Barcelona at night

Yesterday (Sunday), we arrived at Barcelona at around four o'clock in the afternoon. We had no delays at Schiphol and the flight took fifteen minutes less than expected. A shuttle bus organized by the TechED organization was supposed to bring us to our hotel, the Hesperia Metropol in downtown Barcelona. Unfortunately, the lady in bus was a bit confused and brought us to the suburbs of Barcelona where the TechED is located. Her directions caused us to walk around for 15 minutes asking the locals for directions, until we walked into an American women living in Spain telling us that we needed to go downtown again. Fortunately, a cab (with a driver that didn't speak any English at all) finally brought us to the hotel.

Apparently, our hotel was only 400 meters away from the famous Ramblas boulevard, so we decided to have diner at one of the restaurants along it. Unlike what we expected, prices were quite low and I enjoyed a nice three-course meal accompanied with half a liter of beer (which is the medium size; I wonder how big the large one is!?). Barcelona actually has a lot of trendy bars and pubs, and I ran into a number of Starbucks as well. I sure am going to enjoy a nice Frappacino and a brownie sometime this week and try to forget me being on a diet for a brief moment :-)

This morning, the pre-conference session of the TechED started, and I'm writing this while joining the ASP.NET Ajax session of Jeff Prosise. Tonight, I'll need to perform a last test-run of our SMART-Microsoft Software Factory demo that I'm going to do as part of Tom Hollander's session on Software Factory Futures tomorrow.