I attended the famous Potsdam International Symposium, which was originally organised in Potsdam, and subsequenly in various cities in this historic region of Germany. These conferences gather top tick-borne disease researchers from all around the world. I presented two posters, including this simple summary of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) secular trends and presentation of the newly established TBE case classification in Poland. This conference was quite important for me as I met several key persons who influenced my future career, like Joanna Zajkowska from Bialystok, Sarah Randolph from Oxford University and Milan Daniel from the Czech Institute of Public Health.