Before I begin, I would like to point out that I was right about the iPhone.

Anyway, the trip has been going pretty well for me. Thursday and Friday were filled with lots of work and getting adjusted to the time change. Saturday I laid down for a little nap before dinner and woke up at 4am. I did a lot of walking around town sightseeing and pretty much wore myself out. Sunday was much the same, except that I did get out for dinner. I’m starting to get used to this place. Driving on the left side of the street took some adjustment, and it extends to escalators, and to walking past people on the street. Speaking of people on the street, there are certainly a lot of them.

Speaking of things I can get used to, I will probably have to be dragged from my hotel room kicking and screaming and with my fingernails tearing out the carpet on Thursday. It’s terribly nice to have a quiet space where the doorman knows your name and someone does your laundry and cleans your room twice each day. If only they had more (American) football on TV.

Now it’s 8pm and I just got back from the factory and someone will presently be bringing up my dinner while I write some emails, update my expense report, make some calls, and roll into bed to start it all over again tomorrow. I suspect I’ll have more time and energy to write a proper report on the plane home.

The clock on my computer says it’s 5:45 am, which means that I’ve been on the plane something like eight and a half hours, and there are eight more hours to go. I managed to sleep, off and on, for at least six of those hours. The seats on Singapore Airlines, though less cramped than the economy-class seats of domestic airlines, are still not what I’d call comfortable. Jennifer said that the seats lie nearly flat, which either means that she flew out first class, or she is extraordinarily bad at geometry for a mechanical engineer. They tip back about 30 degrees from vertical in my estimation.

Seat angles notwithstanding, the plane is quite nice. Each seat has its own video screen with a great selection of movies and music to choose, and it seems to have some sort of PVR functionality that lets you pause and rewind what you’ve already seen. There are power outlets between each seat, but they don’t appear to have enough juice for my giant honking laptop. I have a second battery charged, so I should be ok if start coding in a little bit and manage to get into a groove.

It seems like most people take sleeping pills on these flights, and consequently, most people around me are passed out. Thankfully, the plane is only about half full, so everyone has an empty seat next to them. I’m on a aisle, so I can tip my seat back and lean up against the un-tipped seat next to me. I really meant to try out the sleeping pill in advance of this trip, but since I’ve never taken one, I don’t want the first time to be an transoceanic flight.

I’ll arrive at something like five in the morning, and have enough time to shower, charge my laptop, buy a SIM card, and take a nap if necessary before going to the factory where I’ll be working for the next week. At this point I don’t know quite what to expect. Several of my co-workers from different discplines are traveling to the factory where we will help a company manufacture our product. Things could go well or they could go very badly. In my case, I’ll be there in case anyone needs help operating the tremendously complex software that controls all the various parts of the machine. There’s probably more than 50 million lines of code if you add everything up, so I’m not there for my knowledge of it all so much as for my ability to navigate and decipher it. Hopefully things go well and I’ll have some free time to see the sights and try the food. Everyone else traveling with me has been there before–some for months at a time–so I should have tour guides aplenty.

The service on the flight has been great so far; there are several lovely flight attendants patrolling the aisles in traditional-looking Chinese dresses. One just stopped to offer me a snack, which I suspect may be a Hot Pocket. When I asked what the choices were, she waved at half of her tray and said “these are curry–you probably wouldn’t like them.” For half a second I thought of pointing out that I like curry–in fact I have quite a cosmopolitan palate–but seriously, it’s airline food. This is no place for a foodie.

…

It’s now 6:30am and I’ve just finished my Hot Pocket. Actually it reminded me of the pasties (PAST-eez) we used to get in the Upper Peninsula. They were basically stew wrapped in pastry dough and baked, and there were large and dense enough that you could pack them hot in the morning and head out for a day of fishing and they’d still be warm at lunchtime. Of course, by then your hands were full of scales and you smelled like fish and you didn’t feel much like eating.

I decided to bring Jennifer’s point-and-shoot rather than my big camera. It’s just too much to lug around. I have made an effort to pack light, but the truth is that I just haven’t been able to get up much enthusiasm for this trip. When I signed up to go a couple months ago, I was pretty excited about the idea, but between then and now there has been so much going on that I’m really just looking forward to an extended stretch of “normal”. By the time Jennifer got back from her trip, I was exhausted, and the last thing I wanted as to put Jennifer in the same position, to get further worn out on this trip, and then come home to an exhausted wife and needy kids; but it was too late, and the commitment was made and here I am, halfway across the Pacific. Jennifer has said more than once that this whole “We’re So Tired” thing is self-fulfilling. On the matter of whether or not we bring about our own suffering, I am fairly sure the defense can rest. Somebody ought to.

