That was pretty funny.

After individual awards they announced team awards. We got third, Hungary got second and China won. We all went back on stage again.

Then awards ceremony ended. Some people on my team went up to claim their prizes from the Citadel people. We also all went up to get another picture together, meant to be for MAA or something.

Then we went to the other hotel again to have our final dinner together. The food this time was slightly fancier I guess but nothing much more than the other meals. During dinner Feodor and I exchanged interesting music recommendations. After dinner we walked back to our hotel for the last time. We went back to our rooms. There, I changed out of my suit and played a bit of slope while Feodor did something. Eventually we all went downstairs to the lobby again to play cards. At some point John and Daniel also came around and gave us these certificates.

At midnight we had to go back upstairs so we all decided to go to Feodor and I's room because since our flight would be at we thought it would be better for jet lag to just stay up the whole night. We played some ftw, but I was on computer while Michael, Andrew and Rohan were on phones so I saw all the questions like a second earlier. However Andrew is an admitter so he still beat me about half the time. We then switched to playing card games while listening to cool music from the speaker Feodor won. Around this time we also had a big issue when we noticed that some of us were on the wait list for our flight.

Eventually at around Daniel came to our room and told us to pack. We packed and at about we went downstairs, checked out, and got in the van to the airport. At the airport, after going through security and getting to our gate, I immediately fell asleep. The others resolved the waitlist issue and some other stuff that I don't know about.

I woke up about an hour later to board the flight. However, as we were boarding, we ran into the guy who had told us to join DOGE again. Apparently he was on the same flight as us. It was crazy that we met each other times in pretty distinct locations. After getting in my seat I fell asleep immediately again.

After landing in Vienna after an hour, we all looked for a place to have breakfast. We had breakfast together then went to our gate where we did some stuff. Then we boarded the plane. I slept the whole time again. Finally we got off the plane and we said goodbyes and then I left.