Author: Jag

Was clearing out my cupboard the other day and found an old mobile phone. My very first ever mobile phone in fact! The Nokia 2110. First used in 1995 and last used in 1996 (I think). I couldn’t help but laugh at the size and design!

Many thanks to the nice people at Somos Azules for making me post this!

On many of London’s buses there is a set of seats at the back of the bottom and top decks – where there are seats that face each other. The really annoying thing is that some people think they have a God-given right to put their feet up onto the seats opposite. (See my flickr set for just a few examples of this very widespread, disrespectful behaviour.)

Most of the time it’s the younger folks who exhibit this total lack of respect for hygiene and general well-being of the bus and fellow passengers. I often feel sorry for those unfortunate fellow travellers who subsequently sit on those seats not knowing that the seat has probably been used more often to accommodate the filthy feet of the people than as a legitimate seating position.

And that’s exactly what I felt the other day when I noticed a respectful-looking old man coming onto the bus and sitting himself down in one of those “feet-up” soiled seats. What was even more horrifying was when an Asian girl came on a couple of stops later and sat almost opposite him and put her filthy feet up onto the seat right next to him!. I was shaking my head at the audacity of the woman. But nothing quite prepared me for the shock of seeing so-called respectful bloke get up a few minutes later (after disrespectful Asian woman gets off the bus) and switch seat and put his own feet up!

The way in which people stand at bus stops could be a whole branch of psychology of its own.

Less than a week until the World Cup football tournament kicks off and the sporting patriotism of car drivers in the neighbourhood is really beginning to show. This year it really is about showing your pride and support for our boys by sticking an England flag on either side of your car. Sales of these specially-made flags (which attach to your rear passenger car windows) are rocketing, so much so that even the guy who normally sells bucket-loads of roses on A40 Westbound off-ramp to the Hanger Lane Gyratory is now selling buckets-loads of England flags instead.

But like all these things there are exceptions to the rule. Multicultural London harbours multinational patriotism. And in my own neighbourhood there are certainly quite a few people who would not pass Norman Tebbit’s Cricket Test (remember that?). Tebbit’s context was “Asian” and “cricket” then. These days it’s more likely African or Eastern European and football.

And these days it would be considered a failure by many in the community not to support the side of your place of origin.

Some would say that “blogging” is a phenomenon of the Internet age; of “New Media” and all that. But in actual fact we all know that it’s been around for a long time. “Citizen journalists” have left their mark everywhere, in every time. From prehistoric cave paintings, to the modern day “graf” that graces our urban landscape. Telling stories of life as hunter-gatherers, to life in a society with limited choice as to what channels to market ourselves through.

The Internet is simply plotting a trajectory through these classic human communication cycles:

The “traditional” media forms still thrive in their uniquely localised forms. At the “publish” end of the spectrum it’s “For Sale” signs stuck on the rear and side windows of private cars parked in the suburbs. At the “collaborate” end of the spectrum it’s like geo-blogging:

I love my local tube station. It’s located at one end of a country park designated as nature reserve of some significance. It’s hard to believe that a large open space typical of ancient Middlesex pasture and haymaking meadowland can be found in suburban London. Over the centuries, generations of local town planners have had the foresight to preserve some green spaces in the neigbourhoods of London and the people in my area are lucky to have one so close by. Although, had London been successful in it’s bid to host the 1988 Olympics our local country park would have been developed into the athlete’s village …

Standing on the platform. There’s only six minutes between trains. But it’s six minutes of countryside tranquility. Insects, birds, butterflies and bees. If you’re in an unlucky six minutes, then the idyllic setting is sometimes punctured by a plane on a flight path in or out of Heathrow, or the wailing of a police siren on the High Street outside the station.

This one is for Katy. On Saturday morning I saw this picture in the “my contacts”? area on the Flickr homepage that caught my attention. A few clicks later I was reading about it on the owners blog. And from there I clicked through to more information about it. Like most people, weekends are a precious time off for the Route 79 posse, so what we choose to do at weekends is important. It is a definite sign of the times when you decide what to do with your family on a Sunday morning based upon something you stumbled upon in Flickr the day before.

And what a spectacle it was. The most utterly breathtaking, magical, fantastic …. er …. “thing”? I’ve ever seen in London. All around there were crowds and crowds of people. Kids laughed and screamed, and grown-ups were reduced to being kids again – it was just simply brilliant!

