Travel · I still don't have a title

FOSDEM 2012

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:05:00 +0000

In a few hours, I’ll be flying to Brussels with Ivan, for a new edition of FOSDEM, undoubtedly the best Free Software conference in Europe.

I’m looking forward to hang out with Debian, GNOME and #dudes people, as well as to explore some other quiet and cool spots in the city with our hosts Raül and Vir.

I’ll probably be around the CrossDistro and CrossDesktop rooms most of the time, but before that I’ll be at the Delirium café not long after landing in Brussels.

For someone who doesn’t enjoy cold weather that much, this is going to be a special edition… oh dear, -10℃, this is fucking crazy!

FOSDEM 2011

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 22:45:00 +0000

When I returned from the first FOSDEM edition I attended, I wrote that I had liked and enjoyed that weekend in Brussels so much, that this conference had probably become a “must”.

It seems I was right. Five years later, I’m delighted to say

I’m happy to meet so many friends from the Debian, GNOME or GNU projects, and enjoy the kindness of our hosts in Brussels, Raül and Virginia. And I’m looking forward to the awesome beer, the excellent talks and discussions, and that unique FOSDEM atmosphere that makes this so special. This year, FOSDEM has the bonus of being able to enjoy the Debian “squeeze” 6.0 release as it happens, with many of the people who made it possible, and celebrate this on Saturday night. See you there!

De mar a mar, hiking across the Pyrenees

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:40:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, Maria and I completed one of our dreams when we arrived in Cap de Creus, where the Pyrenean range sinks in the Mediterranean. To get there, we walked hundreds of kilometres during a month, crossed dozens of steep valleys and enjoyed one of the richest experiences of our lives.

We managed to complete this challenge without facing major problems or pains, and after the first five our six days, our legs seemed to have gotten used to the daily effort and it started to be easier and easier. Our morale kept growing as days passed and we advanced east. When I started walking on a cold and rainy morning in Hondarribia, after barely no rest in the night bus to Irún, I thought for myself that it was improbable that we’d manage to get anywhere near Catalunya, that one of us would get injuried way before, or we’d just give up and go for the easy beach vacation in the Basque Country.

Biadós refuge, under Posets

But we didn’t, and after a somewhat painful start, with our boots soaking wet during the stages that crossed the enchanting Selva de Irati which ended up with me getting the biggest blister I’ve ever seen, we started to walk farther every day, extending the stages when we felt strong after reaching their official end. When we crossed from Nafarroa to Aragonese territory, the mental wall that I had built over the toughest stages in our quest started to fall apart. Days later, we found ourselves climbing down to Pineta, leaving Ordesa behind and enjoying a feeling that our adventure could not go better. The weather had been perfect for over a week and our legs and back were strong to go all over the way to the sea.

Cañón de Añisclo, on our way to Pineta

When we finally saw that huge blue stain on the horizon, the day before getting to the last mark, we got really excited. We had made it, but as we walked towards the cape, happiness slowly got mixed with melancholy. An unforgettable adventure was about to end, and we didn’t want to face our return to the city and our routines. It had been many days surrounded only by awesome landscapes, and living without watches, with only sunlight and weariness marking the time to get in our sleeping bags.

At the very last red and white mark of our journey

We’ve had plenty of time to meet great people. Starting with the Navarrian brothers we met in the early stage, which provided us with a good pace to follow while our leg muscles were still building up; or Kike and Ana, who drove from Pamplona to visit us during the first Aragonese stages (thanks for the supplies!). Tomàs and Roger, young hikers from Mataró, surprised us with their maturity and experience as mountaineers; we had the pleasure to join forces during four days, walking a really cool variant through the Infiernos and Collado del Letrero which avoided going through the ghost city of Panticosa. Roger and Tomàs, we really hope to meet you soon! Andreu, Manel, Ghandi and Gaŀla visited us at the Vall de Núria and were unlucky to suffer a frightening hail and thunder storm when they left our shelter on their way back to their car. Thanks! All of you have been a very special part of our experience!

This adventure through GR 11 has been incredibly positive for us for several reasons. We’ve learned a lot about ourselves and strengthened our relation, and now I know how powerful drive can be; to get somewhere, no matter how far, it’s really easy if you just believe you can do it and desire to get there.

Maria and I are proud of what we’ve done, and no wonder we’re looking for new challenges. An obvious one would be repeating this experience, going through the French side of the Pyrenees, but for now, the Corsican GR 20 seems the most appealing. We’ll see, next summer!

Hiking through the Pyrenean GR 11

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:14:00 +0000

Tomorrow, at this time, I’ll probably be unsuccessfully trying to find a comfortable position on a seat of the Bilmanbus to Irun. Very early on Saturday, as soon as we get off the bus, Maria and I will quickly head to Hondarribia’s beach in Cape Higer to symbolically wet our feet in the waters of the Cantabrian Sea.

We won’t have much time to enjoy the cold waters of the ocean, though. Soon after that, we’ll have to take a deep breath, look East, and start walking if we want to achieve our utmost objective: take a bath in the beautiful beaches of the Cap de Creus, in the Mediterranean sea. In between, 30 days and 840 kilometres of thick woods, deep valleys, high peaks and cold waters, all of which shape incredible landscapes.

The Portella de Baiau, during our 2008 trip

For a whole month, we’ll be mostly disconnected from everything else that isn’t our knee ache, our blisters, the Sun over our heads or where to get food. It’s the first time I leave on a hiking trip as long and tough as this one, and I feel both uncertainty and eagerness. We’ve been so busy during the last few months that we’ve been unable to train at all for this, and I’m probably in the worst physical condition in a decade. It’s too late to take care of that now, so we’ll try to take good care of our legs and spine.

In order to get back home in the Mediterranean, we’ll have to be fast, some days joining two stages and skipping a few that we know are not that interesting (sections over asphalt, etc.). It’s hard to make it in just one month, but we’ll try our best. The plan is going to sleep not long after sunset, getting up at dawn, to be able to walk for a decent time before the heat starts being a handicap and just resting at midday, when the Sun is strongest.

Of course, this means that I’m missing, yet again, this year’s edition of DebConf in New York City, which is really sad because I was looking forward hanging around with Mako, Mika, Biella, micah, Clint and the rest of the NYC/ Boston gang, but when the idea of doing a long trip this summer popped up around January, it was clear DebConf seemed unlikely this year. I hope all of you have a lot of fun, and see you in a few weeks!

DebConf 9

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:13:00 +0000

It’s taken me way too long to scribble these few lines, but I’m happy to say that in about one hour, I’ll be driving to Cáceres with Sergio. After seven hours or so, we should appear somewhere in Extremadura.

My priorities for this week are 1) having lots of fun with people I haven’t seen in ages, 2) catching up with all the Debian work I have neglected lately, be it packaging or l10n, 3) enjoying Cáceres and Extremadura’s culture, as it’s the first time I go past Madrid, and this is pretty much uncharted territory for me, and 4) doing some kind of exercise, which means letting bubulle kick my ass, and finding a decent swimming pool around the venue.

See you tonight!

Festa de les Trementinaires

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:50:00 +0000

Two weekends ago I went to La Seu d’Urgell again, and early on Saturday we drove to Tuixent, in the heart of the beautiful Parc Natural del Cadí-Moixeró, to participate in the Festa de les Trementinaires of the Vansa and Tuixent Valleys. Until then, I didn’t really know what a Trementinaire was, so discovering that incredible tradition in place made it a lot more fun.

A Trementinaire was a woman who, in order to bring some needed extra income to their family, collected medicinal plants found around the Vansa valley area, and used them to make remedies, medicines and other valuable goods. The Trementinaire would then leave their house for a few months every year in order to walk all over Catalunya, going from town to town selling these remedies. Some of them were really valuable for the people in the Catalan plain and coast, and thus were expensive and provided enough money to pay the state’s taxes to the Trementinaire’s family. Their name was derived from the trementina, a substance made from the resin of red pine trees, which was used to make badges against many kinds of pain and bruises.

The Festa program included lots of different activities, one of the most interesting being a botanical tour around the Josa village, which gave us a very practical idea of what plants the trementinaires used and what they were good for. On Saturday evening, we moved to Sorribes de la Vansa, where we attended a talk about women in today’s valley, and participated on a long session of traditional Pyrenean song dancing and singing, lead by the amazing Pep Lizandra. I took my time to become convinced about dancing myself, but it ended being lots of fun. Many of the songs had strong sexual content, which makes you wonder why these were acceptable two hundred years ago and are now so surprising, when not offensive.

El xotis de la relliscada

Eren les dotze ben tocades
quan la nineta va arribar,
duia la trena embolicada,
duia les calces a la mà.

Eren les dotze ben tocades,
el seu xicot la va cridar,
vine Roseta cap a casa,
ai que els meus pares han marxat!

La va abraçar es van petonejar
i la cosa aquí no va parar,
una mà aquí i una altra més enllà
i en Marià no es va poder aturar.

La va abraçar es van petonejar
i la cosa aquí no va parar,
i poc després quan ja anaven llençats
ai la marxa enrere va fallar!

Eren les dotze ben tocades
quan la Roseta va arribar,
duia un vestit de núvia blanca
i un ram de roses a la mà.

Eren les dotze ben tocades
el seu xicot ja era a l’altar
Roseta quina relliscada
haurem de dir sí al capellà

Back in Tuixent, we had dinner with some people we met during the dances and unfortunately due to the heavy rain we missed the burning of aromatic plants, but the organization relocated the concert and dance inside the town’s bar so we had our second share of dancing for hours.

On Sunday morning, there was a market of herbal remedies and natural products and a guided visit to the Museu de les Trementinaires. The museum is a must see if you visit Tuixent, they have managed to capture the conditions of life in the valley before this job and tradition extinguished only thirty years ago, when the last trementinaire left her house to walk all over Catalunya, or as they said, anar pel món.

Industrialization and a quick and progressive depopulation of the Pyrenean areas were critical for the survival of a very localized tradition, which now struggles to not fall in oblivion thanks to the interest of the people of the Vansa and Tuixent valleys. It’s sad to see how such valuable knowledge can be lost forever when all the women who did it have died…

The Festa de les Trementinaires is something I definitely want to enjoy again. Hopefully next Spring! If you are around the area, you’ll discover a new world that resembles the Middle Ages, but happened only a few years ago, and will be welcome by the people of the valley, who show real interest in passing their culture to the next generation, even if the traditions are not so much in practice nowdays.

Barcelona

Fri, 29 May 2009 02:50:00 +0000

Last weekend I finally managed to travel to Barcelona to visit my family and some friends. As my agenda was quite packed with stuff to do, I was unable to find out if any of the Ubunteros had arrived early for UDS, and I left just after lunch on Sunday.

Unfortunately, I had totally missed that before UDS, Canonical held their allhands meeting, and it would have been easy to meet them on Friday night after I got in the city. What a pitty, and sorry about this, mdz, I would have loved to meet… :(

In other Barcelona news, I’m sure that UDS attendees will be astonished (or fed up!) by the football crazyness going on right now. Last night I went to a culer bar near Woody and enjoyed watching how Barça claimed brilliantly their 3rd Champions Cup. For someone who normally doesn’t care that much about football, the last few weeks have been incredible.

Today I visited my 96 year old grandfather, and even if he has lost much of his expressiveness and energy since the last few months, today he was visibly happy and proud of what his Barça has managed to accomplish this season. Three titles, plus literally going over Real Madrid in Santiago Bernabeu. Barça is definitely més que un club, and I’m happy that my grandfather was able to enjoy it.

Calçotada in Valls

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:20:00 +0000

It’s here! This weekend is again the time to go up to Valls, my friend Frago’s town, to meet his friends and enjoy a new edition of their calçotada. Like other years, this will be a crazy event that will cover the whole weekend. I’m looking forward to our traditional calçot war, and spending tomorrow’s night around a big fire in the middle of the country side of Tarragona.

Frago and I, after last year’s calçot war

FOSDEM 2009

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:07:00 +0000

I’m glad to announce that I’ll be again in Brussels for this year’s FOSDEM. Ivan and I will fly from Zaragoza (!) on Friday, just on time for the beer event, and come back on Monday evening. I know azeem would have not been happy otherwise!