Jennifer just got back from a business trip to the midwest, and tomorrow I leave for a week in Singapore, where the temperature is 79 degrees at 94% humidity, at six in the morning. I wonder what happens if I just cover my entire body with antiperspirant.

As much as I hate to write post that are just a event-by-event account of my day, I’m going to do it anyway. Jennifer left yesterday to go visit our newest nephew, leaving me with both of the girls. Anna has been particularly trying lately, so I know I’m in for a fairly rough week. To start out, neither one of the girls slept much last night; Tara woke up three times in the early evening, and then Anna came home from what was supposed to be a sleepover because she wasn’t sleeping either. She ended up sleeping on Jen’s side of our bed, and both girls decided to get up at the regular time despite missing several hours of sleep. Anna had her usual morning in which something upsets her and she explodes in a huge ball of fire and destruction. Normally calm Tara then becomes jealous of the extra attention paid to Anna and explodes as well. Toss in some more crying, hitting, attempts to run away from home, and it’s just another typical morning at weresotired.com.

I finally managed to gather up the girls to go to Pancake House, where we saw my boss, who later called me to say that he had found a Nintendo Wii at the store and picked it up for me. I’ve been looking for one off and on for months. After a failed attempt to go to SeaWorld and a stop by Target so that Anna could spend a birthday gift card, we picked up the Wii and went home for lunch. Tara took a nap while Anna and I learned a little bit about how to play the Wii Sports games. Two hours later we learned the important of tightening the wrist strap properly and called it a day.

After nap we visited the neighbors, who never fail to remind me that no matter how much you have going on, somebody else is bound to have more. After a quick dinner comprised of the last remains of food in the house, Anna decided to put on her best Stepford behavior and help out marvelously with bedtime. Hopefully she wakes up in that mood tomorrow.

After my coworkers left I was desperately tired and torn between wanting to go home, wanting to see more of the city, and wanting to go to bed. I went to bed. In fact, on Saturday morning, I awoke at 9 am so that the laundry could pick up some clothes, then put out the “do not disturb” sign and went back to sleep. At 2 pm, housekeeping called me to ask me when they could come clean my room. I decided to get up.

I took the metro out to the other side of town and just went walking in what I thought was a nice direction; I eventually came across the Parc de la Ciutadella, the “Central Park” of Barcelona. The park was filled with people young and old. People sat and ate on benches, gathered in circles in the grass, and in some cases, couples just laid the grass and made out in full public view. I am not a prude by any means, but I’m just not used to such public displays and found it intriguing. Lots of people were just laying out in the sun, enjoying the gorgeous weather as though it was the beach. One girl was sitting out in her bra and panties with her clothes in a heap beside her. I suppose she’d forgotten her bikini¹.

Eventually I got a call from the one coworker who lived in Barcelona; he invited me out to dinner along with his wife. I wandered my way back to the hotel just in time to freshen up and head out on the metro to the Gràcia district, where the young people hang out. We went out to a light dinner and talked about life and kids and the fact that I could totally move to Barcelona at any moment. We then went walking and talking around the neighborhood, and by this time I was unsurprised to see people lining up at 11:30pm to get a table for dinner at some places. I also discovered that the city would be pretty much shut down on Sunday, and regretted delaying a thorough trip through El Corte Ingles, the enormous department store next to my hotel. El Cortel Ingles is a great place to go if you need a suit, a whole smoked pig’s leg, an electric guitar, and a bathtub. Really. Same store.

I came back to a clean hotel room and fresh laundry, and fell directly into bed, where I lay unmoved until 10am.

Sunday, I found that the entire city had not in fact shut down, but most stores were closed–particularly the sort of stores you’d want to visit as a resident. All the tourist attractions were wide open; I took the funicular to Montjuic, and walked around for a while before getting on a tour bus. The tour bus was the sort in which you could get on and off repeatedly, so I took a last look at Las Ramblas, the Gothic Quarter, and around some of the Gaudi buildings. By dinner time I was pooped again, and I returned to my hotel room, thoroughly Barcelona’d out.

I ordered a $30 cheeseburger from room service, packed my things, and went to bed.

¹ If you ask for a “bikini” in a restaurant in Barcelona, you’ll get a grilled ham & cheese sandwich.