Many will have heard by now of The Sultan’s Elephant – and Flickr has it as one of the hottest tags this week – there are thousands of pictures of the spectacle over there.

Like seemingly everybody else in Central London over the weekend, I took pictures on my mobile phone. I’m trying out the new Nokia N80, (3 megapixel cam, WiFi, better-than-QVGA-display, full-web-browser-based-on-Safari, Flash Lite etc.) which will start shipping on the networks in the UK soon. I’m still trying to get to grips with the phone and how best to comfortably use it as a “blogging”? tool.

The elephant stopped so that the Sultan and his hareem could have some lunch and champagne. Right in front of where we were stood watching in Piccadilly. There were many uniformed police officers embedded in the crowd. One of them was an Asian police officer. (North American readers: Asian = South Asian)

The megapixels in mobile phones are going up. It is fascinating to be able to see levels of detail in pictures that are taken in very different context to conventionally composed pictures. For example: take a look at this picture. It was taken in Islington from the back of a moving car – looking back through the rear windscreen. Now click on the “All Sizes”? button just above the picture and select the “Original”? size. Marvel at the detail. But also notice how the face of the scooter rider on the right is blurred. This is 3 megapixel espionage at the very limits.

Traffic in the London rush hour inevitably leads to occasions when two (or even three) buses all turn up at more or less the same time. What happens afterwards is a predictable series of overtaking manouvres: the first bus stops to pick you up; the second bus overtakes and stops to pick up the people waiting at the next stop down the route; and what was the first bus overtakes that to pick up people waiting at the stop one further down the route from where the second bus stopped. The net effect of when this graceful form of bus “dancing” happens is that it occurs very confidently all the way down to the termination point of the route – getting the people on those buses to their destinations twice as fast as is normal when only one bus comes along. But only so long as nobody wants to get off the bus at a potential “overtake” stop – which is when the rhythm stutters slightly – or else when the traffic upsets the flow. Which does happen quite often of course.

This is a cameraphone picture I took of a Route 79 bus taken on a beautiful Spring morning last week from the back of the upper deck of another 79 bus which was in front at the time:

You hogged the cash machine for a full 5 minutes. I was getting soaked in the rain. I only wanted 20 pounds but you were obviously passionate about learning everything there is to possibly know about yours. Like how many more sports-trousers or trainers like the ones you’re wearing could you buy with the money that the machine is telling you that you have?

I hate cash. It’s an annoying and highly inconvenient concept. Especially given that it’s about trading bits and bytes for bits of paper. But especially when it’s raining and the High Street parking warden is on duty.

A few weeks ago I promised myself I would go back to explore Barcelona properly. Well, I did just that – hauling the Route79 clan over there for a few days – last Sunday through to Wednesday (3 and a half days). Like many, we’re not the sort of family who likes to go sit in the sun and read a book on holiday, so we set ourselves some objectives for this short break, and I am pleased to say that we accomplished all of them.

First and foremost we decided not to pack a reasonable quality camera; electing instead to use the camera in our mobile phones. The results of that mission can be viewed here. The camera is sub-1megapixel (i.e. a bit crap) so the images aren’t great, but they were “blogged” pretty much live, so that kind of justifies the lack of quality. In fact, I think given the context, the fuzziness sort of adds credence to it, but that’s a discussion for another day …

The second objective was to see as much work by famous local artist Antoni Gaudi as we possibly could, so that by the time we came home we’d be sick of it.

And last but not least, we wanted to make sure we sampled some real good, especially Catalan, and Spanish, food, all in that order of priority. So, we went out of our way to research places to have lunch and dinner, and booked everything by telephone in advance of our trip.