Iruña

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:37:00 +0000

This weekend I had the pleasure of visiting my friend Kike in Iruña, a city I really like but had not been able to visit in five years. I spent three days with him, after a really awful Bilman trip during Friday night.

The first thing that happened on Friday morning was quite unexpected. I went out, crossed a pair of streets to get to Carlos III, and going past the corner I found myself surrounded by all kinds of policemen: red, blue, green and yellow. There were press reporters all over the place, with TV and photo cameras ready to record something big. What the hell? I looked around, and there it was: a huge blue sign read Populares de Navarra, and Mariano Rajoy was seconds away from getting out of the new PP headquarters in Nafarroa. With a few dozen policemen looking at me in suspicion, and realising my current hair dress wasn’t the most appropriate for that scenario, I decided to disappear as quickly as possible.

Populares aside, the weekend was really productive. I had a great time trying to find the places I visited 9 and 5 years ago. It was sad to see the fantastic Iruñako Gaztetxea turned into an iron building surrounded by old, traditional houses in the centre of the city. With Kike, I had enough time to learn more about the origins of Iruña and the three cities from which it originated, and visit the Ciudadela.

On Saturday, Kike, Ana and I went to have some fun on a snowy day around Orreaga and had dinner in a small town around the area, maybe Lintzoain? I’m afraid I forgot due to the mix of basque names in my head. We had dinner in lo viejo, where I spotted a poster of Solidari@s con Itoiz for the “Itoitz hustu arte” campaign, a copy of which I unsuccessfully tried to get in several places in the city.

On Sunday, Kike and I took a bus to Donosti, and I travelled across the most beautiful highway I’ve seen. But of course, that was from my perspective seated in a bus. I can imagine the Leitzaran highway project must have been greatly contested by the people of the tiny towns nearby. The spoiled valleys and views must have been really impressive in the past and seem now irreversibly ruined by a scar and holes through the mountains.

This was my first visit to Donosti, which held its annual Marathon, and were lucky to meet our friend Rubén when he was around kilometre 25 of his race. He managed to finish under 2:50, which was a bit better than what he aimed for in his first Marathon. Well done! The weather was horrible, and our visit to La Concha, the old harbour and the Casco Viejo was short, we were freezing and getting our feet wet.

While I visited Donosti for the first time, Mikel Laboa, one of the most respected singers in the basque culture, was ebbing away. Laboa’s songs always give me goosebumps, even if I need to read a translation for the basque lyrics. Many will remember his music from Julio Medem’s documentary, La pelota vasca, featuring Txoria txori, which has become a symbol of basque culture over the years. Youtube has quite a few videos, and I’d recommend watching Txoria txori, Gure bazterrak, Lili bat or Baga biga higa performed by the Orfeón Donostiarra to name a few.

Mikel Laboa, goian bego.

Turkey

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:35:00 +0000

I only start believing I’m visiting some new place when I’ve finally spent way too many hours looking at flight websites in an attempt to find a flight that is slightly cheaper than the only option everyone else is offering you, and after a few days prices have gone up enough so you give up and end up buying.

And, two weeks ago, I finally did. Barcelona-Istanbul means the third chapter of the unplanned saga “Chistmas in Islam”. Two years ago I started 2007 visiting Tunisia, and last year we enjoyed a 10 day trip around the South of Morocco, which was absolutely fantastic (and I’ve still haven’t blogged about).

This year I’ll be discovering Istanbul, Cappadocia and other parts of Turkey with Maria. The idea is to try to avoid visiting too many places in a rush, and follow the good advice of our Moroccan friends, “La prisa mata, amigo”. We have plenty of days to explore Turkey’s secrets, but I want to be able to enjoy them, and avoid being in a constant hurry.

As always, I’ll be glad to get suggestions on “must not miss” places or things, and advice on how to move around, where to stay, what to do or what not to do is extremely welcome. I’m totally looking forward to this, after I missed this years’s GUADEC!

Pyrenees and Mallorca

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:04:00 +0000

This is the last thing I type before I leave office, pick up my backpack and drive all the way to Espot, in the Catalan Pyrenees, to hike around the GR 11 during 7 or 8 days. After that, we’ll take a plane to Mallorca, to spend another week with Jeroni and others in a small town (I always forget its name).

I’m really looking forward to this, it’s been two years since my last trip to the Pyrenees, and I’ve been wanting to visit Mallorca for a long time.

I’m glad I’ll be completely incommunicado, so see you on my return on the 18^th. Have a nice DebConf, you lucky ones!

La Ruta del Carrilet

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

As Josep asks for it every now and then, and we really enjoyed this trip, it’s time to write about the four days we spent cycling from Ripoll to Girona, through the Ruta del Carrilet, a Catalan via verda similar to the one we completed a year ago.

I spent this year’s 9 d’Octubre cycling trip with totally different trip mates, not related to my triathlon team. The extensive group was formed by Sabri, Mar, Bàrbara, Carles, Desi, Adela, Núria, Amador and myself. We started our journey by car from València to Mollet de Mar, where we parked the cars and take a regional train to Ripoll with our bikes, where the real journey would start.

Arrival at Ripoll

When we got to Ripoll, it was quite late and dark, but we managed to find the start of the Ruta del Ferro rail trail which would take us to Sant Joan de les Abadesses. It was quite cold, but especially really humid, so we had to think twice before settling on a place to camp and setup our tents. We had to take special care of covering the bicycles as the air was really wet, and anything we left uncovered would appear soaking next morning. In part, my shoes suffered from this.

Early next morning we had breakfast on the wet grass and then started our way to Sant Joan through a deliciously well equipped and maintained cycling track, which unfortunately only lasts for 12 kilometres through a splendind landscape. After having breakfast in the old railway station in Sant Joan, we abandoned the Ruta del Ferro to take a road to Olot via Sant Pau de Seguries, where we had to climb a small mountain and then descend through the Vall de Bianya until we got to Olot.

Sant Joan de les Abadesses’ railway station

Asking the locals for the start of the Ruta del Carrilet was fun due to the strong oriental accent in the area and we sometimes wouldn’t get a word of what we were told. An old man recommended us finding a big park in the outskirts of the town, where we prepared our entrepans for lunch, and after a little rest, we started cycling up the Carrilet, which would take us to Girona in two stages. This Catalan area is of volcanic origin, and there are several natural parks dedicated to the phenomenon. There are many mountains covered with forests and impossible peak shapes, which due to the time of the year were starting to go from green to brown and yellow, making fantastic colour schemes in the landscape.

Under a green ceiling in Olot

Just after the few first kilometres, the railroad track starts to descend most of the way, which makes it easy for people who aren’t too trained, and easier to enjoy your way chatting with people while you cycle. As we consumed the daylight, we came across a parish church party with lots of old and young people from the nearby town of Sant Miquel de Pineda. Amador and I were lagging behind a bit at that point, and when we got there, we found the rest of the group were already off their bikes and either having a curious look over the party, or directly following suit and dancing like the others. We had a peek into the small church and also into a small graveyard in the back, where I was surprised to find the “enemies” of my Catalan grandmother: «Família Matabosch», as one of the headstones revealed.

Partying at Sant Miquel de Pineda

As it was getting late, we eventually started off again, but luckily Bàrbara spotted what seemed a good sleeping place for that night. To the right of the trail there was a hermitage (devoted to Santa Cecília) up on the hill which, for bonus points, had a porch with a recently renewed roof which would help cover ourselves from humidity and rain, as we found soon after starting cooking dinner.

While the cooks prepared our soup, some others went down to the Carrilet in order to find out if the next town was close so we could get some driking water for the dinner. Luckily, Sant Feliu was close enough, and we found a bar where we got some water… and two bottles of wine, which made some people back at the hermitage very happy. We were quite tired though, so we eventually went to sleep after reading some stories from a great tale book, with the sound of rain hitting the grass outside the porch.

The rain was still with us when we started waking up, so we had breakfast and packed our stuff very slowly, in an attempt to avoid getting wet. But rain didn’t stop, so we made a few hacks on our bicycle bagpacks to minimise the amount of rain wetting them. When we were finally ready to set off and had cycled around 3 kilometres under the light rain, it finally stopped raining, making the rest of the journey very pleasant.

Sleeping under the porch of Santa Cecília’s hermitage

This part of the route is again quite beautiful, with impressive amounts of green vegetation at both sides of the track. There’s a lot of water presence in the land, which makes the type of trees and bushes quite different to the ones we are used to find in the Valencian Country.

After going by a few small towns, we arrived in the old railway station of Amer, hometown of the Puigdemonts. Even if it was a bit early, we decided to have lunch there, so a few of us went down to the centre of the town to buy bread and some other details to eat. Being in my friend Josep’s town for the first time, I wanted to visit his family’s bakery, but unfortunately it is closed on Mondays. We had lunch back at the cute station, and eventually kept going on our way to Girona. Outside Amer, the Carrilet was temporarily cut by the road, and there were two possible alternatives: using the road, with heavy lorry traffic, or diverting through a very steep track with very hard slopes. Most of the group preferred the road, but Mar, Amador and I went up that track, which was hard to climb and really fun to descend. Apparently, Amer locals call those 1.5 kilometres the “Tourmalet”. It’s probably not so bad, though. :)

Amer’s railway station

Unfortunately, the Ruta del Carrilet starts getting uglier after Amer, and as you approach the more industrialised towns near the capital Girona. The area around Anglès wasn’t that fun, with the track continuously being invaded by cars and other vehicles. Soon after we were in the farmland area surrounding Girona and its Devesa.

Jonathan was waiting for us in the city, after his two month stay in Scotland, and we were all happy to meet him. We discarded continuing our way to the coast, which was the initial plan, and instead dropped our stuff in the house of one of Adela’s friends, and went out to have dinner to a Wok restaurant, where the poor people running it suffered our childish behaviour involving the rotating central dish on our table and custard sucking contests.

Jonathan guided us through the Cathedal and city wall areas of the town centre, which are impressive, and we climbed all of the wall towers to have great looks over the dark and quiet city. Eventually, we went to sleep, as Adela had to leave early, and we had to pack to get our train back to Barcelona.

Back in Mollet, we cooked our last camping-gaz lunch in the park right next to the station, before noticing the place stinked of dog poo. After the careful operation of filling the three cars with 9 bicycles, we were finally on our way back to València, completing another great cycling journey. If you like bicycle tourism and can travel to this area in Catalonia, I highly recommend it, as there’s many great places to visit, all of them accessible with bikes.

Having lunch in Mollet

FOSDEM 2008

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 14:52:00 +0000

As part of a sad trend that pulls me away from my healthy travel habits, I just booked plane tickets to Brussels for February 22nd. Note this is 1.5 months of planning ahead. madduck, your turn!

Additionally, two weeks ago I got tickets for a one week long trip around parts of Germany at the end of the month. The travel plan is totally undefined, so I don’t know what cities I’ll be visiting yet. Fun!

Marrakech

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:49:00 +0000

With four plane tickets already in our hands, it’s official. Clara, Sabri, Joni and I will be flying to Marrakech as 2007 languishes, spending the first hours of 2008 in the city, and then start our way to the South during the following week.

We still haven’t settled on a planned route, but travelling with these friends is mostly a synonym of adventure and fun. The desert, the snow, the villages, the mosques, the souks, the spices, the hammams… I can’t wait!

Delta de l'Ebre

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:31:00 +0000

Last December, I went to the Delta de l’Ebre with a good number of friends to spend one of December’s three-day weekends. Les Terres de l’Ebre are the southest region of Catalunya, right next to the border with the Valencian Country. The Ebre river forms a big delta as it meets the Mediterranean, and the great amount of wildlife, specially avian, in the Natural Park makes it a fantastic place to visit.

We would sleep, more or less, in Cinta’s appartment in L’Ampolla. The first night we managed to fit 17 persons for dinner, and about 14 stayed to sleep in any possible corner of the flat.

As soon as the Valencian group arrived, we tried to meet the people coming from the North, but apparently they got lost and we stayed on a sightseeing spot admiring how easily the weather changes here. In an hour or so, we went from a sunny day to a quick but heavy shower and back to sunny. When we finally found each other, we decided it was a bit too late to do anything too special, given the short days in December, so we walked South along the beach, on our way to the Salines, the salt processing facility, in the Punta de la Banya.

