This article is part of the InterRail series and follows Interrail (Part 2) – Belgium.

On August 5th, after yet another train lunch, we finally arrived at Amsterdam Centraal. It was my second time in Amsterdam (the first time was in October 2009, to attend the Maemo Summit).

This time we were not staying at a hotel but rather in the best place of all we stayed in this trip: Ana’s home.
Ana is a friend and a class mate of mine from the University and she had kindly invited us to stay at her place while in Amsterdam. It was really nice to meet her again (now that our group of friends is spread in different countries) and to see she’s doing fine with her internship at IBM and her studies in Vrije Universiteit.
After saying a first hello and just a small catching up — she was working from home that day but she could still tell me “How good you came today because you get to see the gay parade tomorrow!” (more on that later) — we drop the backpacks at her place and headed to the city. The weather was okay and we went for a pleasant boat trip of one hour in the canals (8 € per person, if you’re interested). After that, we went for a hot-dog while I showed Helena a bit of the things I could remember from what Ana had told me back in my first time to the city. Needless to say, the streets were much more crowded in August than what I had seen in October and we joined the crowd, doing the typical tourist things.

(They like bikes in The Netherlands)

(typical Dutch boat-houses)

Later, Ana joined us and introduced us to her boyfriend Sven and we all went to have dinner at The Pancake Bakery. In The Pancake Bakery, you get to choose pancakes with pretty much anything you want, from strawberry and chocolate to chicken and onions, there are pancakes for everyone, really nice place.
After that, Ana and Sven took us for another walk in the city, this time with better guides, of course. On our way to the Red Light district we passed by a crowded block which had a huge party to celebrate the gay parade. We finished the trip by having a couple of drinks in a bar while talking about the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch languages.

(In Amsterdam you may find curious things like this. Ana told me nobody knows how and why this got here…)

Back at Ana’s place, we had a really good night of sleep in her couch. Seariously, it was the best bed we slept in during the entire trip.
On a side note, I also took advantage of having internet connection to prevent another boring train trip and downloaded a book. I somehow thought carrying a book around would be too much extra weight but fully regretted it on the very first train trip. And how would I read the book if I don’t have (yet) an ebook reader? On my N900! Yes, that’s how desperate I was for intellectual stimulus. And the book? A Creative Commons work by Paul Carr, “Bringing Nothing to the Party“. (I might tell you how this experience went and what I think of the book on a separate post one of these days)

The next day we woke up to what I’d call a “breakfast for Dutch champions”! Man, I didn’t know the Dutch had such a variety of tasty, caloric bombs. There was everything, peanut butter mixed with chicken curry (yes, one single product), jelly, cereal and those tiny chocolate pieces that I thought were only used to decorate cakes. They eat these chocolate pieces with bread after a layer of butter. I’m happy all these tasty stuff weren’t available in my childhood or I’d weigh the triple I do today.
After this epic breakfast we left for another walk, the weather was now rainy for the first time in our trip but we didn’t care. I took Helena to visit the Westergasfabrik, an old gas factory where Maemo Summit took place, which is a pleasant place with grass fields and among other things, I wanted Helena to see its kindergarten.
The rain was starting to fall harder and when we were heading back to the city, we saw that in a canal ahead was a bunch of people and decorated boats, the gay parade was starting. Now, I’m not really a fan of the gay parade (I’m not against it or anything, I simply don’t find this or any other parade interesting) but Helena wanted to see it and so we stayed and watched the boats leaving. After that, all soaked up, we went to have lunch again in The Pancake Bakery (Helena really wanted to return there). It wasn’t until around 3 PM that we could find the damned place.
One of the nice things about The Netherlands is that nearly everybody speaks English, even older people. We could approach anyone and they would understand us and answer in a perfect English. All people were also really nice and helpful.

(Amsterdam prepared for the Gay Parade)

(couldn’t take a better photo but here is an example of a pancake at the The Pancake Bakery)

Having satisfied Helena’s hunger for a Nutella‘s pancake, we headed for the train station to ask the schedule of the trains to Berlin. All soaked up for the rain and tired of walking around, we entered the train station to what I didn’t know could happen in The Nederlands. The idea I had about The Nederlands was of extreme organization and order, so, I was expecting the train station to be organized as well.
Entering the train station, we realized we had to get a ticket and wait for our turn to get information but the ticket machine was nowhere to be found. Asking around I finally found it the opposite way of the information area… I got our ticket and we started what was to become a long wait. There were three information assistants but they took a lot of time after answering someone’s questions and calling the next person. This was mainly because they were talking with each other for a while before calling the next number and, unless their job is all about fun and happiness, it didn’t seem like work related conversation. Also, we spotted some people who just waited for an unanswered turn and took that chance to sneak in and get their doubts answered before any of us who were waiting now impatiently. During the time we waited, two of the assistants took a break and went for a cup of coffee or tea, delaying things even more. This is the thing I expected in my country, Portugal, but surprisingly, of all the countries we visited in this trip, The Netherlands was the place where we waited most to get information. At total, 1 hour and a half!
All grumpy and tired, we headed back to Ana’s flat.