From Tuesday through Thursday in Barcelona, there was a nonstop progression of spending the day in meetings followed by some sort of sightseeing and eating combination, then going out drinking, going to bed too late and having to get up and do it again. I don’t remember there being any free time in there, and frankly I can’t remember any particular thing happening on any particular day, except that on Thursday, we cut out from work a little early and went to Parc Güell. I’m glad we didn’t stick around work because the managers’ meeting turned out to go really long, and we would have been waiting around forever for the rest of the team. The closest metro stop dropped us at the bottom of a huge hill which has a couple escalators to help for some of the climb. We climbed up and made our way around the park, reading the Catalan signs as best we could, and only getting lost once. By the time we were done walking and taking pictures, it was starting to get dark and we headed back for the hotel arriving just in time to go to the Mexican place next door to the hotel. The food was decent and affordable, but somehow the group managed to accumulate an absolutely insane bill; probably 75% of it was alcohol.

The following day some of my coworkers left for home, and I was still feeling woozy at 11am, but we headed out for more sightseeing, checking out the other Gaudi buildings in town and doing a little shopping. It didn’t take a whole lot of convincing by my coworkers to get me to eat McDonald’s for lunch. Not so much because we wanted the food as for the novelty of the experience; the menu has different food and is printed in Catalan. I don’t think there was any Spanish on the menu, though the employees did speak it.

By the time dinner rolled around, we were all pretty tired, especially those of us who had been out the night before. We ate at a hot dog place near the hotel and called it a night. My remaining coworkers were leaving the following morning so at last I knew I’d be able to sleep in.

Some of you may recall that I personally seem to have very bad plane karma. I’m always getting stuck next to the largest, smelliest, or loudest passengers on the plane. Not this time. For the first leg from San Diego, I was sitting next to a creepy-looking but otherwise unoffensive little man who didn’t say a word for the entire flight. The second leg, the one going overseas, I was in the middle seat between two largish men when I overheard the couple behind me asking the flight attendants for new seats. Theirs were in the last row on the plane, and they didn’t like it for some reason. After they left, I quickly excused myself to hork the aisle seat they left behind and sprawled out comfortably for the next nine hours.

Upon arriving, we were greeting by our Spanish coworker and checked into our downtown hotel, showered, obtained phone cards, and changed money, then headed out for tapas in the shadow of the Sagrada Familia. The tower going up in the cathedral itself was closed for the day, so I’ll have to return for another look. We walked through the Barri Gotic and stopped at the amazingly gothic Cathedral of Santa Eulalia, before having to stop at another streetside cafe, this time for sangria. Finally, we walked the rest of the way down La Rambla, past the monument to Christopher Columbus, and down to the marina, where we had some really good paella.

I’m finding this city to be a lot like San Diego: temperate, multicultural, busy, and you can generally tell which direction you’re facing because there is the sea to one side and the mountains to the other. Barcelona has an amazing history displayed in its architecture and I only wish I knew how to take better photos of it.

I dropped off the face of the blog as soon as Jennifer home because:

• I was really really tired and needed a break.
• I was really really busy at work because I missed so much of it while Jennifer was gone.
• I was really really busy at work getting ready for my trip to Barcelona.

I leave for Spain tomorrow, so I probably won’t be doing a whole lot of posting for the next week, but if the internet connection is good I should be posting some pictures, especially toward the end of the week.

I’m at this moment riding home in a van, rather than a limo, being driven by a man in a uniform rather than a suit. While on the trip I received the receipt for the trip to the airport and realized that our travel department must be on the take from the limo company, and arranged my own ride back for 1/4 of the cost. I figured it was only fair after the overpriced steak dinner I expensed. My body thinks it’s 1:20am, and I’m sure I’m going to wake up at what my clock thinks is 3:30am. Plus, I should do some double dad duty to give Jennifer a break after eight straight days of being single. Oh, and I’m sure a have a big backlog of work and increased expectations at work that I’ll put my expensive new knowledge to work ASAP.

That’s all ok, though, because I’ll be home.

I’m glad to be going home today. Yesterday was a brutal day of sightseeing; we started out at 7am so that we could get to the Capitol and be in line for tour tickets. The tour was somewhat disappointing; while the building itself is absolutely staggering, we only saw a tiny portion of it because the post-911 tour has been so truncated. We then walked through several museums until we were totally wiped out. After six hours of walking around, we were both completely wasted. We probably only walked 6-7 miles, but with the temperature around 100 very humid degrees, and having done a lot of walking the night before, we were done. It was about 4pm when we got back to our rooms and we simply agreed to meet this morning around 10-11am. I was up at 6:30 after a long rest but I’m already starting to feel tired again. Maybe I should lay down again before our last shot at a museum before we go home this evening.