Agua para todos…

During the walk, we witnessed what the people from the Delta have been warning about for decades: the Delta is disappearing. The progressive overuse of the river’s flow, excessive irrigation, damm construction and degradation is killing this unique place. The waters are slowly claiming what once was theirs. An electricity line, at the beginning of our trip being at the end of the beach starts approaching the sea, or viceversa, as you move southward, to end up many metres inside the water. The old people in the Delta still remember the 200m tall lighthouse in the Illa de Buda, which the sea managed to devour.

Sunset at the salines del Delta

When we reached the Punta we could watch a beautiful sunset over the mountains of Els Ports, and when it got dark and cold we headed to Tortosa, the area’s capital, which I had recently visited for the first time for one of Softcatalà’s meetings. There, we had dinner at a bar and met Jordi and Anna for a while, before going back to Ampolla, going to bed relatively early due to everyone being very tired.

On Saturday, we decided to have a look at the Delta… from above. So we drove to the top of the Cim del Caro, where we could admire a great view over the flat farmlands of the Delta, and then found a nice trail which took us to a nice forest, where we had lunch. After a visit to Alfara de Carles, we went back to the house, had a great dinner and played fun games at the table.

Unfortunately, Sunday morning was dedicated to cleaning up the mess in the appartment and packing, as part of the group, the Jordis from Alcoi and the twins, had to leave early. The remaining four Valencians decided to go to Deltebre to have a local paella. It was quite good, although the bar tender laughed at our request to eat directly from the paella, rejecting dishes. Small cultural clash. ;)

I remember downloading and viewing the pictures of the trip a few days after getting back in València, and then losing track of them. Last week, while testing an EPIA board with some random hard drive, I suddenly realised there was a big chance the pictures would be on that drive, and after some search, I found them; I had been close to mkfs the disk a few minutes before. I hadn’t stopped blaming myself for misplacing these pictures, as they remind me of this wonderful weekend. Luckily, they are back!

Going back to the state of the Delta, experts say it will be mostly gone in 200 years. All of the Terres de l’Ebre have fought against the previous government’s “PHN” plan to divert part of the river’s flow to the North and South, to supply Barcelona, and specially the South of València, where the developing of the coastal areas is out of control. I fear that whenever PP regains power in Madrid, they will retake this idea. There is a lot of money involved in building a 700 km long scar in our land. The Delta de l’Ebre is a fantastic place which doesn’t deserve a terrible fate like this, only for the benefit of the usual suspects. As the good people of this land would say…

Lo riu és vida. No al transvasament!

Rjukan, again

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 19:39:00 +0000

Very early tomorrow I’ll be flying to Oslo for my second week at the Telemark. The only fixed plan for the week is to do ski daytrips all over the Gausta area, and, maybe, attempt topping it if my skills with the Telemark skis are good enough. I don’t think so, though.

Unlike two years ago, the weather will be a bit less gentle, according to the forecast. It is expected there’ll be snow and under -5°C next Tuesday at noon, when we’ll be out in the forests. Eww!

While I planned to hang around Oslo with Tollef while we waited for our bus to Rjukan, it seems this year we don’t have that much time to kill. So, depending on how tight the return is, I hope we can at least have a beer next Saturday instead! Keep an eye on your e-mail.

Tunisia

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 02:30:00 +0000

Last month, Belén and I managed to secure our trip to Tunisia on the very last moment. So, planning trips on the very last moment isn’t nothing new around this place, but we made a big effort to take things to the limit.

I can’t remember why exactly, but on January 31 we were *so* close to fucking everything up before it started, when we packed our stuff just a pair of hours before having to leave to the train station. My luggage was prepared in a rush, so while I think I took everything I thought I’d need, I didn’t really select my clothes too much. The idea was to have our suitcases mostly empty to bring back stuff from the markets: smoking cachimbas, lamps, leather stuff, etc. At that time I didn’t know that would end up being a great strategy.

Anyway, like 9 minutes before the train’s departure we were stuck in Nuevo Centro without a taxi and at that point I really had lost hope about being on time. For some reason, there were no taxis in the area, when it’s normally a place where there’s tons of them. Suddenly one appeared, we rushed in and I asked the taxi driver to please fly to the station. Happily, we got an incredible green wave around the avenues, he drove us at like 80 Km/h and we even had to wait for a few minutes at the station.

In Barcelona, we prepared our small New Year’s Eve dinner with my cousin Laia and Marc, and while the plan was to go to sleep pretty early to be in good shape to go to the airport next morning, the bottles of wine and cava emptied quite fast, and around 4:30 we were quite drunk when we decided it was enough. When some annoying sound woke us up next morning, it was really late, so we again rushed out to the empty streets of Barcelona, sneaked into a regional train, without knowing it was the only way to get in time in El Prat airport, and after some initial confusion trying to find the travel’s agency desk in the wrong terminal, we managed to check into our flight, being the very last to do so. With all the rush, I couldn’t get some clothes from my suitcase transfered into my hand luggage, which I really wanted to do after my nice lost luggage experience during Debconf 5 in Helsinki. Anyway, chances are small that your luggage gets lost, right?

But of course, Murphy is always vigilant, and this was a great opportunity to fuck me up. After a short but horrible (due to our really bad hangover) to Tunis/Carthage airport, we were in the long security/passport check. When Belén picked up her bag and mine didn’t appear, I tried to tell myself “hey, it’ll appear, no worries!”. After 15 minutes, the stupid suitcase was nowhere to be found. Apparently, another two pieces of luggage had the same luck, which made us contact a group of four Uruguayans who were missing one of them.

Nothing too terrible; it’ll surely come on tomorrow’s flight. After reclaiming our lost luggage, we went out to the parking where a bus was waiting for us, and on the way there, the six of us nearly fell into the first Tunisian scam, involving a dude selling jasmine flowers at 2€ each. The bus took us down to Jasmine Hammamet, the most touristic place in Tunisia. Valencians might have an easy imagining the atrocity of the area by picturing what twice Marina d’Or plus Benidorm including Terra Mítica would look like. Kilometres and kilometres of a disgusting “Who can build the most horrible giant hotel right next to the beach” contest.

So it was pretty clear we had to spend as little time as possible in the area. We soon learned about how transport works in Tunisia. The cheapest is to use the public busses and the luagge collective taxis, we soon found out. Our first morning there, our guide Rejeb, working for Iberojet and Solplan touroperators, gave a talk where he advised us against travelling alone, specially around the South, while he offered organised trips around the country for every day of the week. Although we expected this “danger!” speech, we decided to book the two day trip to the South and Great South of the country, basically because it was the best way to see many places in a short time, even if it meant having limited time in each destination.

We wandered around Jasmine Hammamet and discovered Carthage Land, sort of a Disneyland set in the age of Anibal and Carthage’s empire, which was inside a newly built medina complex. This was a really bad place to practice the art of haggling, as the place was so desert, merchants really tried hard to get you buy something. Again, we were close to fucking up after our first negotiation, but we finally decided we weren’t so interested. Lucky, we later found out the price was outrageous.

Sadly, we spent way too much time in that tourist trap, and we found it was too late to go to the real Hammamet town to see a real medina and real stuff, so we had a long walk around the immense beach until sunset. On Wednesday, we did organise a bit with the Uruguayans and some others we had met: María and Santi “Kuchi Kuchy”, Cristina and Pedro and an Argentinian family, and managed to hire a van driver to drive us all over the North. For quite a good price, we were taken to a few ruin sites in Carthago, now mostly a residential area, and it was really impressive. While the condition of many of the remainings is not optimal, it was exciting to see things which had been built by Phoenicians and Romans 2,000 years ago. I really enjoyed the remainings of the Antonine thermal baths of the city. It had been a huge building right next to the sea; one of the standing columns helps figuring out how big it had been. Right next to this site, the Presidential Palace dominated the whole gulf. Military places are treated zealously in Tunisia, and it is against the law to take pictures of any bit of it, not even a barbwire of the fence. The Palace had a great Tunisian flag waving over it, and many signs advised you against taking pictures in that direction. I couldn’t resist.

The ruins of the Roman Antonine Baths

After Carthage, we went to Sidi Bou Said, a small touristic town, which had the peculiarity and beauty of having all windows and doors painted in a beautiful light blue colour. Our last stop for the day was in Tunis, where we visited the most amazing medina of the whole week. Unlike the new medina in Jasmine Hammamet, this one was literally packed with people going up and down the maze of very narrow streets. Every few metres you’d come across a new, attractive smell coming from the few salons de thé or spice, leather or perfume shops. Here we finally started developing our haggling skills, and managed to get a few items for reasonable amounts.

Streets of Sidi Bou Said

Back at our hotel, everyone tried to get a quick dinner and go early to bed, as next morning we were taking a bus for our trip around the South. There was time to call yet another time to the Airport, to find out that one of the luggage pieces had been found. While there was no news about my suitcase, we shared a taxi to the airport to pick the found suitcase, and see if mine was actually there by any chance. Unluckily, it wasn’t, so I wouldn’t have any clothes for the desert visit. Some people in the group were kind enough to lend me some t-shirts and pants. For my underwear, I actually resorted to using some of Belén’s (no kidding, it was way too sexy :P), while mine dried up after some manual washing.

The alarm clock went off at 5:15 or so, and soon after we were ready in the hall with our small bags. When the bus was ready to pick us up, the guide said we weren’t allowed in, as we weren’t on the list. WTF? We were nearly the first ones to book and pay for it! So he finally let us in, for a short while, until he realised there was no space for everyone, so he demanded that we got off. Of course, we didn’t, and a long and very disgusting argument started between the guide, us and a few people who had seen us pay for our trip, and were trying to support us. To make a long story short, we ended up stepping down when I noticed the bus driver calling the police, and after Rejeb, our guide, told us the other bus would be waiting for us at the travel agency if we quickly took a taxi there. We of course knew that was a fantasy to get the bus moving, but dealing with the police at 6:30AM wasn’t on my list of activities for the day, so we finally gave up to let the rest of the people get in time to their visits, as they were very tightly scheduled to make everything fit in two days.

Nobody was waiting for us at the travel agency, but we were promised our money back, which did happen in the evening; our plans for Thursday and Friday were a bit broken though, and the rest of the morning was spent looking for alternatives. When we had managed to book a new trip in a different agency for Saturday, we took the bus to Nabeul, the capital of the province, well known for their medina specialised in pottery.

In Nabeul, we lived a tourist trap which I found to be quite original. Not having walked 3 metres into the city walls, some young dude stops us and tells us that he knows us, as he works in the restaurant of “our hotel”. I totally didn’t remember his face at all, but why not? So he quickly tells us Nabeul has good carpet workshops, and her sister is working in one which is regulated by the Government, and you can only visit two days a week. Coincidentally, Thursday is one of them! So he literally grabs us by the arm and takes us to one of the streets perpendicular to the main market street, and we enter a carpet shop. To the right, his sister probably being like 45 years older, is knitting a nice carpet on the loom. And a few seconds after, we’re taken upstairs, where a “Teletienda” show starts before us. Without being asked if we want to buy a carpet, some other dude starts to unroll carpets and more carpets before us, talking in some very basic Spanish. While we’re offered jasmine tea, which is really nice, Ali “the brother” quickly excuses himself and vanishes, leaving us with the salesman, which continues unrolling more and more before us, now helped by someone else. When 10 minutes later we convince them that we won’t buy any carpet, he asks a donative for his young employee, who has unrolled and will now roll back a zillion carpets. Back in the hotel, we have dinner with a pair of Catalans from our flight, and when we tell us about the carpet place, they tell us they went over the same story like one hour before us!

On Friday, we got some advice on other places to visit, and decided to go up to Cape Bon and visit Kerkuan, the only important remainings of a Punic city which, when conquered by the Romans, was destroyed to the grounds, but not rebuilt on top (they were busy with Carthage). Romans did an excellent job when destroying cities, and the result is a site which still lets you see perfectly how a small town (around 1,500) looked like 2,000 years ago.

Ruins of a Kerkuan neighbourhood, with their red bathrooms nearly intact

To reach Kerkuan we had taken the bus up to Nabeul and then our first luagge to Kelibia, where we took a taxi (after no less than half an hour arguing in French with the taxi driver to settle on a rate for a ride to Kerkuan and then to the tip of the Cape in El Haouaria. Luagges are undoubtedly the best way to travel medium distances for very little money, while getting mixed with locals. During our ride up North, we chatted with a nursing student from Kelibia who was going back to her town for the weekend. She was really open, like most of the people we found in Tunisia, and we ended up exchanging our post addresses; we still need to send her a postcard from València soonish. This area wasn’t so touristic, so the roads, while totally acceptable, weren’t as good as the highway from Tunis to Sfax we were used to.

