It's been a week since I arrived in Montréal, and had not had a free minute to blog about it. There's tons of things to write about, the activity and fun has been mostly non-stop.

The travelling wasn't perfect, as always I could not sleep a single minute. Instead, I watched Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I had wanted to see for some time and was nice, and Batman Begins, which was positively surprising, being a Batman movie.

When I arrived at Montréal's airport, the fun started soon enough. Coming from Spain and having this scary looking face and beard didn't help much to survive customs. When I got in the line and handed my arrival card, I was sent to the immigration office straight away. I was asked what I was coming to Canada for. "To a computer conference", I said. Well, having no "invitation" or anything for this conference made me a quick suspect. After being freed, I walked on my way out, and on the next control, I had my bag searched. And again... "Do you have any document about this conference?". And then, to the real baggage inspection room.

As the guy started opening my bag, I suddenly remembered about the fuet I was carrying for Vicente, while I had said, confidently, "No I don't carry any food" in my card. Luckily he saw I was carrying a DragonLance book, liked it and let me go.

The next thing was, while waiting for the bus that should take me to Downtown Montréal, my first conversation with a non-airport staff Canadian. So this old woman in her seventies comes along... and the first thing she says... "I hate those fucking moslems". I try to not look too much like "WTF!?" and without replying, listen to this totally moronic and racist monologue about how moslems in Canada come to the country to not work and live of the country's welfare. "Why should they work? They stay at home, and watch TV and fuck. That's all they do. The more kids they have, the more money they get. I don't believe in welfare". So I got on the bus quite shocked.

After a bus trip and lots of walking due to forgetting I had to get on another one, I got into the hotel, and started meeting all the people. My first dinner was with Gustavo, Salgado and Carlos, and I felt I wanted to die, I couldn't keep my eyes open. The conference started next morning for me, and has been the usual dynamic as always, only that now it's the first time that I really find myself somewhat useful during the sessions. :)

Meeting mdz and kiko happened that morning. That was when all kinds of stuff started to happen. Why do I have to get such bad influences?

Kiko and I managed to not fall over while taking all of these pics in Mont Royal

It's 6AM (for me) and I'm about to collapse. I am in Montréal to attend to the Ubuntu Below Zero conference. Hopefully jetlag won't last long. There's plenty of anecdotes about the flight, but that can wait until tomorrow.

Yesterday we walked down the Valle de Eriste on our way back to civilisation, after spending 6 days in the deep Pyrenees. It's been a fantastic and tough week. The bad weather and the sudden drop of temperatures in the area has made us suffer situations that are more appropriate for October instead of August, but it's been a lot of fun.

Among other things, we've climbed Posets, my first 3.000, during the only 3 hour window when the weather was reasonable enough to attempt it.

My group observes Ordesa and Monte Perdido from the top of Posets (3.375)

During 5 days we've been completely unable to communicate with people or get news of what was going on 10 kilometres away from our spot. Back in Benás, we learned about some Spanish soldiers dead in Afghanistan, which seems the big news this week. The other big news was that fire continues to consume Spain and Portugal.

After being in this high mountain paradise, watching the images of great forests in Galicia and Portugal burning were a lot more impacting than ever. I wonder what I would do if I had one of these pyromaniacs in front of me. Bastards.

I'll post some more about this week in the following days, along with some of the nearly 200 pictures I've taken.

Tomorrow I'll travel to the Pyrenees, to the Benasque area, where we'll walk a five day route around the GR-11, near the Aneto peak. I'm going with quite a few people and it looks like it's going to be very fun, but tiresome.

We'll carry all our tents, food, clothes and everything else on our backpacks, and hopefully we won't get many of the typical evening showers of the summers in that area.

It's been a while since my last vacation completely away from technology, and I'm really looking forward to it after so many years. I need a break before the hectic times that probably await at work...

I'll post some pictures when I come back from my stay under the stars!

Debconf finally ended for me, and I am now sitting in Paris-CDG, the very friendly airport with not enough benches for people to sit on while waiting; or wireless, or even plugs for when you run short on battery. Luckily I found a hidden plug in the stairway to one of the boarding gates. If you are leaving Helsinki via CDG and have a few hours to kill, you can use these two plugs which are in front of check-in #6, in gate D78/79. Only 4 hours of wait to go...

I've been in Otaniemi for the whole Debconf, after arriving late on Saturday. It has been fantastic. Better than my very best expectations.