Oh and I forgot to say, all of this had to be done for a budget of less than £1200 for a family of four (two adults and two children) – all in – including flights, long-term parking, insurance, accommodation, food and pocket money. Anyone who’s researched flights from Heathrow to the major cities in Spain will know that BA and Iberia have got it all pretty much sown up and we would have busted the budget on the flight alone. The alternative was to go Easyjet from Luton, say, but I found what appeared to be an interesting deal for around £800 from Lastminute.com a couple of months ago – it was a combined flight and hotel deal that had quite some elements of choice in it; for example I managed to configure the package so that we flew from LHR (Iberia codeshare with BA) and the hotel we stayed at was actually an “Apartment Hotel” slap bang in the centre of town, right on Las Ramblas, which is the centre of all the action there. Apartment Hotels usually offer larger, family friendly, suites and a lot more by the way of privacy. We positively detest the idea of paying a premium for being fussed over and room service and all that, so that helped keep it within budget. I also found a relatively cheap valet parking service operating out of Heathrow, they took our car away at the terminal and brought it back on our arrival. Luxury eh? For a price not a great deal more that advanced booking at Pink Elephant for the duration. The rest of the budget was used on other expenses whilst there, specifically travel (Metro T10 prepaid “carnet” tickets – don’t buy any other travelcards as these are superb and all encompassing), food and other items like entrance fees to museums or attractions etc. Details of the “bill of materials” at the end of this posting if you are interested.

Anwyay – apart from Gaudi architecture and the really great food, the things about Barcelona that left me with lasting impressions:

1. I have never seen so much graffiti in my entire life! But unlike much of what you see in London, BCN graf really is art. Practically every metal shutter of every shop and restaurant on the narrow lanes of the old city around Las Ramblas is covered in very carefully sprayed graf, usually extremely colourful and often intricate. And care is taken not to spray or cover the stonework of the aincient facades – sticking to the metal shutter only. Of course, there is lots of more unsightly graf too, but it ‘s mostly out of town and in the usual places. There just seems to be a lot more “respect” for the important buildings.

2. I don’t know wether this is a Spanish trend, or strictly a Bareclonian one, but quite a high proportion of younger women (as in between teenage and middle-age) have a metal stud in their lip. It can’t just be me, because the other 79ers noticed this as well.

3. The pavements in Barcelona – even the out of town ones are not made using paving slabs of the size that you normally experience say in London. They are much smaller tiles – about the size of teacup footprint, and hexagonal. This makes me think of the amount of time it must take to lay these things. And on some streets (e.g. the prestigious Passeig de Gracia) the design on these Hexagonal paving tiles are quite intricate and kind of arranged so that the patterns connect over adjacent tiles.

Here’s how we spent our money if you’re interested: Continue reading “Barcelona revisted” →

Random update: When I think of April I think of tax and rain. It’s the end of the tax year and the start of a new one. And it usually rains a lot. But here in London we’re not getting enough of the latter. Or rather, we’ve not had enough of the latter for the last 18 months or so. Which means that the local water companies are banning us from using hosepipes. Which doesn’t really bother me, because I don’t use them anyway. But my next-door neighbour has an obsession with washing his car with a hosepipe every week; rain or shine. What should I do if I catch him using it during the hosepipe ban?

I have to say though that the weather is definitely picking up, and London is a fantastic place to be when it’s hot and sunny. Looking forward to the summer!

Yesterday I discovered that my Internet Service Provider is now doing an 8Mbps DSL service for about 10 pounds per month cheaper than my current 2Mps service. Upgrading was therefore a no-brainer, and it only took 24 hours. Now I am on 8Mbps down and 400Kbps up for £19 per month. Don’t you just love it when you get something better for less?

I was getting rather depressed by the lack of colour on these pages lately so I delved into my picture archive and pulled out a random picture to brighten it up a little. Especially now that it is Spring.

I heard the music of an ice-cream van out in the street just now. And did you know that it is a principle of Japanese cooking that a balanced meal is one that has twelve different colurs in it?

Which in a very round-about sort of way brings me to something that I’ve been thinking about for a little while. Those of you who work in offices might be used to a procedure called “hot-whiteboarding“. This is a term used to describe the collective establishment of an abstract idea using marker pens on a glossy white board mounted on the wall of a meeting room, or if you’re that way inclined, luckily on a wall near your desk.

The procedure usually starts with someone going up to the whiteboard and then (a) picking up a marker pen and taking the top off (b) smelling the tip for a second (c) drawing a little line in the corner of the whiteboard (d) rubbing out said line with finger. If the line smudges instead of wiping off clean then it’s a flipchart pen, which you put to one side then you go back to step (a) with another pen and curse the person who mixed the flipchart pens with the drywipe ones. If hot-whiteboarding is a really popularly practised procedure in your office then step (c) will often result in no line at all – or else a line so faint that it is illegible from any practical viewing distance. In which case you go back to step (a) and repeat the process until you find one that works. Sometimes you get people who bring along their own, highly-treasured, packet of multi-coloured drywipes to the meeting – and then take them away at the end of the meeting and lock them up in their desk-side drawer. That really annoys me that does. In my opinion this practise is an unnecessary inhibitor to the spontaneous, creative process.