We had seen some bits of the local “driving skills”, but the luagge driver performed some of the most extreme overtakings I’ve ever seen. These happened every three of four minutes, so after a while I was actually amused about what was going on. We would overtake two lorries on one go when there was absolutely no visibility; if things went too far, people would just slow down to let the overtaker get back into his lane on time, and those coming ahead would just use their headlamps to make them know it was just a bit too close.

The taxi driver, annoyed at us, took us to Kerkuan but didn’t wait for us; he immediately left, leaving us without any transportation in the middle of nowhere. After a visit at the site, we walked around 2.5 kilometres back to the main road, where we decided it was too late and risky to continue the journey up to El Haouaria, so we waited on the road gutter for a taxi. The first one which stopped was, to our surprise, the same bastard who left us one hour before, who stopped, laughing at us a little. Luckily some other taxi came by in the correct direction, and soon forgot about that man.

After a taxi, luagge and bus ride, we were back in Hammamet, and the desert group had already got back from the two day trip. We were asked over and over what happened, what did we do, etc. People who hadn’t talked to us before would come over and see; we were really surprised about the warm welcome we had. After dinner, we improvised a customes party, and many people managed to dress up in Tunisian/arabic fashions using bed sheets and so on. We had to wake up at 5AM next morning, but didn’t go to bed until 2AM.

Nothing could go wrong this time. We had our tickets, we had confirmed we would be going on Sunday the night before, so at 6:15, our new guide came in, and came straight towards me. He said something in German, and after I told him I spoke absolutely no German, he said “huh, well you know the bus is full of Germans, and my indications will be in German?”. Pretty incredible, but again a fuckup by the agency. My ticket said, clearly: “Sahara safari. Bus + 4x4. (ALL)”. Turns out “ALL” meant Allemand, not “everything included”, although we had requested English pretty clearly. This was quite a minor problem though, after having no clothes for a whole week and having been left behind two days before.

I think we were really lucky getting that German group, though. We were only 16 people on the minibus, making the stops a lot faster than the normal ones, where 55 persons need to get out and in of the bus. We had our own Routard guide for Tunisia, so we could read about the places we were about to visit before getting ther. Also, I surprisingly knew much of what our guide was talking about, just missing the details —he talked about oil production in Tunisia compared to Spain’s, among other topics—. When the landscape was becoming drier and drier, Belén and I spotted something dark far away ahead in the completely straight road. As it became bigger, I started thinking it might be the #1 place to visit for me in Tunisia: El Djem’s impressive Roman amphitheatre.

When we got off the bus, I was totally excited. Before me, the walls of an incredibly well preserved, huge Roman building; in fact, the best Roman ruins in the whole continent. El Djem’s amphitheatre was the third biggest of the Roman empire with 35,000 seats, only surpased by Rome’s and Capua’s. It remained mostly intact until the 17th century, when some of its stones were used to build the city and some of the treasures taken to the Great Mosque of Kairouan, but when it took more damage was during two consequent wars, when the Turks didn’t have many problems to blow part of the wall away using cannons to end up a siege of the city.

The Roman amphitheatre of El Djem

The underground tunnels are intact, and it’s difficult to not have flashes of Gladiator while walking under the arena’s trapdoors. Sadly, there was little time to spend there, and we had to continue the journey after just 45 minutes. I would have spent half of the day there.

From here, the landscape truly started to get drier and more desertic. The south of Tunisia is a giant olive field, until you reach the Great South, where it’s dry enough that the only thing that grows in the land are rocks. Hours later we arrived in Matmâta, the very famous troglodyte village of small holes in the ground. Although I was curious about being there, watching how organised and massive tourism has destroyed these Berber’s ways of life dissapointed me greatly. Our guide stopped the bus in one of the pits, which was decorated with white and light blue. In the first room, an old woman was grinding something in a small, stone mill. The dwellers of the few pits still used by their original inhabitants now make a living by letting people into their homes and getting dinar as a payment for taking photographs. What the woman was doing was just a bit of theatre, part of the show. After this first room, we got into the middle of the pit, which had a series of other passages to some rooms, some of which were simply open so we could get in and have a look. I felt a little bit like violating someone’s privacy, and wondered how much the house had changed in the last years.

Inside a troglodyte underground house in Matmâta

After our visit, we continued up the mountains of Matmâta, and after going by a giant “WELCOME TO MATMATA” sign drawn in white in the middle of a mountain, Hollywood style (!), we stopped for a brief photo-stop (sic). Indeed, the view was quite impressive, and is universally famous as one of the filming spots of Tatoonie scenes in Star Wars: A New Hope. Speaking of famous places, a few minutes later we stopped at the top of one of the hills, were we’d have lunch in the Hotel Sidi Driss, a place of pilgrimage for Star Wars fans, as it was the troglodyte pit which served as the Skywalker’s home. The place is full of references to the film saga, and one of the open pits is full of set pieces stuck into the walls. We were served couscous, which wasn’t bad, but was cooked and served in the most genuine fast-food fashion. Everyone there gets couscous to eat, apparently, and it’s the same in many other touristic places in the area.

Matmâta’s lunar landscape

From here, our journey headed straight West, in the middle of the rocky desert, until after some time, you could start to see lines of palm tree branches planted here and there, a sign that rocks would soon disappear, being replaced by sand and dunes. As when we were approaching El Djem, at some point a huge, dark spot appeared on the horizon.

Douz, probably named after some 12th French batallion which stayed there, is a small town in the very limit of the Sahara desert, built right next to a huge oasis, exclusively dedicated to palm tree plantations, making dates production a big source of income, along with, of course tourism. The travel agencies use Douz as the starting point for several-day trips into the desert, camel rides and stuff like this. Our guide offered us getting a camel and carriage ride in Tozeus for 20 dinar, but Belén and I declined. He didn’t seem to be too happy about it, and had no problem commenting this in German and Arab with the driver (Spanisch and Spanien were clear to me). We learned that the agency (or the guide) makes around 3 Dinar for everyone who contracts the camel rides, after speaking to one native young kid who worked in the camel place. While our German trip mates got dressed in berber fashion, we opted to walk into the desert and play around in the sand on our own. I discovered a few desert insects which were unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere, and their diminute trails were all over the dunes. Looking West, the view was astonishing, with only thousands of kilometres of yellow dunes ahead us.

The evening sun over the dunes

After they came back, we were taken to our hotel, which was really impressive. After leaving our stuff in our room, we headed back to the desert, which was like 300 metres away, to see the sunset over the “Great Dune”. There’s a street which literally serves as the frontier between the rocky ground and the sand desert. From there, you could see many lines of palm tree branches, which are planted by locals in a futile attempt to stop the inexorable advance of the desert. Women in Douz and other towns in the desert limit spend their days sweeping the entrances to their homes, as sand gets in really fast. A small village next to Douz even had to be abandoned and rebuilt in some other place, with the old one being finally devoured by the dunes.

When it got dark, we still had some time to kill before dinner, and we discovered a hammam in our hotel. I got in, and saw there was a bored young man inside. He informed us about the prices, and after some short deliberation, we realised we’d spent half of the camel money in some Arab relaxation; while I got a really cool massage, Belén enjoyed a Turkish bath. I spoke to the guy for a while, and he said not that many people used that hammam. He actually handed the list of services since 2002, which easily fitted in one piece of paper. People don’t know what they are missing; he explained that most of the hotel’s clients just showed no interest in the baths. I wonder how Fins or Norwegians would react, given their sauna culture. The dinner and breakfast in that hotel was absolutely awesome, and I actually ate too much to have an easy sleep.

Next morning we had to be ready at 5:30. That’s pushing my limits. The bus started crossing the Chott Jerid when it was still quite dark. The chotts are dry, salt lakes in the middle of the desert, which during some seasons do get some water, sometimes from the underground. The Chott Jerid is the biggest of the three chotts in the area, and the views are fantastic. It’s like a giant, totally flat muddy sea which reflects light creating dangerous mirages of oasis-like dark patterns. Before the construction of the recent road that links Douz and Tozeur, crossing the chott was so risky that many people died in the attempt. We had the unique opportunity to see the sun rise over the salty horizon.

Sunrise at the Chott Jerid

Again, on our way to Tozeur, we were offered a carriage ride for ten dinar, and again we declined. The guide then asked us if we had no money or what. So in Tozeur we basically wanted to walk around the oasis fields, and ended up talking most of the time with some old man who sold drums and desert roses.

On a 4x4, we went up North to Chebika, a really cool town with a small oasis of thermal water, which I guess was around 40°C. The short walk to the wall where the oasis surfaced was packed with children who insistently begged for money or offered necklaces and other items. It was difficult to make them understand you didn’t want anything. We then went up the mountain behind Chebika through a road which had its own piece of history. It seems that during WWII, Rommel suffered an Allied siege in Chebika, with a range of mountains behind their backs. The Allies gave him one month to surrender, and he took his time to answer. During that time, he ordered his engineers to design and build a road which would let them escape Chebika through the steep mountains, and they managed. When the ultimatum expired, the Allies apparently found out Chebika had been abandoned by the Germans, including tanks and most of their equipment. So, on the way up, a few kilometres away from the Algerian border, there was another typical visit to the biggest oasis waterfall in Tunisia, which was several metres high.

The oasis at Chebika

Our Sahara trip would soon end, and after lunch we headed Northeast on our way to Hammamet. On our way back, we stopped in Kairouan, one of the key Islam pilgrimace spots, with the Great Mosque as the biggest attraction. Unluckily, as we arrived after lunch, we didn’t had a chance to see it. Apparently it is really impressive. We haggled a bit for a pair of babouches and a small leather couch in the medina.

We came back to our hotel around 7, and found most of the people around the hall. After the obligatory update on how it went, we went to bed as we were exhausted, and of course we had to get up really early to head to the airport. The airport was at that early time of the morning a total chaos, and while people stood in the checkin lines, I tried to find out what was going on with my still lost luggage.

I went back to the lost luggage window, which would be closed for 5 more minutes. When they finally opened, they told me once again they had no clue about what was going on with my luggage. I finally understood they had no clue: my tracking number wasn’t in their database. I asked them if I could have a look at the unreclaimed luggage storage room. They kindly opened a small door for me, and invited me to go inside and have a look. The view was gross: hundreds of lost bags all over the place. As I was in a bit of a hurry (I actually had to get back to Barcelona), I asked him where to find the bags of one week ago, and he nearly bursted into laugher. Okay, I had to look all over the place, scanning every piece of luggage in an attempt to spot mine. There were bags of absolutely every type in there. In one of the corridors, I sensed a disgusting smell, and figured out some poor guy may have food or something in one of their lost bags, which was rotting in that horrible room. So wrong: soon after I found myself nearly stepping on a puddle of shit, as if someone had literally dumped it right there. Oh my… luckily my search was nearly over and unsuccessful, and I got back to Barcelona with the hope of finding my bag in El Prat. After looking in their two storage rooms I realised I’d probably not see the luggage again, which is a real pain in the ass.

A few hours of train later we were back in València, with a feeling of having spent 3 or 4 weeks in Tunisia, not just 8 days. Really a great place to visit, not only for their cultural treasures, both current and ancient, but for the openness of their people. I hope I’ll be back at some point!

Tunisia

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 16:22:00 +0000

Yesterday Belén and I got confirmation from the travel agency: it’s now official! We’ll be going to Barcelona (third time this month for me) tomorrow, spend New Year’s Eve with my cousin and early during the morning of January 1st we’ll be taking a flight to Tunisia, to end up in Hammamet for a one week long trip around the country. Before this very late confirmation, the agency was only assuring one of us could come back; the other return ticket was missing, and I wasn’t planning on staying there alone. :)

This is pretty exciting because I’ve never been anywhere in Africa, despite it’s very close from where I live, so I’m really looking forward to discovering the cultures of the Islam in Northern Africa. We plan going to way too many places, but I think I’ll most enjoy the different Roman buildings in a few of the important cities, specially in Dougga.

