High tech

I'll tell you some other day about my trip to Thailand and Malaysia, but I wanted to show you the technology we found in the airport in Frankfurt. We arrived there at 6 am, no one could give us any information and they made us go through a labyrinth to get to the boarding gate... but everything was compensated when we got there. The information about boarding gates was not in a standard screen, it was in this high tech piece:



Taking into account that we were coming from Singapore, the shock was even greater!

Some times you pick up the phone and call someone you don't see for some months.

Typical situation:
- Hey, how are you?
- Good, good, and you?
- I'm fine thanks. We should meet some day, shoudn't we?
- Yeah of course. See you.

No so typical situation:
- Hey, how are you?
- Well I'm six months pregnant. Twins.
- WAW!

Congratulations Cleo and Inasio!

Great phrase:

Written by Dilbert in his blog:

"I’ve been told that in Muslim cultures you use one hand for eating and one hand for wiping your ass. By my count, that leaves no acceptable hand for masturbation."

That's how we, in Spain, create our web pages ;-P ...

"Should we call it a night?"

Yesterday we went to have dinner with some friends. Two had come from the states for Christmas, and one of them came with his girlfriend from Ohio, so we basicaly spoke english. At 3 a.m. we were already tired and a friend of mine said: "Should we call it a night?". I had never heard this expression and I like it. I like this king of phrases that don't have a literal meaning.

Christmas in Barcelona

Hi there! I hope you are all doing well after Christmas and new year's eve. I hope you didn't eat or drink too much!

I thought it could be interesting for you to know how do we catalans celebrate these holidays. The first thing is that in the rest of spain they celebrate Christmas eve and Christmas day, while we celebrate Christmas day and Sant Esteve, which is the next day.

Presents in Catalunya are traditionally brought by a piece of wood (the "tió"). One week before Christmas children begin to feed the tió so that on the 25th December the tió shits the presents. The children hit the tió with other sticks and sing, they go to another room to pray and when they come back the tió has shit the presents.

On the 25th the tradition is to eat soup with meat and a stuffed chicken (I don't know if that's how you call it), and then in the 26th to eat canelloni done with the leftovers from the previous day.

The next tradition is new year's eve. What people usually do (that's common in all of Spain) is to eat one grape grain with each of the 12 times the church bells ring. It is quite disgusting to see people with grape juice going out of their mouth... if you ever try to eat grape that fast you'll understand why.

Finally, in Spain we have holiday on the 6th January. It is the "day of the magic kings". The thing is that the 3 magic kings that went to offer presents to Jesus when he was born go to every house to give presents to children during the night.

Things I miss...

For those of you who are far from Barcelona, I must tell you the weather here is begining to scare me. By now we should be going from autumn to winter, but the temperatures are still like in late summer. Nobody wears still any coat or jacket, just light sweaters. No talking about rain. We haven't seen any water for a long time. I, who love hot weather and hate cold, am begining to miss a good storm. In the other hand I like this waether, so I am happy every morning when I wake up and don't freeze and every afternoon, when I can still go out to the beach to have lunch, but it scares me. It really does. For the last 3 or 4 years we have not had autumn or spring. We passed directly from a freezing winter to the hot summer and viceversa.

A part from a good storm, another thing I miss is Austrlia. I must admit that Alberto's last posts in his blog have made me think about everyone I met in Australia and specially in Melbourne, and I miss them. I miss my life there.