That evening we went to do some food shopping (Helena bought the tiny chocolate things) and buy dinner from a local kebab and went back to the flat to have a quiet and pleasant dinner with Ana and Sven. We talked about Portugal, Spain and The Netherlands, the good and the bad of them all, and about particularities in the languages of those three countries; I love Europe and its diversity!
We also watched some old and “compromising” pictures from Ana’s devious archive of our time in University and ended the night watching stupid movies in YouTube and Takeshi’s Castle in the TV. Turns out the Dutch have a sharp sense of humor, which I thought they didn’t but Sven told me “that’s more like the Germans”.

(the narrowest house in Amsterdam. House taxes used to be calculated based on a house’s width, this guy totally worked around it…)

It was really nice to meet Sven and to catch up with Ana now that we rarely see each other so, I must finish this post thanking them for being so nice and giving us such a good time in Amsterdam. We love your couch, and you guys, obviously
The next morning we said goodbye to our hosts and headed for the train station to catch the train to Berlin.

to be continued…

Last week was a busy one with more than one day and a half devoted to meetings besides the usual hacking in MeeGo and SeriesFinale (yeah, I could still devote a couple of hours to keep the work on the GNOME port) but a great weekend was waiting us.

On Friday, after work, we went to Brión (close to Santiago de Compostela) for another Igalia Winter Summit. The trip was quite interesting with me sharing the car with Victor, Claudio and Guillaume, which is a funny thing because in a company with a majority of Spanish members, none of us is Spanish

The first night was composed of hard, philosophical discussions, card games, general get-together and, for some of us, 4 hours of sleep.
On Saturday, Piñeiro (AKA A.P.I.) and Martin Robinson gave a talk about how they got to Igalia, that is, where they come from and how they got into this life of a Free Software hacker.

After lunch, I had a brainstorming with a few other Igalians about Grilo and SeriesFinale’s (unrelated) world domination plans.
This year is also Igalia’s 9th anniversary and some of us were having our companions joining in for the anniversary dinner on Saturday night, so, we had a magician performing impressive card tricks and a Queimada.

For this summit, a few of us had a new challenge, to give the first concert of the Igalia Blues Band as kind of a spin-off of the concert given in last year’s GUADEC (or GCDS). So, Andrés, Claudio, Piñeiro and myself practiced, when we could, the five songs we selected for this after-dinner show. After the concert, we continued with a “less official” setlist where I performed an disastrous alternative version of Bad Things (opening song of the True Blood TV show).
It was quite nice. I think we entertained the people and everybody seemed happy.

Igalia Blues Band (Claudio is not present because I couldn't find any picture with the four of us)

The next morning, Juanjo gave a presentation about the history of Igalia. It is impressive how the company evolved in these 9 years, from a group of Computer Science graduates from Galicia, into having 40 people across 8 different countries, always considering people as its main value and Free Software as a philosophy. I’m proud to be part of it.

The traditional group photo

This article is part of the InterRail series and follows Interrail – France (the beginning).

We finally arrived at Gare du Midi/Zuidstation, we should have continued in the train to the Central Station but I didn’t really knew where it was, so, we instead took the subway to get close to the Grand Place and our Hotel.

We stayed at Hotel Mozart, this and the hostel in Paris were the only places we booked before starting the trip. For Brussels I had still been looking in HotelWorld.com for cheap places, yet, all the double rooms were more than 30 € per person and night and away from the center. Finally, with Booking.com‘s last room thing, we paid 49 € per room and the hotel was pretty cool. It is about 1 minute walking from the Grand Place and decorated in an Arabic style that made it look like a museum (what does Arabic has to do with Mozart remains a mystery to me).

An Arabic fountain in the Hotel

I had passed in the hotel’s street every time I was in Brussels before but never in the Summer. All the times I went there it was in February (yes, for FOSDEM), and it turns out that street can be quite noisy for those who want to sleep but we didn’t really care.
That same night I decided to practice my French with the receptionist and I asked him why there were so many photos of Obama in the hotel’s walls and he told me: “That’s because the boss is American, from California!”. We chit-chatted a bit about whether Obama can change more things. Really cool guys the two receptionists I had the chance to talk to in the hotel.