If you have any suggestions of things I can’t miss in Tunisia, feel free to comment here. Have in mind I’ll probably be moving around in louages (shared taxis) so maybe going to places too far away from Hammamet isn’t that easy -yeah, I’m thinking about Matmata and the Skywalker’s village ;)- and we don’t want to spend lots of money.

Hopefully things will be normal at El Prat airport tomorrow, after the distressing news coming from Madrid this morning… More when I come back on January 8th!

Debconf7 travel options

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 18:52:00 +0000

The Debconf team just announced that registration is now open for next year’s Debconf7, to be held in Edinburgh next June.

The preparations seem to go at good pace, and they already have a Travel wiki page with information so attendees can start looking for the best option for them. I am delighted to see they have been thinking about every case out there and it will be possible to swim all the way over to Leith, not even getting a bad cold.

Thanks! This of course is yet another reason to plan ahead so I don’t miss out, like last year in Mexico. Erinn, remind me about it in late May or so, mkay?

We made it

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 11:06:00 +0000

I just came back home. I feel like I’ve been beaten up, my backbone is about to crack in two pieces, and I’ve been sodomized by a few people.

But we made it. We’ve learned a few things in the process:

Teruel-València arent 150 kilometres if you cycle through the Vía Verde Ojos Negros and the Via Augusta. It is exactly 200.
Full moon light is good enough to spots rocks and other obstacles on the patch ahead, but mixed with extreme sleepiness, its usefulness decreases significantly
At some point, it doesn’t matter if you cycle 150 or 200 kilometres. You just don’t feel your legs that much. Also, you stop being sleepy, and could go on for more and more hours. I don’t want to test the hard limits though. :)

Good night!

Asturies

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 19:07:00 +0000

Tomorrow I’ll be going with Belén to Asturies, one of the northern regions of the Spanish state. The plan is to spend the weekend in Ribadesella during the celebration of the Descenso Internacional del Sella and then move around the area and walk all over the beautiful Asturian mountains, during four days, until Friday.

The plan for those four days is pretty loose right now, so if anyone has suggestions about must see places, I’m very interested in hearing them in comments. My idea is to do daytrips of several hours (6 or 7), coming back to our base camp to sleep, but if there’s something we really should visit and it involves a two day stage, we’ll probably bear with carrying the heavy tent around too.

From Teruel to València under the full moon

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 07:57:00 +0000

For a few years, the probably most intrepid group of triathletes in my club have been doing cycling tours during the long weekend of the 9 d’Octubre in València. We once did a good chunk of the Ruta del Cid, covering around 550 kilometres in 3 days and a half, carrying aproximately 25 kilograms of sleeping bag, food and clothes on our bikes, and going from Teruel to Albarracín, back to Teruel, then to Morella and back to Albocàsser and through the Serra d’Espadà. The next year, we started the trip in La Sènia, and crossed the Valencian Country all the way to Requena, through Linares and Rubielos de Mora.

This year, we intended to cycle across the Pyrinees, from the Basque Country to Catalonia, but in the end my travelmates have to work on Monday, so we had to quickly settle on a one day alternative. As this is the 9 d’Octubre, the trip had to be a bit crazy, so we’ve decided to get the last train up to Teruel, arriving there at 21:30 or so, have a very good dinner around El Torico and soon after, start our way down to València, under the full moon.

Our itinerary for tonight

We’ll be carrying a few forehead lights and a bicycle light, and will really hope that the sky isn’t cloudy at all. We’re really going to need the moonlight. The route follows the national road from Sagunt to Teruel, through an old train track which was turned into a cycling path. Most of the trip will be descending, so covering the 150 kilometres shouldn’t be too hard, except that neither of us are specially trained now, unlike 3 years ago. If we end up having to stop and sleep, that’s going to be a problem as we are carrying no sleepingbags or anything, just our winter cycling clothes. We pretend to take our time, aka most of the night, to get to our destination, as we obviously won’t be able to cycle fast in the dark. But we’ll manage. This is just crazy, not impossible. :)

GUADEC 2006

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 19:39:00 +0000

Weeks go by way too quickly lately, and GUADEC was suddenly here. So I finally got permission from work to attend, after managing to complete our milestone the required one week in advance.

So far, my first GUADEC has been fantastic. While I’ve tried to come here with my most “just relax” mentality and it’s working pretty well, I’ve also tried to be around the conference for most of the day, as meeting people is, I believe, the best way to enjoy this kind of conferences. I’m staying with Josep and Jesús in one of the bungalows at the GNOME Village, which is a very nice place, althought it’s a bit too far from the GUADEC site. There’s a public bus service, but some days it’s quite unreliable; luckily Fabrice is staying with us at the bungalow and he has a car which we can use.

An unplanned attendee was mako, who after being around the great CDG airport for the Ubuntu Conference in Paris, had a few spare days before returning to Boston and came down to Vilanova i la Geltrú for the warmup weekend and half of the first core day. Of course, having him around has introduced the usual randomness to those days.

Just after arriving in Vilanova, toniher drove us to the lighthouse area, where there were some big Sant Joan parties going in the middle of the beach. At 4AM, and after checking our flirting techniques are not too effective, we wandered off back to Vilanova Park, seeking some good sleep. In the meantime, Danilo Segan, from the Serbian team, apparently had a hard time finding a way to open his bungalow, and ended sleeping in ours as yet another guest.

Saturday morning was spent sleeping, and while we had breakfast, I put on my Komando CT training t-shirt. When mako saw it, he said “hey I have one of those!”, which made me discover how kiko traded my other Komando t-shirt with mako during the Montréal conference. WTF! We headed back to Vilanova to get lunch and my talk about the Catalan GNOME localisation project. At 16:00 it’s hard to get food in some places, and when we finally managed, my talk was so close we had no time at all to prepare.

Jordi Mas, Toni Hermoso and I spoke about our experience to a great audience of about 12 persons. Having decided what would each talk about two minutes before starting, I found myself with little to say at some points, but I guess the talk ended up being interesting, and we got a few interested people in assisting us with further translations.

After the conference we met with Bastien and several Debian UK people in one of the bars in the beach area, where we, just after getting in, could see how Argentina scored a fantastic goal against Mexico in extra time. A few beers later, it was time to sleep, but we still had to go through the transportation odyssey. I think we managed to get a taxi one and a half hours later.

Sunday has been the most intense day so far. Up at a reasonable time, mako, danilo and I planned going to spend the day at Sitges, one of the most famous towns in the Catalan coast which is just one train stop away. Mako was thrilled about the idea of visiting the Gay Capital of Southern Europe, and we set off for the train station.

Visiting Sitges was not meant to be too funny for me, but mostly quite emotional. My initial plan was to go alone during the week, but I figured that mako and others would really enjoy being in such a beautiful town as this one. Sitges is where my Catalan grandmother was born, and where she lived for much of her life. Some will remember that wrote about how important she was for me when she died one year ago. I hadn’t been in Sitges for years already, and I feared my emotions when I went back to her house in the middle of the town.

We walked from the train station down to the Santiago Rusinyol street, while I tried to show them some of the details I always enjoy about Sitges, including the No embruteu les parets tiles which are all over the place. We arrived at my grandparent’s place and we entered the house. Having danilo and mako with me probably helped to not get too many memories back, and also, seeing the house so dismantled, and empty of life made it hard to feel “at home”.

“Don’t dirty the walls. Cleanness is a great signal of civilisation”

When we went down to the Platja de Sant Sebastià and I spoke to my cousin Bego on the phone I was unable to stop the tears when my grandma appeared in the conversation, though. That beach was her favourite, and I remember how she would take us to spend the day there when we were little more than babies.

I took danilo and mako around the town’s center and enchanting corners, and after having lunch, we headed to the beach going through the “gay streets”. At the beach, we had our share of sunbathing and swimming, and around 18:00 I told them we should probably head back to Vilanova, as I had to be ready to play football at 19:00.

We were lucky and the train arrived as soon as we got to the station, and also when Fabrice gave us a lift to the stadium with his car. The GNOME World Cup had already started, and someone had taken the last red shirt to substitute me, so I quickly neglected my ex-team and joined the Blue Team. We found ourselves in the final after a dramatic penalty kickout, to play against the mighty Black Team led by Bastien Nocera, who had *destroyed* the White Team with 16 goals or something equally insane.

It was a very even final, though, and after 40 minutes of non-stop running, our team scored the decisive goal just three minutes before the end.

Champions!

The day would not end up there, as I had to meet my cousin Laia and her boyfriend Marc in Barcelona, to have dinner with them. So off I went, with a hurt calf and dressed like a tramp, to fetch yet another train. I had dinner at a nice place near the Plaça de Catalunya, and after that we were all so sleepy that we went straight to bed at my cousin’s place, at 2AM or so. Then, there was the fight against the mosquitos at 4AM, and an early wake up to go back to Vilanova, in time for the grand opening of the Core GUADEC.

Sevilla

Mon, 29 May 2006 17:28:00 +0000

I arrived in Sevilla this morning to attend tecnimap 2006, and I will be staying in the city until Friday evening. I’d love to hook up with the Sevillan Free Software community after the show ends during the week, so if you’re in the area, please contact me by phone (there’s plenty of Debian people who know my number) or by email and we can try to make up some plans.

I’m staying in the Sevilla Congresos hotel in the outskirts, so going out to the city involves taxis, busses or other non-trivial means of transportation, so have that in mind!

Getting here has been quite stressful, but that’s no news anymore. At 00:00 last night, not only I had not packed at all, but all my clothes were scattered around thre different flats in the city, and I had no car to go pick the stuff up. Luckily, this morning my sister could give me a lift to pick things up and then took me to the airport.

The flight revealed a very dry landscape as we headed south, and some irrigated areas in the middle of pure desert. There are also some very characteristic circular fields that show very cool patterns when looked from the heights. It’s pretty hot in here, but still bearable. I don’t want to imagine August around the place.

Anyway, if you’re in Sevilla, I hope to be able to meet you any of the four evenings or nights I’ll be around. I need some natives to walk me around the place, and in some cases, translate the very special Andalusian spoken here. :) Momona people, I also mean you!

The difference between Oaxtepec and Seville

Thu, 11 May 2006 12:11:00 +0000

So, I’m not going to Debconf. I suspected this long ago, when the dates were changed to early May, but you never know. During the last month, I’ve been finding daily pink notification alerts on my irssi window, with different people asking me to start swimming to Mexico, to book a last minute flight, to work overhours so I can justify leaving office for a whole week. In short, to POP THE TRUNK.

But unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I’ll make it, being Thursday, and when I was planning a hypothetical departure on Saturday in the same flight as other Spanish Debian people. So, I’ve spent some time reading the blog entries that start flooding Planet Debian from people who are already attending Debcamp. NO NO NO! I can’t believe there are even 10m diving platforms.

There’s talk at the office about me maybe having to go to some conference in Seville. jacobo and ana had an opinion on that.

12:06 < ana> jordi: dude, mexico es mucho mas interesante que sevilla
12:07 < jacobo> en vez de decirte "quillo" te dicen "cuate"

I still have 1 and a half days to take some wild decision and get there by surprise. That would be fair with azeem. :)

London

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 19:08:00 +0000

I’m miraculously on my way back from London, after spending a week with daf, mvo and two guests, abel and thep, from Hong Kong and Thailand, working on improving some l10n aspects of the upcoming Ubuntu release, dapper.

The most visible result of the stuff that we’ve been doing is that if all goes well, users of the Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Bengali, Lao or Korean languages will get their required input methods, fonts and dictionaries Just Working as soon as their drives spit their dapper install CDs. We’ve learned quite a bit about the state of many of the Asian languages in the Free Software world today. Daf and I can certainly tell when an app renders Bengali or Thai correctly and when it doesn’t, after closely comparing how different browsers do the job on various websites and font test pages.

We’ve learned more than we probably like about fontconfig, and thanks to mvo, there is now a mechanism to get custom fonts.conf snippets depending on the default language of the system set by language-selector, so users get the right fonts installed and used by default. Thep’s and Abel’s help to get this straight is invaluable.

On Friday, daf and I went to the ExCel Novotel where the Launchpad team is having a sprint, in order to lend a hand with the dapper translation import that is going on right now, but for a series of reasons we ended up working on l10n sprint stuff. At least I got to see the team again, and specially kiko, who greeted me with a “Qué pasa, hijo de puta!”

