More from Spain

The blog conference that I'm attending in Caceres, Spain ends today. It's been really interesting to meet "geeks" (or "freaks" which is the Spanish word, believe it or not) and bloggers from other countries who are pretty much like our own home-grown variety. The two geeks, above, Antonio (the blond) and David (the brunet) were representative of the crowd - just very cool, interesting, friendly, and wee bit geeky (just enough).

One of the papers from Barcelona did an interview with me yesterday, you can check it out here if you read Spanish (and I only did half the interview in Spanish, so don't be too impressed - she cleaned up most of it).

Now for a few photos from the conference, and the city. One of the things that really so defined this conference for me was sitting in a workshop on podcasting, looking around the room at the conference attendees sitting in front of their computers trying to learn how use Apple's Garageband audio editing software, and then noticing the 15th century (or so) paintings decorating the walls around us. Sure, they were copies, but the juxtaposition of so much history alongside a class on podcasting just strike me as funny, and moving.



Some things need no translation:



Some new friends from the conference made me get up at 8am (hey, this is Spain, I had to force these folks to let me go home last night at 1am - they stayed out till 3, or 4, or 6). Anyway, we went for Churros y Chocolate. Basically, it's to-die-for hot chocolate that you dip a Spanish version of very long thin donuts in. Basically, it's disgustingly good. Of course, everyone is smoking, which is the curse of this country, just like Greece, and France - but at least in France it's being outlawed next year (though it's been outlawed here too, in restaurants, but for some reason practically every restaurant we go to seems to have received some kind of exemption to the law - it's very strange). I just learned that small restaurants can "choose" whether they want to go non-smoking or not. Of course, small restaurants don't need a law in order to "choose" to go non-smoking - they can do that anyway - so this little provision of the law was a cute way to exempt small restaurants totally (ah, politics doesn't change no matter the language). A small movie of the folks making the churros:



A few of the local inhabitants in the old city.



And finally, the classic southern Europe photo - the local roadblock: