Jet Lag

Friday September 9th - Saturday September 10th

Today was a crazy day. In fact it's been so long since I've slept, it might even qualify as a crazy two days. I did wake up at 4:30 am on Friday morning like I originally planned. That gave me a whole 3 hours of sleep. Since that time I have only slept an additional 2 hours or so on the flight from Philadelphia to Barcelona. Believe me I tried but I just couldn't seem to.

I purposely kept myself awake on the flight from Salt Lake to Philadelphia. I figured that in order to make up for the Jet Lag between Philly and Barcelona that I would want to sleep for the entire international flight. When we arrived in Philadelphia at 3 or 4 in the afternoon exhaustion was already starting to set in.

That didn't keep down my spirit of adventure though. I was determined not to waste a trip to Philadelphia without checking out the city. We had nearly 4 fours until we boarded the next leg of our flight. That was plenty of time to get into the city, have dinner and then return to the airport. Half of the group that I was traveling with (Dean Lythgoe, Tim Draper and his wife) was on-board with the dinner-in-philly plan. The other half of the group (Scott Brown, Scott Clayton, Dirk Giles and Morris Blackham) had managed to disappear in search of the international terminal before we even had the opportunity to convince them of the superiority of our plan. Fools!

Apparently finding a place to eat a Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is not such an easy proposition. We were met with blank stares as we asked half a dozen people for directions to the best Philly Cheese Steak in town... and that included two different taxi drivers. Our luck improved when Dean randomly chose and printed out directions to Pat's King of Steaks restaurant. After a little bit of badgering the cab driver finally conceded to knowing where “Pat's” was and even informed us that it was indeed the best place in Philly to get a Cheese Steak Sandwich.

We were all starving and filled with hope as we piled into the cab. That hope was replaced by trepidation as the cab driver began to navigate the streets of Philadelphia. He had this bad habit of not stopping for red lights. It wasn't bad enough that he ran the lights, but he actually did so consciously and carefully. When the light turned red about a 100 yards or so ahead of us he would actually begin to slow as he was approaching the intersection. This led to a false hope that he might actually stop. Instead he only slowed down to make sure that he wouldn't hit anybody by driving straight through the intersection.

As we got deeper and deeper into the inner city of Philadelphia I think that we were all beginning to worry. We all had imagined that Pat's was actually a TGI Friday's sort of a place with a happy and fun atmosphere tucked into some recess of the sprawling urban metropolis. Instead we found ourselves driving through inner city ghettos. I kept waiting for a bullet to come whizzing by my head. When we finally arrived at Pat's it was apparent that we were really in for a taste of the local experience.

The menu consisted almost entirely of different ways to cook a Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich. Who knew that there were more than 20 different ways to prepare a Philly Cheese Steak? The seating for the place was all outdoors. The sandwiches were, in fact, pretty damned good.

Our flight left Philadelphia at about 8 PM and with the time difference arrived in Barcelona at 9 am the next morning after a 7 hour flight. My plan to sleep the entire flight quickly evaporated. I was able to doze off for a couple of hours after dinner but that was basically it for the whole night.

When I woke up they were showing “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” as the in-flight movie. I'm a little ashamed to admit that I actually wanted to see that movie. I refrained from purchasing headphones because I thought it would be more important to try and get some sleep. I pretty much ended up watching the whole movie without any sound. It will be interesting to rent the movie when it comes out on video to see if the actual movie dialogue was as interesting as the dialogue that I imagine while watching the movie with no sound.

Even though my body was tired when we landed it was just hard to think about catching z's when the sun was rising. I was also way too excited to sleep. As soon as we touched down I forced myself to perk up so that I could be sure to soak in the whole international experience.

Barcelona is a very cool city. It appears to be a fairly heavily populated area, yet you don't feel overwhelmed or downtrodden by concrete and asphalt. The streets were clean and there was still quite a bit of natural landscaping that kept the city from looking like an urban war zone. This was in stark contrast to the city of Philadelphia.

Luckily we were able to check into our hotel rooms about 4 hours early. The hotel rooms are awesome. Everything is in decorated in a modern décor. I have a corner room where two of the four walls are basically nothing but large glass windows covered by motorized blinds. The bathroom was also all glass. After sliding a translucent “privacy” panel out you could see into the bathroom through the shower from the room. And while you were taking a shower you could see into the rest of the room. Even the TV was modern. It's a 21” flat screen TV monitor. Way Cool!

There were a few quirks about the room. For the longest time I couldn't figure out how to turn on the lights or the air conditioning. I must have tried every switch in the room 3 times. Finally a noticed a small plastic panel near the door of the room with an arrow pointed on it and a slot just big enough to fit a room key. I couldn't even begin to imagine why you would want to insert the room key into a slot once you were already in the room but I decided to give it a shot anyway. No sooner had the card entered the slot than the whole room started whirring to life. The air condition turned on, the lights turned on and the blinds started to raise.

We only stayed long enough to drop our bags off and then we embarked on the 1 and ½ mile hike/walk to meet up with the other folks from Novell at the Princess Hotel. Because we were booked so late, we ended up in the overflow hotel. Everyone else was in a hotel that was just a few steps away from the conference center. In the long run I think that I actually prefer our hotel. It's nice to wake up in the morning and not be immediately surrounded by hordes of conference attendees. It makes it easier to get away from “work” when I'm not actually at the conference center.

I've committed to walking the distance between the hotel and the conference center every day. I figure that it will be a good way to get exercise while I'm away from home and to and will help to make up for all of the extra food that I will be eating and the beer that I will be drinking. I also think that walking gives you a better chance to connect with the city and see the “real” Barcelona.

I, and the other 3 guys that were brought over to do the exchange migration, were invited to dinner by the generous folks at “The Messaging Architects”. They were same folks that pushed Novell to send a few more people to help them run the Exchange migration workshop (i.e. I wouldn't be in Barcelona right now if it weren't for them). We went to a really nice seafood place right in the marina.

I decided to be adventurous and order the seafood stew, which was listed as a “Local Special”. It was basically every kind of crustacean that you can imagine smothered in a sauce or gravy. The monk fish was awesome. It was my first experience peeling prawns from their shells which was made all the more challenging by the sauce that the prawns were smothered in. Lucky for me one of the girls, Rumiana, from The Messaging Architects ordered the same thing and walked me through the whole experience. Rumiana was cool. Too bad she lives in Montreal.

Even though I had barely slept in the last 60 hours, I decided that I was going to fight the urge to sleep after dinner. Instead I decided to go out drinking with Rand and Greg from the Messaging Architects. I was surprised when Rand passed up a bar/discoteque in the marina where you could spy girls dancing half-naked in bikinis on bar tables as you walked by. I tried to convince him to turn back for the next mile or so but he wouldn't listen. We ended up hanging out in a little hole-in-the-wall bar with pool tables. I got schooled by Greg who was pretty good with a cue. I did manage to win 1 out of about 5 games.

As I stumbled home through the streets of Barcelona at 2 in the morning I was surprised at how much activity there was. The streets were teaming with the 18 to 30 crowd that was out partying on the weekend. It didn't seem to phase anyone that it was 2am. I was tempted to stop at a couple of places and join the party but I figured that, for the first time all day, I should be responsible and get some sleep.