The real life side of this sprint has been less exciting than on other occasions, as due to being few in number and being quite tired, we haven’t gone out of Earl’s Court area until today. Still, our exploring around the hotel has yield some nice discoveries.

On Sunday, mvo and I were looking for a place to have dinner, and stumbled uppon the Troubadour a place which can either be a pub, a restaurant, a social club or a theatre, depending on your mood. The food was excellent, and the staff was really friendly. I found a Dictionary of Slang in one of the book shelves, and learned a few funny phrases.

Other days we’ve been to good Italian, Indian or Chinese restaurants, but we couldn’t resist to go back to Trobadour again. On our last night, Mark took us to a place in the South Kesington area, with again was very good.

Abel left just after dinner as his flight was at 5AM from Stansted, and we hope he made it OK to the Netherlands, as at 00:30 or so he phoned us and seemed to be pretty lost somewhere. mvo left early in the morning, so daf, thep and I went to visit some bits of the city. My plane was at 16:45GMT, and we calculated that I should be leaving the K&K at 15:00 to be well on track for my flight. We went to Monument to see the tower, went up and enjoyed both the great views over London and the Thames river, as well as the really cold wind which made me swear once again about the %*@!# lack of Spring in the UK.

It was getting quite late for me, so we went to China Town for lunch. Despite the restaurant people being really quick, I only managed to leave the place at 14:50, but given my travel plan was pretty conservative, I was supposed to be safe still. Daf left me at the tube station entrance, and there I started my way too stressful journey back to València. If on our way to London Carlos and were quite close to find our flight closed, this time, I think I hit the limits.

I really don’t know how daf and I arrived to the conclusion that leaving Earl’s Court at 15:20 was acceptable to get in Heathrow on time. I ran up and down the tube stations, grabbed by luggage, and rushed back to the station, but I had just missed a train to Heathrow and that made me lose some precious 10 minutes. As stations passed by, it became clearer that we had fucked up somewhere when deciding at what time I needed to leave. At 15:35 I was still in the Hammersmith station, with half of the Picadilly line ahead before arriving to the aiport. I sent a message to daf, so he started to get prepared about me staying to sleep somewhere in London.

As soon as the train’s doors opened, a number of people rushed out. Someone ahead of me fell when climbing the automatic staircase and I somehow managed to jump over him, with luggage and all. After a run that seemed like half an hour, I arrived at the Iberia desk and, panting, I could only articulate “Tarde para València?”. The guy at the counter looked at me, and with a “this can’t be true” expression in his face, he picked up a phone and asked “Is it already closed? […] Can you open it for one more piece of luggage? Thanks.”

In the meanwhile, I had been busy removing a 500 ml yoghourt from my bag, fearing having all my clothes smelling like strawberry back in València. The guy handed me a boarding pass, and gave me instructions about the “Iberia Room” near my gate. I asked him what that was about, and he says “oh, of course, you’re in Business Class”. For a second, I was reminded of stargirl’s tricks to get free upgrades when flying, and immediately I was reminded that I was still in a hurry, and I should rush to my gate. And so I did, forgetting to thank the guy for being so kind. I left my yoghourt there though, so at least he could get some food if he was hungry.

The long line before the security check was exasperating, and when I finally went past it, I had to run all over terminal two to my gate, where everyone appeared to be waiting just for me. The doors closed as soon as I entered the aircraft, and I sat in the first row, got a free newspaper and a free meal. I couldn’t believe my luck.

As I write this, we’ve gone over the Pyrenees, which are not as snowy as a month ago, but they still look beautiful from up here. I’m glad to be back in València.

FOSDEM 2006

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 19:29:00 +0000

I’m so glad I finally decided to attend FOSDEM this year, as last weekend in Bruxelles was so cool it reminded me of the unforgettable week in Helsinki for DebConf 5 last summer.

I travelled early on Friday with Ivan Vilata, the dude who dragged me into the Catalan translations world, and about 12:30 we were finding our way through Bruxelles airport. We had barely no problems getting to Raül’s place in Boulevard Louis Schmidt, thanks to the detailed HOWTO he provided a few days before.

We dropped our bags in his appartment and went out with him and Virginia after a well deserved mini-nap. On our way to the Grand’ Place, where we’d hook up with the Softcatalà crowd and the rest of FOSDEM people, we stopped in A la Morte Subite, where we Ivan and I started our personal training on Belgian beers.

The Roy d’Espagne is an excellent name for a place where to meet our friends from Catalunya. I didn’t know that was a formal meeting point that kickstarts FOSDEM, so I was really impressed when I got to the second floor and found the place was packed with Free Software people, many of them I already knew in person. Reaching Softcatala’s table near the window took about 15 minutes, and after saying hi to most people, we decided we could use a quieter place to have dinner, and then go back.

The Grand’ Place was bombed by seb128 in 1695

Raül and Virginia, our official guides during the weekend, chose a Vietnamese restaurant in the Stock Exchange area they frequent, and for little money we got an enormous meal. Back at the Roy d’Espagne, I tried to say hello to most Debian people I saw around, while at the same time I tried to be with my hosts and the Catalan people. A while after, I spotted tbm and azeem downstairs, who I finally met. I talked to Michael for a long while, and at some point we left as we didn’t want to miss the last tram.

Ivan, luckily, only snores rarely, so we slept for a while, and then took the tram to the Université Libre du Bruxelles. The main room was already packed for RMS’s keynote, which was pretty good. After that, we went to several talks here and there, while I kept meeting some people around the place. Ivan and I left when the show ended and we met with Virginia and Raül at the centre.

This time, we hooked up with Xevi and Jesús Corrius from Softcatalà, as Toni Hermoso had abandoned us for a cheap dinner with the Mozilla.org people. We were taken to a packed bar/restaurant (don’t remember the name right now), which had a few interesting features: they wouldn’t sell any Coca-Cola, would not accept credit cards in protest for the high fees Visa charges on small businesses, and something I wouldn’t expect to see in 2006, their chart of prices hadn’t been rounded up when they switched to the Euro. So some plate would be 9.72, others 12.43, etc. After dinner we had a few beers at the Théatre de Toone, located in some tiny alley in the centre and being pretty tired, we went back home at 23:30 or so.

Sunday was a busy days, due to the number of interesting Debian and GNOME talks going on. I’d highlight liw’s talk on Piuparts, Enrico’s on debtags and fjp’s on Debian Installer in the Debian room, and kris’ on the future of GTK+. There was also a cool demo of Novell’s XGL.

During a dead slot, I approached Little Daniel and keithp to see if he could point me at some mapping between UTF-8 and XKB symbol names. But Daniel was cool enough to solve a problem a lot simpler than expected. :)

jdub’s closing talk was just fantastic, and after telling him “See you in Vilanova”, we left the University, for our last dinner around Bruxelles.

jdub clues the audience about some basic acronyms

We managed to rescue madduck from the Debian UK beer trap and went to an Italian for dinner, this time with Josep and Mia, from Softcatalà, making a nice mix of German, Valencian/Catalan, and Swedish at our table.

Mia, Josep, Raül, Ivan, Martin and Jordi after pizza

Raül took us around the city centre and told us about the underground river, the remaining city wall’s tower, and the church that leaned against it. That night’s beer lesson happened in the “2000 beer bar”. We all had a 7€ Trappist Westvleteren Bleu 8, apparently “the best beer of the world”. It was pretty good, actually.

Our weekend in Bruxelles was about to end. After not that much sleep, Ivan and I took a tram and a bus to the Airport, arriving in València around 10AM, and after seeing the best view of the Pyrenees ever, which were absolutely covered with snow, as well as many other places in the País Valencià and Teruel due to massive snows during the two days we were out.

FOSDEM is probably a “can’t miss” yearly event now. Thanks to all the organisers for their hard work to make it happen. You rock.

Going to FOSDEM 2006

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 19:06:00 +0000

After several years of chickening out in the very last moment, I finally booked plane tickets to Brussels for this year’s FOSDEM.

azeem, you can stop calling me names now. :)

Charles de Gaulle, worse than the NYC Stock Exchange

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 10:21:00 +0000

Yesterday we did meet zufus and gravity for lunch, then mika joined us for bubbles tea. There also was a somewhat unexpected couple joining the group at that point: kiko and his sister. gravity and zufus had to go back to work though, so it was mika, micah, kiko, zuzi and I who went for some Freedom Trail discovery.

The weather wasn’t that good, and I didn’t have too much time either, but we did manage to see a few things around the centre, like the memorial grave yard and a park with tons of fearless squirrels.

We headed back to the Acetarium, I quickly took a shower and packed, and we left to the metro, a bit behind on my planned schedule. mika left me two stops before the one I needed to get down in, and instructions to get to the airport from there, using the shuttle.

It’s not amusing how slow something can appear to be when you’re in a hurry. The driver of the bus said it took 5 minutes, but I had to go to the very last stop at terminal E, and it was like an eternity. In the end, I arrived at the terminal at 18:40, when my idea was 18:00, and I ran and ran until I found Air France’s desk. There was no queue or anything, only me.

During the flight, I tried killing time with War of the Worlds, which was a timekiller but nothing more, and The Island, which I wouldn’t recommend unless you care too much about hot female characters.

After 6 hours of flight, I was in Paris, apparently on time. But the doors opened much later that when we landed, so my connection started to be endangered. Again, I ran and ran, from one terminal to the other, around the chaos that is CDG. In vain, as my checkin was closed after arriving only 20 minutes before the departure.

Much annoyed, I went to the transfer desk, to discover the next flight to València was cancelled, so the next one was the next morning. The quick alternative via Madrid was full, so I now have tickets for CDG-BCN-VLC, which is extending my travel plan in 7 very nice hours.

I have no idea of where my luggage is, but at this point I don’t care. I only wonder at what time I’ll get sleep. What I do know, is that these fucking idiots claim there is free wireless in this spot of Terminal 2F, but it’s not true at all.

Not that Cambridge

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:06:00 +0000

As predicted, the morning was not productive at all. At one point I slightly became concious and saw sladen fetching his bike, opening the door and telling me “Back in two hours!”. We didn’t know anything about him until 24 hours later. As we started waking up, we tried to think of a plan for the day. The morning was gone, though.

Clint took us to a restaurant two blocks away for breakfast, or actually brunch, because that was the only food in many hours. I ate some “pancakes” with banana in them, and barely could finish them; they are very filling. We went to the promenade for a last look at the Manhattan skyline and took some pictures while we tried to figure out what to do.

A last view over Manhattan

Mako was developing a plan in secret, though, which involved micah and his car. Micah found out soon after. We went back to Clint’s, expecting to find sladen somewhere, but we didn’t. I packed my things, and when we really needed to go, we resolved to put his things in the entrance so he could find then and do whatever he wanted on his return.

We went on the Metro to Union Square, where, hear this helix, I saw TONS of raperos doing their break-dance thing (ok, maybe not tons, but I did see them). And two blocks away, we arrived to the most incredible book store.

Mako has blogged many times about buying very rare books at the Strand for ridiculous prices, but this was totally unexpected. The Strand is huge. On the outside, there’s carts with hundreds of second-hand books, all for one dollar. Mako used to go there and browse the books to find interesting stuff. The Acetarium is full of them! Most of the dollar books are total crap though. A very high percent talk about god, religion, “our troops” and stuff like that. Mentally filtering what might be good and what is not is not easy when you haven’t done it before.

Mako started scanning the shelves as soon as we arrived, and every now and them he’d pick some totally stupid title. I was on my own shelf, missing many good stuff, while mika, Clint and mako did their own. Clint found quite a few titles, but mako didn’t find anything good. I got lucky though, and found the precious book of the day: The Spanish Anarchists. The heroic years 1868-1936, by Murray Bookchin. Although old, it was in very good condition, and mako immediately asked if I was taking it. :) I won!

The inside of the Strand was incredible too. Three very big floors packed with books, plus the half-priced “reviewer’s copies” at the basement. I was totally overwhelmed by the amount of books I’d be interested in buying, and the limited weight I should be carrying back, so I did my best not to look too carefully.

