I was lucky to be in London again last week, just before the lunatics probably disrupted the city pulse for a few months. Last weekend, from Friday 1st to Sunday 3rd, Canonical held the first Edubuntu summit, in preparation for their first release next October. Mark invited quite a few people involved in the development and deployment of Free Software in educational environments, including, among others, known faces like pere and Knut from Skolelinux, Juan Conde from Guadalinex, Quim Gil from Interactors and others from the K12LTSP or Schooltool projects. There were also a few teachers from the UK, and mdz, ogra, JaneW and Mark from Ubuntu. My boss Silvia Caballer also attended and presented the background and future direction of LliureX, our own regional project.

Belén and I arrived at Stansted around 40 minutes late, which proved to be critical to not catch the last underground train and be forced to try the nightly bus service. At Oxford Street, we tried to get into a few of the possible routes, but the drivers kept telling us that one wouldn't take us to Earl's Court, and we waited for the next one, and the driver would tell us it was the other one we should take. After one and a half hours of bus ping pong, and when I was totally freezing in the street, we decided to pick a taxi and go to the hotel as soon as possible. After some wait, a car that didn't look like a taxi at all stopped nearby and offered to take us. I tried to negotiate the fare before getting in, but the driver said there was nothing to talk about: £25. I prefered that to the cold I was incubating.

After the sessions, we'd go out for a walk around the city. On Friday, Juan, Juanjo, Quim, Belén and I went to a Malasian restaurant Quim recommended and we had difficulties finishing our plates and for dessert, we had some cider in an old tavern near the restaurant. The next day, Belén and I met one of her friends in Notting Hill and had dinner in an Iraqi restaurant which had a dude with an organ playing such a loud music that it was difficult to talk across the table. On Sunday, as the summit ended early, Petter, Knut, Jane, Matt, Ogra and us went for a walk around the Thames and a nearby park, but the group kept losing members as their flight hour approached.

In the end, it was Belén, Matt and me, so we headed to the Soho to look for a cheap and good Chinese restaurant, where we had dinner quite early, as the plan was to go to bed early because we had to wake up very soon to catch a plane at 7AM. After fighting with the chopsticks, we went for a walk around the area, and tried to phone some of the Debian guys around London. We were unlucky, elmo and thom were away, and we didn't have Ross's number, so the three of us ended up in another tavern driving beers and cider. When I was starting to feel drunk, Matt had enough common sense to suggest we went back to our hotel. Too late: after packing up, we had two fantastic hours of sleep before the alarms went off. We picked a taxi at 5AM which dropped us at Stansted for only £65. WTF!

Exhausted, and again frozen by the plane's air conditioning, we were back in Valencia at 11 on Monday. Just a few days later we learned about the horror in some of the stations we were around just the weekend before. What a weird feeling.