Wednesday, May 9, 2012

2 days in Madrid, Spain

Few weeks ago I went on business for 2 days to Madrid, Spain. IBM held an education session for a few hundred of our IT specialists from all over Europe and I presented several topics for 6 hours all in one day - boy, that's a lot of talking. I do not understand how teachers in schools can handle this much talk every day?

My hotel was located 20 min from Alcala de Henares, the birthplace of Salvatore Cervantes, so I downloaded his "Don Quixote La Mancha" into my Kindle and read it on the plane from Pittsburgh. You should have seen my dreams when I fell asleep after reading that book! It was a mumbo-jumbo of the Don Quixhote phrases mixed with the airplane related stuff - all in the usual surreal "dream" style. In short - I did not sleep too well :-).

The best part of the trip was that I met my schoolmate Saglara. She now lives in Madrid and I have not seen her for 25 years (ouch!). Although she has not changed much :-). We walked around the city center and went to some interesting places that I would have never otherwise found if I was there alone. For example, we went into the 130 years old cafe where they serve soup (not tea!) from the Russian samovar. We also visited the market where they sell "jamon" - thin slices of ham.Saglara graduated from university as a journalist and we had a very interesting discussion. She recently translated a book about transerfing from Russian to Spanish (book link).

It was interesting to talk about different esoteric teachings while walking on the ancient streets of Madrid and I took few pictures along the way:


This was my second time in Madrid. My photos from the first visit in 2007 are posted in this album.

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