For a few hours, I didn’t have a too clear idea of what mako’s plans were. At some point, micah phoned him and we rushed to the PATH, the train that goes to New Jersey. Apparently we were meeting micah at Newark, but I still didn’t know why we had to go there. During our ride, I could see how pleasant New Jersey is to the human eye. Miles and miles of heavy industries. I’m pretty sure it’s the ugliest place I’ve ever seen. What I couldn’t see, and I’m still disappointed, is any of the viciously arrogant rats of the New York metro system. Mako had told me about how they look at you, like saying “if you come down here, you’ll be left with 9 fingers”, and the incredible number of them on the tracks. Unfortunately I couldn’t see any. I blame Michael Bloomberg.

At Newark, micah appeared in his car, and we all hopped into it. We apparently were going by car to Boston… including Clint. I was puzzled, as he had to work on Monday, but he’d said that he’d simply “come back”. There was a problem though, mako had dilinger’s keys, and he was going back to NYC from Boston, and we didn’t have time to get to Boston before he left, so we had to find a way of leaving the keys in NYC so he could get into his appartment. Finally, mako resolved that Clint would be left in a cold street, in a rough area of NYC, and he would handle the keys problem. I still didn’t understand what was going on.

We headed North, and I quickly fell asleep on mika’s lap. I’m getting old. When the car stopped again and I suddenly woke up, I looked ahead and… HORROR! We were at the door of a McDonads. WTF WAS GOING ON? So it seems that when you’re on the road, there’s no much other choice than shit food. After a quick discussion with mako about how badly those burgers taste, I quickly went back to sleep, until we were in Boston. It took a while to find a parking spot, because all of them “permit only”. It’s impossible to park if you come from somewhere else.

I was finally at the Acetarium, a very cool flat in Cambridge, 15 minutes away from the MIT. It was 3:30 in the morning.

The day after, we woke up pretty late, and as I opened my laptop and found a privmsg from sladen, he was was knocking at the door. This man has an incredible ability to disappear and reappear when he’s most unexpected. Apparently he managed to grab his stuff in NYC, fetch the bus and arrive at 2AM in Boston, meeting dilinger at the station, and mako as he went out to MIT.

micah and I went to explore Boston, but never managed. We consumed a few hours when trying to ship some equipment to micah’s colo, and then trying to find food. When we were ready to go, micah got a very badly timed call, which made him go back to the Acetarium: a server at work was dying or dead. At one point, it was late enough that going to Boston wasn’t worth it, so we went to visit the Media Lab instead.

On our way there, micah and I kept chatting about this and that, and found out how small the internet is. We both know a bunch of common people from uncommon places like Perú, from our involvement in social projects in the net like Indymedia and Sindominio.net.

The MIT is incredible, specially the Stata Center by Frank Gehry. We wandered around as we only got voice mail from mako, until an hour later we found we was like 20 metres away from us. He gave us a tour through the Media lab, and it was incredible. I had never seen something like that. Every lab was colourful and fun, and very cool developments were going on everywhere. I also saw the coolest mame box ever, with an arcade case and everything.

The Stata Center, right next to the Media Lab

After the tour, micah and I headed back, while sladen stayed to have a look at one of mako’s projects. When we got back to the flat, there were a few people already there for mika’s sushi party, and I rolled my first sushi rolls, which was fun. A bunch of Debian people joined us, including zufus and gravity, and had a great chat with them. The party ended way too late and after too many beers.

sladen used his secret disappearing abilities, and a few colleagues from mako crashed, so there was a bit of overbooking. Mako’s solution was simple. mika, him and I could share their bed.

I can’t say I have slept too much, because mako would keep pulling the blanket and leave me out in the cold, and I was trying not to squish mika. But it went ok, although we discovered too late that mika was hot while I was cold, and we swapped our places just before we ended up waking up.

Today, we’ll go find the Freedom Trail and walk a bit around it, meet gravity and zufus for lunch, and I will sadly have to go back to Cambridge, quickly pack and head to the airport to catch my plane. My hours in North America are expiring.

The source of all evil

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 11:51:00 +0000

Yesterday was a very, very intense day, and I had lots of fun.

Clint, sladen and I headed to Chinatown walking, with a few detours to be able to checkout Manhattan’s skyline. The view from the other shore is awesome, even with the two towers missing. When I compare the current view with how it was four years ago, I understand how much the city has changed without them. They were so impressively big that I just can’t picture them too well in my mind.

The skyline of South Manhattan

We walked over the Brooklyn bridge, giving me other very cool views of Manhattan, while I hammered Clint with questions about this and that. I saw that since 9/11, you can’t go past the Town Hall. “Security reasons”, of course. I was very surprised to see police cars in every single street. It’s like a Police State, and if you ask me, it didn’t make me feel safer.

After some walk, we finally got in Chinatown, which is the craziest place ever. People sell stuff on the sidewalks, and many streets are packed with people. We had to meet with micah, biella, dilinger and his cat at some Chinese place for breakfast/lunch. The place, as Chinatown itself, was crazy. As soon as we sat down a few waitresses landed a few plates on the table, without asking or anything. A few minutes later I could see that the way they serve you is going around with carts with lost of food, and you either want it or not.

We left dilinger at the metro station, and moved on to the SoHo. I wanted to go to the SoHo Apple Store to see if they knew about replacement Spanish keyboards for my Powerbook. My powerbook was bought in the US last year, so it has a US keyboard. This is mostly ok, but only mostly as it’s missing a key.

After SoHo, we went back to Chinatown to pick up bubbles. It was nice to see her after Debconf, and she made the effort to come just for a few hours even if she was ill and had lots to do in Philly. We headed to South Street Port, where I had a long chat about Cuba with micah while we sat on a bench looking at Brooklyn bridge.

And then, we gathered all our braveness and headed to the heart of the beast, to the kernel of the system. We walked into the Financial District, and soon enough I was walking in Wall Street no less. If I breathed hard, I could smell the money. The road was paved in gold, and there were skyscrapers everywhere. I discovered the rulers of this world had opened a “public space” in JP Morgan’s building. To their despair, probably, it had been taken over by the poor. I wonder what Bloomberg will do about it.

As I walked up the street, a strange feeling in my heart grew and grew, until, behind a corner, I saw it. The source of all evil was ahead of me, guarded by George Washington himself.

The New York Stock exchange and its black evil aura of Capitalism

I was standing ahead of this building where so many people behave like bastards everyday, pushing millions to povery for a bit more profit margin. The doors were closed and surrounded by security officers, which despite being asked politely, didn’t let us in for “security reasons”.

Next to it was the Church of Capitalism, at the end of the street. It’s curious that such an old church still stands where it was build near the harbour probably a century ago, now surrounded by some of the most modern and tallest buildings in the planet. And then, we visited the bull, which I didn’t know is the “friendly” symbol of how Capitalism works.

I had Capitalism by the balls

We moved down to Battery Square, past the old US Customs building with the four statues representing the four continents. We saw the damaged sculpture which lived in the WTC, and sat down at the pier to watch a beautiful sunset over the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty seen from South Manhattan

At that point, biella and micah had to meet some friends at one cinema to see the Wal-Mart documentary. We went to a funky place to have some tea, decided to go see Times Square and then walk to Central Park. At the time, mako was arriving to NYC on the Chinatown bus, so we agreed to meet in a restaurant to have lunch. Paul Sladen finally managed to get lost, after many tries during the day, and wasn’t seen until we got back home.

Mako and Mika waited for us at the door of an… ethiopian restaurant in the SoHo, despite Mako knows I can’t stand spicy food. But in the end it wasn’t so bad, I just needed a few more glasses of water than average. And I finally got to know mika, after lots of time of chatting over IRC. Greg, SPI’s lawyer, also appeared, and was a nice addition to the group.

Mako knew where to take us after that. The Belgian bar was packed, but there was a private party in one of the spaces and we took over some of that space. After a few rounds, we were ready to leave the pub and go for Falafel and some tea. I was terribly falling asleep though, so instead of tea we took a cap back to Brooklyn, where we found Paul waiting at the door.

After an hour of inflating a mattress, we were ready for sleep, at 4AM. It didn’t look like the morning after would be very productive…

Good Morning New York!

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 15:56:00 +0000

After a not-so-easy ride with James Blackwell, and the last minute surprise of Paul Sladen joining us, we arrived in New York. The sky was dark already.

Instead of arriving at 15:00 or so as expected, we arrived at something like 20:00. Behind, we had left great perils like an empty gas tank and finding no gas station, and noticing one tire could use some pumping; evil officials at the US border not liking the fact that it was the first time I entered the country, which involved fingerprints and a smily face at the customs offices after a long wait; a great meal (after a long wait to get served) at probably the best restaurant in the whole State of New York; the three of us becoming terribly sleepy half an hour after resuming the drive, and having to stop for a short nap and stopping for gas once again around 70 miles away from NYC.

When we did arrive, we managed to get lost a few times around the city. We crossed four bridges on our way to Brooklyn, which accidentally let me admire the Manhattan skyline by night, and finally, got to Clint’s place.

When we were parking, I noticed the tire was mostly flat now. Surely not the best way to land in the city. We also found out Clint and the rest had left for dinner after a long wait, as neither they or us expected to arrive so late, and we were way too freaked out with the crazy traffic and finding our way to phone them.

After a while, both problems were sorted out; Clint appeared and James was able to leave. James, thanks for all you did! I owe you a big one next time! We spent some time with Clint, dilinger, biella and micah, saw the great view of Manhattan from the roof of his appartment, and eventually went to bed.

Apparently, they are taking me to a place called “Dim Sum” for breakfast. I wonder how dilinger’s cat tastes.

The East Coast Road Trip

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 07:26:00 +0000

Tomorrow I leave Montréal, Québec and Canada and will move down to the US, on my way to New York City. This part of my stay in North America is a bit (others would rather say “totally”) improvised, and the plans are not too accurate even now, 8 hours before our departure.

The first idea for this was to travel on a night bus from Montréal to Boston, meet mako and mika and then move to New York City during the weekend.

The unavailability of any buses that did this route in less than thirteen hours made me look for alternatives. Chatting with mdz, I found out he was flying with Mark and Jane to NYC very early on Friday night, on the private jet. Sounded like a plan. Only it had a big flaw: non commercial flights entering the US require visas for everyone aboard, apparently. If you don’t have it, the reports say you’re really, really fucked up. So, having no visa as I don’t need it in normal conditions, this was discarded too.

Finally I learned that jblack was driving down to Pennsylvania after the conference. I asked him if it was possible to go with him on his way South, and he said yes. He could drop me in the nearest point to Boston, or drive me straight to NYC. As NYC is the easiest for me and jblack and Clint has no problem with hosting me one extra day, that’s what we’re going to do.

(After having everything more or less clear, Paul Sladen came along and proposed yet another plan involving a bicycle and hitch-hiking. I was able to say no, though.)

Here starts this crazy road trip. Wish me luck, and see you in NYC!

Discovering Montréal

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 23:45:00 +0000

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

Arrived in Montréal

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 06:09:00 +0000

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.

Back to the civilised world

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 18:11:00 +0000

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.

A week in the Pyrenees

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 22:06:00 +0000

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!

Debconf5

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 15:40:00 +0000

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.

The Piano & the Guitar

Fri, 15 Jul 2005 21:27:00 +0000

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

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 09:23:00 +0000

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

Have you been run over by elmo?

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 13:26:00 +0000

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.

Je t'aime, Charles

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 02:57:00 +0000

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!

Going to Helsinki

Sat, 09 Jul 2005 00:19:00 +0000

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!

Visit to London

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 23:21:00 +0000

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.

Jetlag 1 - 0 Jordi

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 03:50:00 +0000

I had this great plan to minimise the impact of jetlag for this trip to Australia. Anyone at UDU will read on my face that it didn’t work out that well…

I, partially on purpose, partially because the night got a bit more complicated than what I planned, slept just four hours or so on Friday. This was cool, as it would help sleeping during the long flight.

But of course, the flight from València to Heathrow was 3 hours late, and completely fucked up my plan to take a nap while I waited for the Sydney plane. No worries, I had plenty of hours to sleep on board. That’s not so easy. When I discovered the passenger sitting next to me also came from València, we started chatting and, after dinner, I tried to get some sleep, but was mostly unsuccessful.

After our stop in Singapore we faced our second night in just a few hours, and I wasn’t sleepy at all. At 2:30AM I found myself still reading my book Quina lenta agonía… and could get 1h of sleep before breakfast time and landing.

