10 Apr 2002 chrisime   » (Journeyer)

Back from GUADEC3. It was a lot of fun to meet the GNOME hackers again. I met a lot of people which I only knew from IRC.
I was staying at an apartment together with jdub, Gman, Uraeus, thomasvs, kmaraas(Kjartan), hadess, BBB(Ronald), Martin Baulig, Jorn (Galeon/Rhythmbox hacker; wow, he's just 15!!), sienap (Dennis, crazy guy), kanikus + his GF. It rocked. The apartment was close to the city center of Sevilla. The bad thing about Spain is that almost nobody speaks english there. But we could somehow manage to get everything done (describing the to the conference center, getting food at the restaurants, ...).
The day we arrived in Madrid really sucked. We tried to find out where the buses to Sevilla were leaving. Unfortunately the information desk at the airport wasn't able to provide us the information we needed, so we were on our own and we succeeded, yay!! We left Madrid (the city sucks!!) at 1 am on Wednesday and had quite a nice trip (I was able to sleep in the bus which is normally not possible). We arrived at Sevilla at 7.30 and had to find our apartment -- which was much easier than I thought first. At the apartment we tried to get the keys. Unfortunately Fernando (which was in charge of the apartment) couldn't speak english at all. I was quite surpised that his son know bits of english. We agreed to get the keys for the apartment 45 minutes later; so we're waiting. (bummer, I couldn't reach Markus, the other guy from the apartment, I just reached his answering machine; on monday I found out that he's German,...). It was quite surpising that another guy called us (he spoke German, but I still don't know who the hell he was) and told us to get to a cafe. There we should wait until he arrived. So we did that (in vain). Martin and we were frustrated/annoyed of Spain (and this was just the second day). We finally found out that the other gang (Uraeus, kmaraas,...) would arrive at 4.29 pm at the train station. We decided to go there. Together with the other guys we headed back to the apartment and tried to get the keys for a second time. But *sigh*... We were glad that jdub finally arrived (that bastard had the keys ;) ). We just put our stuff in the apartment and left to get some food.
The rest of the evening was quite nice (except that kmaraas broke my latop :*( ). I could finally enjoy the day.
On the next day we had to find our way to the conference center (which was about 3-4 km away from our apartment). As previously mentionned (almost) nobody speaks english in Spain, this includes taxi drivers. We somehow managed to get to the conference where our first problem was to register at the reception and to get something to eat (yeah...nobody speaks english blabla). We finished eating and headed for the first talk. It was fun to meet so many people, people who I haven't seen for one year. I also met some new hackers who I only knew from IRC.
In the evening I stayed together with hadess at the apartment; we watched some movies which was a lot of fun.
On the next day we missed the first talks (which were quite uninteresting for me) and arrived at about 12:30 at the conference center. There's not much to tell about the day except the evening. Yep, there was the XIMIAN Party! It was so much fun (and I was so fu**i*g drunk). We had the famous butt signing (vicious you rock!). At 3 o'clock I was too tired/drunk and I asked Martin B. what he thought about going home (hmmm, I dunno what I said ;-) ). We somehow got home and I went to bed (the rest...I won't tell :P). BTW, hadess got home at 7 am!! Poor creature ;-)
OK, the rest of the day was quite annoying except that I met hub and Dom. Unfotunately those guys had to catch their train and thus our conversation was quite short :(
In the evening we did some sight-seeing (nice!!) and went to a restaurant (where we had the usual problems!).
On the next day I stood up quite late and was quite suprised what had happened in the other apartment (the MAS guys were there). They discussed about gstreamer and MAS which was quite interesting; I learned some bits of the internals of gstreamer, a really amazing piece of software! Later that day we went (again) to a restaurant where I tried a snail (baaah, tasted strange!!) and after that to the irish pub. Unfortunately, I was quite tired and had to stay there until 3 (or was it 4) o'clock. For more information about that night, please read hadess's diary *hint*. ;-).
Monday: That was the last day and the weather was quite nice, so some of us decided to go the the city. We went to the cathedral and the city park.
OK, that's it, more or less. Conclusion: Spain was fun for the most part, except that the organisation of GUADED, the weather and people who couldn't speak any English sucked. Fun fun!! See you next year in Dublin(??).

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