If the hot-whiteboarding session has been a productive one then the end result will be a highly-crafted and pruned work of art. If you’re unlucky, you might be the one who has been volunteered to own the action of staying behind at the end of the meeting and transcribing the whiteboard into Word or Powerpoint for later distribution to the meeting attendees (apols for the use of office jargon!) You’re really unlucky if you haven’t got one of those scanning whiteboards that automagically prints the content of the whiteboard onto a piece of paper at the touch of a button. But you are really lucky if you have one of those “smart” boards that you can plug your laptop into and it dynamically keeps a picture of what’s on the whiteboard on your laptop as an image that can be sent to everyone without haste at the end of the meeting. Otherwise you just resort to having to stay behind and painstakingly reproduce the contents of the whiteboard in your Black and Red day book with that really smart stationery-cupboard gel pen that you never really use. Or if you’re in a hurry to get to your next meeting you just write a note in the whiteboard saying “Please do not wipe!” and come back later hoping that nobody has. However, these days, the work-smarter types are more prepared. They take pictures of the whiteboard using their digital camera or their mobile phone and then distribute the images by email to the attendees later – or else upload the images to Flickr and send the URL around to everybody like these people have done.

Well I came across something really neat the other day. It’s called ClicktoScan. With this web app you take a picture of the whiteboard using your mobile phone and email or MMS it to ClicktoScan. By the time you get back to your desk a PDF of the image will be waiting in your inbox, or you just login to your ClicktoScan account and download it from there – or better still – if you are not in your office (e.g. in your client or supplier’s office) then you can have the image sent to your nearest fax machine for printing – right from your mobile phone. Now there’s a useful use for a fax machine – and you can gaurantee there’ll be one in every office somewhere just waiting there, desperate to be used. Or you can have any combination of any of the three.

And the really neat thing about ClicktoScan is that the software in their systems does a load of clever processing on the images sent to it, like removing any dark background noise from the image, sharpening the letters in words, unwarping the edges of the image and adjusting the contrast so that the resultant image you get is actually very readable. Exactly what you want.

And what’s more, taking pictures of whiteboards is not the only application. With your mobile cameraphone you could use it to get readable images of anything that you cannot easily take away with you, wherever you find yourself with the need to capture something with words or lines on it – e.g. restaurant menu cards, instruction leaflets for electrical appliances when you go shopping, location maps outside train stations, campus maps, snippets from articles in magazines that you read in WHSmith that you can’t be bothered to buy etc. etc. In the old days this would have been the stuff of spymasters and their tradecraft. Now it’s in the domain of anybody with a mobile phone and access to the web. Which is just about everybody these days. Just one thing though – the results are better if your camera is at least 1.3 megapixel and has reasonable focus.

And the ClicktoScan service is not constrained to images taken from your mobile phone either. You can email images from any source to ClicktoScan. So for example you could use any digital cam, get the images onto your PC and email them. Although the proposition has greater value to mobile phone users due to the fewer number of steps taken to get the end result. And best of all – it’s free (for now). Except if you do send from your mobile phone then you will incur your usual GPRS/3G data transfer charges to your network operator.

Have been travelling by jet-plane more than I have by bus lately. I’m not really too keen on flying. Really. Having done far too much in my lifetime so far, I’ve had my fair share of “plane travel horror” experiences, and like almost everyone I know, have shared at least one of the horror stories with friends and colleagues.

My dislike for flying can be traced back to one particular short-haul journey between Belfast and London during the mid 1990s. I had spent the day working in (what was then a very “war-torn” and nerve-wrackingly full of military checkpoints) Belfast and was returning on an early-evening flight back to Heathrow. It was winter. There was a storm. It’s only a 45 minute flight. No sooner had the plane reached the top of its climb to cruising altitude, it was on its way down for descent and final approach into Heathrow. It was during this phase of the flight that the storm really had its effect on the plane. The plane started shaking violently. The seatbelt light came on suddenly. The crew were asked quickly to strap themselves in prematurely. And the nervousness in the captain’s voice was evident over the PA system as he pleaded this request. Seconds later all hell broke loose: the crew hadn’t had any opportunity to clear away the used food trays and drinks etc. So when the plane started to get tossed around in the wind there was food and drink *everywhere*. It was a frightening experience. I have vivid memory of a moment when the plane just seemed to DROP for several long minutes – my stomach being left behind somewhere in the sky. I thought I was going to die. And judging by the screaming of everyone else on the plane, I wasn’t alone. When we eventually landed safely the rain was torrential and you don’t know how thankful I was toward the pilot and crew for getting me back on the worshipful ground. Which indeed I could have worshipped at the time. I was completely oblivious to the rain as I walked back in a daze to my car parked in the long-stay car park. I was just happy to be on the ground and vowed to never fly again. Of course, I did fly again. But not without everlasting trepidation.