The silly guys at the airport’s customs service were kind enough to trigger a “passport alert” on me, scan my passport, search all my baggage and ask me questions about my possibly evil plans for my stay in .au. That made me waste one hour that I could have used having a short nap at the hotel, but no luck.

As soon as the conference started, Daniel Silverstone said I would be collapsing by 11. Well, it’s past 12 but I can’t say I’m being able to concentrate too much in the BOFs… running a BOF this evening with Carlos will be interesting in this condition… :)

Oh, to follow the trend on my movie choice of the night before, last night I saw Sandra Bullock’s Miss Congeniality, which was decidedly worse than Blade Trinity. I wonder how people actually go to the cinema to watch this kind of stuff.

Flying to Sydney

Sun, 24 Apr 2005 02:04:00 +0000

It’s past 2AM and I’m sitting in an airplane on my way to Sydney. The monitor in front of me, besides a zillion different movies and TV shows, has a channel with a map that gives you information about your journey.

Along with not so useful stuff like “tail wind” or “outside temperature” (it’s -40°C outside, so what?), there’s a countdown of the time it’ll take to arrive to Singapore, our first destination. Even if it already feels like I’ve been inside here for an eternity, I still have 9 hours to go, but I’m trying to stay up as much as possible in an attempt to fight jet lag a bit.

We’re currently flying over the Black Sea, and soon we’ll be over interesting places like Iraq. I wouldn’t put money into this, but I’m pretty sure the map stuff is made using xplanet, or xplanet’s maps, because the night shading is just exactly the same as what I used as my background years ago. The size of this airplane was quite a surprise. It appears to be quite big from the airport’s terminal, but when I got in and saw how wide (and tall) it is I couldn’t help a “woah” to myself.

As the goal is to kill time as fast as possible without wasting too much laptop battery (currently at 68%, 2h 14m remaining), I decided to watch the fist movie I could identify on the many channels. Soon enough I found a tatooed Wesley Snipes on channel 4, so I ended watching a total POS called “Blade Trinity” which got rid of 2 hours quite easily.

I still have battery to watch a full DVD, and I think that’s what I’m going to do until 4AM CEST. I have with me Chocolat and another one by Woody Allen.

Ubuntu Down Under

Fri, 22 Apr 2005 16:43:00 +0000

Things move quite fast in my life lately, but what happened today was a bit extreme.

Yesterday, at 1AM, attending to Canonical’s Ubuntu Down Under conference was just out of the picture. And then, Carlos appeared…

01:05 < jordi> sigh, I wish I was there.
01:07 < carlos> jordi: the conference is next week, you can join us :-)

Just for fun, I looked in some flights webpage, saw there were tickets, and why not, asked Mark if I could make it still. Shocking, he said “Take the ticket!”, so I just had to ask at work…

This morning, first thing I do is ask Pablo: “So, can I go to Australia? Today?”. Knowing he couldn’t say “yes” with his boss hat on, but wanting me to take the opportunity, he redirected me to the head of the department, who had no problem at all.

So that’s it. From having to reject Mark’s invitation to suddenly having e-tickets waiting for me at the airport. Thanks to everyone involved in making this possible! I’m not looking forward to the massive amount of time I’ll be inside a plane tomorrow, but I know UDU is going to be just fantastic. See you there!

Ah, have a nice day tomorrow up there in Catalunya!

Skiing at the feet of Gausta, in Rjukan

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 02:53:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I went on a ski trip to the Telemark area in Norway with Núria and Brande, and three other friends of Brande. Brande is my sister’s boyfriend, and has been to this place a few times before, as the facility where we were staying is owned by a hundred Danish families, including his.

The night before leaving, I decided it would be great if I got the flu and travelled with a bit of fever, and so I did. We three from València went to Madrid, carrying two big backpacks each with tons of weight, on Friday 25th to spend the night before flying to Oslo, as our flight was at 6:20. We stayed at Diego’s place, in La Latina neighbourhood. In the morning, the four of us took our plane to Amsterdam and then another one to Oslo.

In Oslo, we tried to use the three hours we had between our arrival and the departure of our bus to wander around as optimally as possible, and visited the main streets, the Royal Palace and the harbour, while we carried, by turns, Brande’s skis, as he had gone to look for Norwegian yoghourt and milk for our breakfasts.

Just a bit before taking the bus to Rjukan we met the last two members of our expedition: Alfredo, another friend of Brande, and her girlfriend Patricia. The four hours of bus to Rjukan were horrible for me because there was no way of sleeping due to the fever and I was terribly tired because we had woken up at 3:30 that day. Once on our destination, a pair of taxis took us to the Kvitåvatn Fjellstoge, where we would live that week.

This place is something like a small ski centre, surrounded by lakes and many kilometres of tracks to practice telemark ski. They have a main building with common areas for guests and many rooms for up to seven people. Outside, they have a set of typical huts, and we were lucky to stay on one.

These are old huts that were once in the middle of nowhere and were bought by the Kvitåvtn people, took them piece by piece and recontructed them at this spot. Our hut had two floors, with a table, a sink and little more at ground level, and four matresses and a few wooden racks for clothes in the first floor. The kitchen, bathroom and sauna were in other huts and were common for everyone.

If you want to cut some expenses, you can choose to carry your own bed sheets, food and clean up the hut yourself, and that’s what we did. Brande organised three teams of two to manage cooking. Alfredo and Patricia took care of the small lunches and picnics to have during our ski routes, and the last dinner; Diego and Brande took care of breakfasts and two dinners; and Núria and I took care of the remaining four dinners. Núria and I planned to cook two different kinds of spaguetti, rice and lentils, with salad for all days. We also contributed our share of wine and a bottle of mistela.

We carried everything in our bags, making them very heavy, and we were glad to drop them on the floor as soon as we arrived. Brande took care of contacting the Fjellstoge people and getting our keys. We thought we’d have to sleep in the normal rooms, but it seems there was some cancellation and they were able to give us one hut for the first night, and two for the rest of the week, so Alfredo and Patricia moved after the first day.

The first morning was a bit rough. After visiting Trevor in the ski hut, who equipped us with all the necessary material, our first skiing lesson started. Brande has been skiing all his life, and was our teacher. Alfredo was lucky to have done it just two years before in these same tracks, but for the rest of us, we were about to start a long day.

While Brande went to buy some wax, the novice skiers jumped on their skis and started experimenting. Of course, with no wax, this was a bit dangerous, and mostly all of us bit the snow after just a few minutes. With the wax in place, and the very basic lesson learned, we tried to go down the first slope. I fell like 4 times in 15 metres, which was a bit discouraging; and this continued on and on during the first slopes. I told Brande I felt my feet were a bit loose inside my boot, and we tried to make a very tight knot on the boot, which helped somewhat, but I still felt a bit uncontrolled. For example, when I tried to stop, it was my boot what touched the snow, not the edge of the ski, and eventually that would make me fall down.

When there terrain wasn’t steep, though, I adapted easily and could lead the group, as it was a not too tiring exercise, but plains weren’t very common in the first day’s newbie track. After crossing the ice lake, we reached a hill which we had to climb (no problems so far) and then descend skiing. A few more bad crashes and quite some harm in my butt made me stop being so brave and get rid of the skis for the most difficult slopes. In the end, after the first day, all my courage was replaced with bruises and a nasty pain in one of my ankles, which fortunately went away the next day. My confidence in being able to do it more or less ok was gone, though, as I had been the one in the group who had fallen most, and that was quite unexpected to me.

After dinner, our first sauna session and a good sleep, we were ready for our second day, which would take us through a much more interesting and tricky course. I went to Trevor’s to see if he thought my boots were to big, and they were. When I told him about my boot touching the snow, he said… “you realise there’s a ski for the right foot and another for the left foot, right?” Well, no, nobody had told me, and the mark on the ski was impossible to see if you didn’t look very closely.

Wow, correctly sized boots and skis on the right side did make a difference. Despite the track being a lot harder, I fell a lot less and after a few slopes my fear to slide down started to go away. We skied all day long around the course, which offered great views of Rjukan’s valley and the Gausta, and arrived back in Gaustablikk just in time for sauna, late dinner and some card game.

On Wednesday, Núria and I decided to go down to the town to see what was it like, and the rest went to do a long course. We discovered Rjukan is only two long streets, and there were sales everywhere. Shops were selling winter stuff like frenzy, with up to 90% discounts. We couldn’t resist buying some clothes, but after visiting all the shops it was way too early to go back to the mountains, so we went to the public swimming pool.

This place was awesome. There was a big swimming pool, jacuzzis, sauna, vapour sauna and other stuff, and we spent three hours inside the water relaxing, with the white mountains behind us.

Day four started with some bad weather for the first time in the week. We went to do the 21km track, but going behind Gausta first. We had to wear all our equipment against the cold, including caps, because there was some wind and snow, and when you stopped to drink or wait for others, you would quickly get a bit cold. When we had done 1/3 of the course, we decided to go back because a few were a bit tired. The track went upwards for the most part, and the snow didn’t make it easier. Nothing some more sauna couldn’t repair.

This was my first time in a place with a real sauna, and I really enjoyed it. It was unthinkable for Spain that men and women would share a small space like that naked, but here it was, apparently, very normal. In Spain, I think even a non-mixed sauna only with naked men would be generally pretty empty. At first I thought I was going to melt and die in such a hot environment, but a few minutes after going out you could feel how relaxing it was. I would normally do three or four cycles of 10 minutes inside and 2 minutes outside under a cold shower (and with cold, I mean cold water is freezing in the Telemark).

We shared the big kitchen with a Danish group that were doing a survival training course, and Brande would sometimes try to overhear what they were talking about, and would later tell their mad plans to us. For example, in a few days they would leave the Fjellstoge and go sleep in the mountain during a week, excavating holes in the snow to get warm during nights. Oww!

As ski days passed, our bodies accumulated more and more bruises and painful spots. After more or less repeating the course of the second day, which was beautiful as it went through a dense forest, on Friday we had our last opportunity to ski in the Gausta area. In the previous days, I had been getting a pain in my leg due to, say, opening them too much when going down difficult slopes, and on the last day the pain was big enough that I didn’t mind going back to something easy to test myself. Núria and I decided to repeat the newbie track of our first day, to complete it perfectly and go back to València knowing that we had at least learned a bit of skiing. And so we did: we started skiing, and until we crossed the lake we did very well and fast.

When we got to the same hill that caused us so many problems, I tried going down the slope, which included a bad bend on a fast area, and sensing I was a bit out of control, decided to do an emergency landing with my hip. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to put on my gloves and roll down my long sleeves, and the snow and ice bruised my hand and arm enough to draw blood on a few spots. Also, the impact on my wrist was quite tough and it ached quite a bit. That was good enough to remind us that we were still simple beginners.

Little more was left to do but pack, cleanup the hut as much as we could, and have our last dinner. Núria and brought the exact quantity of food we needed: we weren’t short at all, and nothing remained either, which was pretty cool, because our bags were sensibly lighter on our way back.

I chatted a long while with Brande in the bus, while Diego made friends with a Norwegian girl who sat next to him. We had some spare hours at the city, and we used them visiting a second-hand market under a bridge near the Oslo canal, and we went up the canal for a while to see parts of the city. We even found what seemed to be a very nice squat in the centre! We finally left for the airport, and quite a few hours later we were back in Madrid. On Sunday morning, the Valencians went back in train, leaving behind the other three. Luckily for us, Monday was a local holiday in València so we had time to land and get back to real life, without sauna or a white paradise around us.

I think I have already decided where I will go next year in Fallas or Easter…

Back from Kvitåvatn

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 19:41:00 +0000

Brande, Núria and I just arrived a few hours ago to València, after leaving Rjukan at 6AM on Saturday and spending nearly 24 hours travelling back home.

Our week at the Kvitåvatn Fjellstoge in Norway has been, without doubt, one of my best vacations ever. Not only for discovering cross-country skiing, but because I’ve managed to disconnect from the daily stress and worries almost completely for eight days. Waking up every day near Brande, Núria and my new friends Alfredo, Patricia and Diego, with the Gausta peak saying “good morning” outside our window was just priceless.

I’ll have to write a long blog entry soon or I’ll forget many cool details, but not now as I’m pretty exhausted from travelling. We’ll post the more or less 300 pictures somewhere soon, too.