2006-11-20 16:22:46

Back from Spain

I got back last night from Spain.  I brought my family with me to Tech-Ed Barcelona and we stayed an extra week for vacation.

A few notes from the trip, some of them business-related, others from the family vacation:

• As a trade show, Tech-Ed was okay.  I overheard some of the other vendors describing it as a big waste of time.  I won't say it was a good show, but I don't think it was that bad.  To be fair, I'll admit that we intentionally kept our expectations low.
• This was our first trade show outside the US.  The first thing we noticed is that the booths are weird.  In every previous trade show, the setup had been the same:  We get a piece of floor space, approximately 10 feet square, with a curtain hanging in the back and a shorter curtain between us and our next door neighbors.  At Tech-Ed Europe, each booth is a box, bounded on two sides by a wall.  The booths are grouped four together in a square, so every space is a corner booth.  I got the impression that this is just the way shows in Europe are done.
• I chatted with Miguel de Icaza for a while, catching up a bit.  It sounds like it might be time for us to take another look at the Mono Windows Forms stuff.
• Barcelona is an amazing city.  I wish we had stayed there longer, but I did get to see a few things:
• There's a cathedral that has been under construction for 200 years.  They say it's almost done now.  Another 20 years or so and it will be ready for use.  There are so many jokes to make about this that I'm not even going to pick one.
• In the old part of town, we went into another cathedral.  Fantastic.  Those European cathedrals are just amazing, and there's nothing really like them here in the states.
• We toured the Picasso art museum.  Did you know Picasso did "normal" paintings for years before he started doing all that weirdo stuff?  I had no idea.
• I was quite surprised at the amount of Spanish in Barcelona.  Basically, this city speaks Catalan, which is a funky mixture of Castilian Spanish and French.  I speak very rusty quasi-fluent Spanish which I learned 15 years ago when we lived in Spain.  I expected to have problems in Barcelona, but I didn't.  Everybody speaks Castilian Spanish.  Also, it turns out that in its written form, Catalan is closer to Spanish than I thought.  To me, Catalan looks like Spanish with everything spelled wrong.
• Before the kids came along, Lisa and I lived for a year or so in Torrejón de Ardoz, a town just outside of Madrid.  So after the conference was done, we got on a train from Barcelona to Madrid and spent the second week based in Torrejón.
• Torrejón has changed a lot in 15 years.  Before leaving Barcelona, we took the kids to McDonalds and told them that it was their last American food for a while, since Torrejón is a much smaller town and has no fast food places.  When we got to our hotel in Torrejón, there was a McDonalds directly across the street.
• Torrejón has a town plaza.  In the corner of that plaza is a church.  That church has a tower.  On the roof of that tower is an enormous bird nest, perhaps 4 or 5 feet in diameter.  I'm no expert on birds, but they look like storks.  Anyway, I'm pretty sure that nest has been there for at least 15 years.  I remember seeing it before.
• I picked up some souvenirs on the trip.  One of my personal traditions is that I always carry a wallet which was purchased during one of my foreign trips.  My current billfold is wearing out, so I picked up a new one.  Spain is a pretty good place to buy leather stuff.
• My most notable souvenir is a Spanish guitar.  Thursday night I went to Madrid planning to buy a classical guitar at a big music store near the Palacio Real.  Instead, I ended up at a place called Conde Hermanos, one block away.  I ended up spending a lot more than I planned, but I sort of fell in love with this quaint little luthier shop.  They sell guitars that are hand-made right there in the store.  The wall is covered with photographs of famous classical and Flamenco guitarists proudly holding their Conde Hermanos guitar.  So anyway, I bought a guitar, and I shook hands with the guy who made it.  The whole experience was thoroughly enjoyable.
• For you guitar freaks out there, my little collection of acoustic guitars now includes:
• A Conde Hermanos Flamenco guitar.  Cypress.  Hand-made in Madrid and purchased there.
• A Martin HD-28.  Indian Rosewood.  This guitar may be the sweetest sounding of the bunch.
• A Larrivee Parlor Guitar.  Mahogany.  Nice for travel.  Sounds great for its size.
• A Taylor 614C.  Maple.  Very bright sound.
• A 1968 Martin D-35S.  Brazilian Rosewood.  This is my "birth year" guitar.  From the serial number, I estimate it was made just a couple weeks before I was born.
• Madrid has grown a lot.  I don't remember the subway trains being so crowded before.  Our friends there told us that around 2 million immigrants have moved into Spain over the last several years.  For a country with a population of around 40 million, that's a pretty significant change.
• The best day trip from Madrid is El Escorial.  The monastery there is really amazing.  The train ride is approximately an hour.  When you get off at the train station, there will be a bus to take you up the hill to the monastery.  Don't take the bus.  Instead, walk up the hill, through the park.  It's a little more than a mile, and the grade makes it kind of a workout, but it's an extremely pleasant walk.
• One of my favorite sights in Spain is the Roman aqueduct in Segovia.  It was built around the end of the first.  I just find it amazing that this enormous structure, built from granite blocks with no mortar or concrete, has been standing there for almost 2,000 years.
• By the end of our second week, my Spanish was starting to come back.  I'm still very rusty, but I can carry on a conversation if the other parties will be somewhat patient with me.
• I ran out of reading materials on the trip, so I bought a Spanish translation of one of the Harry Potter books.  It was rather slow reading for me, but I got through it all.  I found it terribly unfortunate that the clever wording of "Diagon Alley" just doesn't work in Spanish.

Anyway, right now I'm glad that the westbound jet lag isn't nearly as bad as the eastbound version of the disease.  This is a short work week because of the Thanksgiving holiday, and I'm still catching up from all the email and other stuff that I missed.