TechEd EMEA IT: Day 0 - Greetings from Barcelona

Ola! Andy and I are now in sunny Espana. Only it's not sunny. Oh well... However, true to form we started our trip, having registered at the conference centre, by eating hot dogs in a german fast food joint in a Spanish shopping centre! If you're passing, Kurz & Gut does pretty good food.

I'm also extremely impressed with the Metro system here in Barcelona. It's my first time in the city, and the transport is pretty efficient, with a wonderful simple trip-based charging mechanism.

The only downside is that despite not travelling particularly far, we seem to have lost an entire day to travel. Up and out by 8:30am UK time, and we finally landed in the hotel here in Spain around 18:30 (17:30 UK time) - then we had to get across town to the conference centre.

Apparently, take-up on the shuttle service from the airport was low last year, so this year Microsoft didn't bother. I can understand that, but at the same time it would have made our lives much easier, even if we would have needed to get from the conference centre to the hotel after registering. Perhaps that's as much because we're TechEd noobs - next year we'll know where to go and how to get there, I guess.

So now we're relaxing in the hotel bar, checking the conference schedules and noting the irony of how the prize-of-the-moment for all conference competitions is the Dell Mini 9 (I'm typing this on mine, and Andy stole Richard's for the week!).

As I mentioned before, don't be shy - if you're in Barcelona at the moment and feel like being sociable, get in touch and we can try to meet up. Oh, and I hadn't forgotten about Robert, but he's effectively working!