Besides doing all sorts of stuff, like nearly getting killed by the cabal or voluntarily risking my life in the stupidest adventure of the entire Debconf, I've been doing other things. I've attended some very interesting talks and bofs, although admittedly I haven't made it to any of the 9AM talks (except Jeroen's, which I happily slept through as the video guys had the kindness to record for posterity) because night life in Otaniemi is quite intense.

More important than the work done in talks, bofs and small meetings in the Smökki, has been for me the social part of the conference. I have met many people -the list is way too long- I've been working with or chatting for years, and had never seen in Real Life before. The atmosphere you could feel between the Debian Developers and other Debian community members during the week is something that will help me renew energies to keep working on my Debian tasks, and will make me start thinking of Mexico for next year.

I have specially enjoyed some of the features Finland introduced in this Debconf, like all the sauna and naked swimming dipping in the pond we've enjoyed throughout the week. Stuff like this really helps making friends and socialising with your project mates, and is very enjoyable if you come from countries where nakedness, far from being as natural as it is in Scandinavia, is nearly a taboo.

The campus where Debconf took place at Otaniemi was also fantastic, being brand new, just 100 metres away from the sea, virtually inside a forest, and relatively well connected to Helsinki. Had I not fucked up my leg, I would have also been able to take advantage of the athletics field that will be used in the paralympic championships next month, and run through the forest to discover what was around the campus.

The nights, as I said earlier, have been a source of many anecdotes. A few days I went back to Helsinki to sleep a bit more than what you could in Otaniemi not having a room, but after leaving early for the last bus and missing the spontaneous Alcohols of the World party one of the first nights, I decided to stay there to sleep, in whatever corner I could find. This generally has meant going to bed at 5 or so every day, except for the last two days, when I just didn't sleep at all.

One day was the now famous Ubuntu chorus day, led by mdz and sabdfl, which woke up the entire debconf at 4AM, and never ended until 8, when a few people sneaked into the hotel and had a big breakfast. Sorry about that guys, next year we'll have practiced in advance and at least it will be something resembling to music. :) Before the singing, a large group of people had moved to Helsinki to find some cool club. Soon the group split in two, and I ended in the so called "Ice Bar", which was... cold. Way to early, at 3:30, we were kicked out from the place and while standing in the line to take taxis, a request to climb Thom ended up in a few people doing human castles in the middle of the street, climbing lamp posts and other "I am bored and a bit drunk" kinds of stuff.

The second night, after barely no sleep (if you don't count the two hours of sleep under direct sunlight, thanks to madduck), a group led by Mako went to a club, and there was dancing for over 4 hours. I think I should have stayed at Otaniemi because, being so tired, after a while I was just waiting for the closing hour to go back. When we finally did, at 4:30 or so, people were already waiting for their taxis or packing their stuff. My idea was to go swimming and see the sunrise, but it was a bit too late for that, and after saying goodbye to everyone that was already awake, I was lucky to find data who was about to drive the van to the airport, so I even saved quite a bit in a taxi drive.

In short, this has been one of those weeks that you wish it never ended, in some ways eye opening and quite productive in many aspects. Thanks to all of the organisers like data, gwolf, marga, Andreas and the rest of the team who have made it work so smoothly, despite of the huge amount of people who attended. You make Debconfs rock!

I can't wait to get to València and sleep 10 hours for the first time in a long time. It won't be easy to get back to work tomorrow after all of this.

It is a great and relaxing surprise to go down to the Video Room and find Matt and Hanna playing the guitar and the piano. The best way to have a quick peek at your e-mail near this source of live piano classical music or more modern guitar music accompained by the singing of Matt and Clint.

Hanna calms down the geeky hordes

POP THE TRUNK, GUYS. WE DID IT!

Last night, three brave adventurers did what many Debconfers haven't dared to do... and they did it at 2AM. Matt Zimmerman, Martin Krafft and Jordi Mallach decided (some helped by alcohol) that it was time to visit the other side.

The other side is quite far away

During one of the hot sauna/skinny swimming in the lak^ocean cycles, I said (once again) that I was going to cross to the other side. The bad news is that Matt picked up the challenge and started swimming, followed by Martin. When we were nearly halfway, we had a little aquatic meeting. There were four alternatives to proceed with:

• Be reasonable and go back. Enough is enough
• Go all the way to the other side, in the darkest hour of the Finnish night (which, OK, is not that dark) and grab a taxi, paid by Mako, to take us back to Otaniemi
• Go all the way to the other side and walk all the way back along the high way
• Swim all the way to the other side, rest a few minutes while we could bear with the cold temperature and swim the other way back

Looking for a taxi seemed the most fun option, but really: is it actually POSSIBLE to find one for three naked men who don't speak a single word of Finnish, in the middle of the night, and when we (very obviously) are not carrying any money?

