Madrid: Plaza Mayor

The entire square is covered with a grid of these strange Holiday lights that look a bit like flying saucers. At last, after a couple of hours of miserable rain, some blue sky is starting to break through the clouds.

The rain in Spain...

...is quite a royal pain. Went for a walk around lunchtime - the weather seemed to be improving. But when I got out of the restaurant (cheap Paella), a steady chilly rain was falling. Still managed to walk around for a few hours, got a local SIM card for my cell, took a couple of pics, and then headed back to my hotel for more work.

Madrid Ritz is nice...

...but I'd be just as happy in one of the smaller places I have stayed in Madrid. Posh is not my style. I must say, the level of service is pretty amazing. The doorman asked my name when I arrived, and I could tell he was concentrating hard to pronounce it back properly. When, ten minutes later, I headed out for a walk, he called me by my name and asked if everything was OK. Impressive!

Rainy and cold in Madrid

Got to Madrid bright and early, and the weather is really crappy. Just above freezing and drizzling. The limo driver has been to Morocco many times and gave me some interesting advice (avoid the north and Tangiers, not so interesting - spend more time in Marrakech and definitely stop in Meknes).

USAir is depressing

It was exciting to be invited to attend an event in Madrid which includes round-trip business airfare. Unfortunately for a variety of reasons I chose USAir, which frankly is a bit depressing. Funny enough, while on the plane I was reading a copy of USA Today and found an article summarizing a recent Zagat survey of airlines. USAir is near the bottom. In fact, the ranking of their international business class is lower than the domestic coach class for some of the smaller airlines like JetBlue, Virgin America and Southwest.

Welcome to IcoPaolo's Blog

I created this blog primarily to experiment with embedding Infomous into Blogger, but I think I will try to use this to document my trip to Spain, France, Morocco and Italy in December of 2010.