school trip

Brrr! I came back from Seville late last night and am frozen solid already. Bye-bye summer heat, hello cold and rain.

Seville was great and as we (yours truly and 3 of her colleagues) arrived a day early we had Wednesday for sightseeing. The boys were good and went on the corporate treasure hunt in the afternoon, the girls decided to skip it in spite of its charitable cause and go on a boat-cruise and shopping mission istead. We discovered a cool Spanish store, Cortefiel (the clothes on the website are quite horrible so you just have to believe me they had other, nicer, stuff) where we raided the "Sale" section. We also popped into pretty much every shoe store there was. And there were many of them. E. bought a pair of sandals, I couldn't be bothered to extract my swollen feet from the shoes I was wearing.

As a novice to conferences, never mind those of such a huuuuuge company as the one financing my retail addiction, I have to admit I'm rather easy to impress. Still, it was pretty impressive to see that a gathering of almost 2000 people could be organised so smoothly with no technical glitches or other mishaps. In fact, it was a logistical masterpiece and the organisers had thought of everything from (branded, of course) sun-screen, mosquito repellant and baseball cap to vouchers for drinks and tapas on the night before the conference. That night, the town was full of people wearing the telltale wristbands, t-shirts and bags with the motto of the conference, the venue of which was rather original and unusual as well. Our colleagues from Dublin and Hamburg arrived in chartered planes, the handful of Viennese participants got value for money with their plane tickets. Thus I know not only know the airport of Seville (practically no shop-ops, in case you were wondering), but also those of Madrid and Palma de Mallorca. Ah well, gift-horse and all that...

I had last been in Spain at the age of 14, en route to Portugal with my parents. My parents had made bad experiences every time they visited Spain, including stolen suitcases, wallets and a hit-and-run car accident, the latter in Seville, actually. For that reason, family holidays tended to give Spain a wide berth. As my experiences on that short stay were entirely positive, I wouldn't mind going on a proper holiday to Spain or the Balearic islands.
I've just put my hard-earned frequent(ish) flyer miles to good use today and cashed them in for a flight to London. A weekend in London in November, yeah!

Oh - I now have a picture of myself grinning next to one of the Firm's founders. Not entirely uncool, that.