Nowadays I’m a little more relaxed. But only a little: I’m the one person on the plane who likes to keep an eye what’s going on. My sense of awareness is multiplied ten-fold when flying. I watch for everything. I pay lots of attention to every little unusual noise, and every little flexing of the wing, and every little wobble in the movement of the engines. I just know that I will be the one to report something unusual to the crew if something looks alarmingly untoward. I am most tense when the plane takes off, and I hold my breath when the wheels of the plane hit the runway on landing. You don’t know how much the effect of the “Ladies and Gentlemen: welcome to so-and-so” announcement has on my mental psyche as we hit the ground and taxi down off the runway. You can call me a paranoid flyer.

There have been many occasions when on the final approach into Heathrow I spy the tiny little buses and cars on the roads around the airport and just wish I was down there instead.

Barcelona a few weeks ago. Athens last week. Madrid the next.

It was snowing in Athens during the two days I was there. Not sleety snow, but full on slow-big-flakes-drifting-to-the-ground snow. My taxi driver from the airport to town did not know how to get me to my hotel in suburb of Kiffisia. Somehow he managed to persuade me in very broken English to get into the front seat and navigate him to the destination using his Athens equivalent of the “A-Z” map book. This wasn’t so easy, but I was grateful for the A-Level maths that I studied years ago – as this helped me decipher the correspondence between the form and pronunciation of some of the Greek letters e.g. lambda, theta, kappa etc. We built up a bit of a rapport along the way, and during our sometimes very bizarre conversation I asked him what was the Greek for “Thank you”. And even more bizarrely, he asked something like “You know the Japanese for thank you?“, and rather bizarrely I said “Why yes: Arigato” – and he said “Well in Greek it is very similar; it is Efharisto!”

And like Barcelona: I must be easily passed as a local Athenian, as during my stay there I got approached a couple of times by people wanting directions or something or other and had to explain in some way that I did not speak Greek. This made me feel a little ashamed really.

And I’m really missing my bus.

Absolutely freezing. A sharp Easterly wind has conveyed itself across London over the last week or so – with only a slight hint that it might be decaying on this cold, but sometimes sunny Sunday.

Looking forward to the Spring? Absolutely. The daffodil shoots are visible on the grass verges in outer Brent. Soon they will be in bloom of a bright, and sometimes rich, yellow.

Which brings me nicely to one of the latest Indian Cinema productions gracing the screens of some larger multiplexes in suburban London lately: “Rang de Basanti.“ (Which literally translated from Hindi means “the colour yellow”.) There are so many reviews of this film out there I won’t even attempt to try to review it properly other than to say that it was an interesting film. I would even go so far as to say that this production stands out from the staple of Indian Cinema output – but I suppose this sort of film could absolutely become staple in due course.

I went to see it at a multiplex in Feltham (which I always associate as a place where the nation’s young offenders are locked up) – and am amazed that this cinema manages to insulate itself very well from the thunder of jumbo jets taking off at nearby Heathrow Airport. (The cinema is directly underneath the flight path of the runways which are less than a kilometre away.)

Things that impressed me about the film: *some* of the cinematography was excellent. *some* of the music was very fitting and iconic (in a Thelma & Loiuse kind of style) and the storyline was mostly well put-together even if it was little preposterous. But the latter can be forgiven somewhat.

Things that annoyed me about the film: Amir Khan: who I *used* to like as an actor is absolutely in the wrong role in this film; he just DOES NOT work as a university student amongst his character comrades at all in my opinion. I shall always benchmark him with his role in Lagaan or Dil Chata Hai – and his role in Rang de Basanti just so doesn’t work. Also: the gang of friends at the centre of this “male bonding” movie broke out into playful childish-like song way too often than was necessary to emphasise their comaradarie. (Did I spell that right?) And finally: there were times during the film where shortcuts in the editing process were very noticable – and frankly quite crap. (Sigh)

Other than these – it was a great film – glad I watched it in the end. Despite the interestingly critical review by Anand at MDEII.

Attended the 3GSM World Congress last week – a massive tradeshow for the world’s mobile industry. It had outgrown Cannes (which is where it has in the past been held annually) and frankly I think that even the city of Barcelona felt overwhelmed. It took place at the Fira de Barcelona – which is an exhibition centre not far from the centre of town comprising 8 massive halls between Placa Espanya (a big roundabout) and the Palau National de Montjuïc (a big palace on a hill). There were over 50,000 attendees and nearly a thousand exhibitors – and several CEO summit-style conferences were all taking place at the same time there. All the world’s major tech and service companies involved in mobile were there – many providing trade journalists with all-expenses-paid packages to be there in return for good writeups – and several governmental trade missions will have used the event to further relationships with this industry which, in the UK alone, contributes 1% to the national GDP.

Needless to say, every single hotel room in the city was booked – and every single seat on flights to the city were booked up for months in advance as the airlines took every opportunity to rip people off for direct flights from major cities elsewhere in the world.

I travelled Monday, attended the event Tuesday and Wednesday and travelled back home Thursday. I refused to pay the extortionate prices for direct flights from London (circa £600 return) – so managed to get a a cheaper ticket (£120 return) with KLM from Heathrow via Schipol in Amsterdam. OK so the journey time was longer by a 2 to 3 hours each way – but it felt a lot better doing that than lining the pockets of British rip-off Airways.

I’ve been to Barcelona before on business, but never really got to know this city very well on those occasions. This is the effect of stepping out of airports and hotels and stepping straight into taxis. You’re never quite in touch with the rhythm of a city until you’ve experienced moving with the people of the city in the way that they do. So this time around I schlepped it on the trains tubes and buses. (Did I say tube? I meant “metro”.)

The train into town from the airport was cheap and efficient. As is the metro. The metro trains themselves are like a cross between the Paris metro and the Hong Kong MTR: the doors have little handles in them that are used to open them at stops – and some trains are made up of carriages that you can walk right through from one end of the train to the other. Because the trains are just below the street level you can get a mobile phone signal on most of the system – and the time it takes to get from surface to train and vice versa is kept to a minimum. I don’t know whether it was because of the 3GSM event or not – but I noticed a lot of security police with scary-looking dogs patrolling the trains and the streets over the few days that I was there.

Just about every major advertising space in the city was taken by the mobile phone industry. And in many cases the entire fronts and sides of massive buildings and hotels were draped in massive adverts. By the time I left the city I was sick of “Hello Moto“. Go on – click that link to get an idea of the sort of picture you would see plastered all over the side of a 10 storey building. They were everywhere, featuring different human models of various ethnic backgrounds all dressed up and made up to look like internationally correct customers – but mostly looking like they had come fresh off the set of a Gap commercial.

I did a lot of walking. Mostly between the nearest metro stations of near convention centre and my hotel – which was not too far from the south end of Las Ramblas which is a touristy sort of pedestrianised street in the old and scenic part of town. The funny thing is I also got stopped by a number of Spanish tourists who wanted to know the directions to various places. In some cases I was able to help despite my Spanish not being very good at all! This reminded me my times in New York and Los Angeles – where I would often get mistaken for being of Latin American origin. Personally I consider it an advantage being an Indian in the tourist centre of Barcelona – or indeed any country lining the Mediterranean. You’re less likely to get treated differently when interacting with local people. For example – I went into a coffee shop which was on my way from my hotel to the local tube station one morning. The guy in front of me was clearly a foriegner – a British guy attending 3GSM probably. (Just like me!) He ordered a coffee – but the shop assistant qualified his request by shouting “American?” – and he nodded. What he got served was a normal cup of black coffee – which was served in a normal cup, with some sugar and milk on the side. I was up next – and ordered coffee too. But this time the assistant didn’t qualify my request – and I got a “real” coffee – more like an espresso, in a tiny little cup – and no mik or sugar on the side. That made me feel great. And the coffee tasted fantastic too.

I have now made my mind up to come to Barcelona again at some point. For pleasure. There is so much to see and do in this town – a couple of days on business does it no justice at all.