Travel-goods catalogs certainly play to anxieties -- there must have been 10 anti-bedbug products in TravelSmith's latest (including liners for your suitcase, in case bugs travel back in your clothes)-- not to mention the sleepsacks in case hotel sheets aren't clean enough, the portable air purifiers, the hand sanitizer wipes, etc. [Didn't buy or use, but of course they did make me more anxious]Flight to Madrid was luxurious -- US Air's Envoy class has seats that extend horizontally (as opposed to American Airlines' business class, which is maybe at a 5 degree angle, hard to sleep with). Even finding that my reservation wasn't in Iberia's system wasn't that bad -- it felt good to be able to talk Spanish & be understood (and understand what the airlines people were saying). I'm no where near that point in Japanese -- can only produce the most rudimentary, routine utterances.
Steve v. worried that I was an hour late getting into Barcelona (I probably wouldn't have made the earlier flight even if Iberia had been able to find my reservation -- I'd been under the delusion I needed to pick up & recheck my bag in Madrid, which cost me 1/2 hour, and I needed to change terminals and THEN it took something like 1/2 hour to go back through security and treck out to the gate -- Madrid airport's terminal 4 is vast.)
V, v good to see Steve, of course. He was happy to see me, and happier still that we could get into town for EUR 1.86 by train from the airport (2 trips on a 10 trip metro ticket). Hotel v nice (it used to be the Ritz). Breakfasts truly luxurious -- vast choice of fruits, juices, fresh rolls, pastries, smoked salmon, cheeses, and excellent cafe con leche. Hard not to pig out.