Walking all the way back would be feasible, but meant walking quite a few kilometres while getting the worst cold ever.

So we were down to two choices: going back or being real adventurers and tell the rest that we did it. An hour or so after leaving the pier, the three brave men were walking back to the sauna, filled with pride after swimming the 800 metres to the other shore and back.

We tried to carry some stone from the other shore as evidence, but having no pockets made it difficult. In the end, the only evidence is Matt's bruised feet, which he harmed when walking over some sharp stones at the other side.

The only reward was harmful stones and coldness

If you haven't in the past, lucky you. Yesterday a bunch of people went to play frisbee. At some point of the game, my team mate elmo and I ran to catch the frisbee and I was unlucky to accidentally be hit by his knee on my right quadricep. Clearly James on evil_elmo mode.

elmo and me, during the happy days before the incident

At first I thought it was ok, but a few minutes later I had to stop playing because the pain was getting worse. When I went back to HUT, Beowulf and the other Spanish crowd would start saying I was acting and I was a "nenaza", but the truth is that during the night, whenever I moved my leg slightly, I would be awaken by pain.

As I expected that the pain would be gone today, and it's actually worse, I have looked into getting someone who knows a bit of these injuries a look at my leg. I have no bruise or any mark where the impact happened, so I fear my muscle is fucked up in some way as only walking short distances is difficult and painful. My mother, who is a nurse, told me to buy some paracetamol. I considered going to a hospital, but I don't have my medical insurance papers so I'll try to look for alternatives before that.

I guess this will end up in someone saying "it'll get better in a few days", but it's the first time I get such an intense pain like this one in a very localised muscle, so I'd better take care before I get back to València. This sucks, I wanted to go running during the week. I hope I can still swim in the evenings... I'll find out soon.

What do most people that came to Debconf via Paris have in common? We all lost our luggage.

After very quickly packing my stuff up, including a number of glass bottles for some people who will get them if they are nice to me (hi helix!), I managed to arrive well ahead in time to València's airport. I checked in, arrived to Paris-CDG with a very short time frame to change planes. I quickly got off the plane from València and followed quite blindly the indications to "flight connections", and suddenly I nearly was in the street. I started to get a bit nervious, not knowing too well were to go. I finally found the Finnair desk, and was the last one to check in for the plane and board.

This had a positive effect: I quickly stumbled upon jacobo, and we both had last minute seats in business class. During the flight I had time to have fun with a pen that spilled ink all over the place, I managed to spill my tea all over the place, and accidentally fell asleep for half an hour or so.

At the airport, we waited at the baggage claim area for our bags, in vain. Denis Barbier, Jacobo and I didn't get ours, but at least they managed to get them back later during the evening. Mine will have to wait until tomorrow evening, who knows why, so I have no clothes, toothbrush or anything until then, and what's worse, I fear so much the oil bottle will end up breaking and fuck up all my clothes.

After leaving my stuff at Guillem's place, we went to Otaniemi, and I met a big number of people, including helix, Alfie, gwolf, stargirl, marga... Incidentally, a big number of them had lost their luggage some days before, too. It's nice to see people I have never seen in person before. I'm really going to enjoy this.

By the way, it's 3:30 in the morning as I finish this entry and I'd swear the sky was never completely back tonight. It's probably getting lighter already outside!

My flight hopefully will take off in 12:10h, and I haven't packed up anything for my week at Debconf. I'm actually waiting for the laundry to be dry tomrorow morning so I have *something* to pack up, but in the end it seems like the preparation of this trip is going to be so Jordi-style again, totally unplanned in advance. Hopefully I won't forget anything while I rush to get stuff in place tomorrow morning. I know that some people would hate me forgetting the oil bottles... I really hope I can fit them in my bag without to many troubles! I keep having this vision of my bag appearing in the luggage pickup area in Helsinki's airport, pouring out a dense, golden liquid. If that happens, I hope you have plenty of clothes at home, Guillem. :)

See you in HEL, or for a few unlucky guys, at Paris CDG!