I don’t know how to explain it but there’s something about Brussels I like a lot. Some of my friends say it’s a small, uninteresting city but I love it there. I love the beer, the sightings, the comic paintings on the side of some buildings, the Grand Place, the fries, Amadeus and of course, FOSDEM!
Now what’s the Amadeus thing above? Well, it is the place you wanna be when you’re starving like we were during our train trips! It’s Amadeus, the Place for Ribs (TM?)!
Amadeus is a warm, dim lighted, vintage-environment restaurant where they serve you spare ribs! So imagine this, you enter this huge place, walls covered floor-to-ceiling by bookshelves (full of real books of course) and you can get to eat huge ribs (I think they are cow ribs, but they could easily be dinosaur’s, I had never tasted dinosaur so I couldn’t tell) along with a nice salad and a roasted potato covered with a tasty sauce. The price? I’ve always paid less than 20 € so it is indeed “a great deal of a meal”!
The music from the 30s set a really nice atmosphere too, together with the dim lights it is like entering another dimension. A dimension that raises you cholesterol and makes you feel bad for not having more space in your stomach for more, it’s just so tasty!
Oh, by the way, in Brussels it isn’t called Amadeus but Amadeo. This year I had to ask it and a waiter told me that it was because there was already a place called Amadeus in Brussels.

An already half eaten rib at Amadeus!

If you have been to FOSDEM and attended its Friday Beer Event these last couple of years, you’re familiar with Delirium Café, a place with over 2000 brands of beer. I was curious to check it out again but this time with less than 1 geek per square meter and I had been telling Helena “I gotta take you there, you’re gonna love the Kasteel beer!”, and she did. What a better way to finish the night after a colossal dinner than drinking a tasty beer such as Kasteel Kriek? For those who don’t know, this is a cherry-flavored beer but with a difference with the other cherry-flavored brands I tasted: it has 8 degrees of alcohol! So it goes in like juice, but the effects are different…
Helena loved it!

We were supposed to stay in the hotel just for one night but we liked it so much that I put my negotiator hat on and talked to the receptionist about staying one more night (I didn’t want this extra night to cost us the original 150 € /night of the room without the last-room discount). So I asked him how much would it be for us to stay one more night and he asked me “How much are you paying now?”, “49 €” I said and he made it easy: “Okay, just gimme 50 €!” and we got our extra night.

The next day we went to the Atomium, I had never been there, and it’s impressive! We stood like 5 minutes on the line to enter and then realized it had an exposition inside and we felt we would spend a lot of time in it (we’re still traumatized by the time we spent in London’s museums), so, after taking a few pictures, we left, as we had wanted to go visit Gent and Bruges.

The Atomium!

Gent is a beautiful city and the capital of East Flanders. I had been to Gent the first time I went to FOSDEM but I went there at night and so, this was like the first time I was there. It’s like our travel guide book said, it’s a nice alternative to Bruges, still beautiful but with less tourists.

An artistic photo Helena took in Gent

Look at how many beers this little shop has (in Gent)

We were eager to visit Bruges, I had watched the movie “In Bruges” which got me interested in the city; the movie is great BTW. So, Bruges, from the very start (outside the train station) to the center square, was simply marvelous. Everything was so clean and so well cared for; of course, the market square was filled with tourists, much more than Gent but it was pleasant. We entered the tower in the square, the same that plays a big part in the movie I mentioned but we couldn’t see how to get up there… Maybe it is because it was past 5 PM.

The tower in Bruges.

Later, while entering the train, I had the feeling that it was first class (our InterRail tickets were for second class) but since there were only us a another couple, we didn’t care to check it out. Then, when the ticket collector came by, he confirmed us it was the first class car but: “You know, don’t worry, this is Belgium, you only need to switch to the second class, there’s no problem.”, he told us with a smile. We did so and we were only 10 minutes from Brussels, so, I guess I can say we traveled first class at least once in this trip.
And how well organized the train system seemed to me in Belgium! We asked for the trips to Amsterdam and we were given a free little book with all the schedules to and from all locations; the information and ticket sales people we talked to all spoke good English; I love the fact that there are no barriers/doors to enter the subway or the tram (and yes, we always paid the tickets), a different philosophy I guess.

Back in Brussels, I had a secret I had been keeping from Helena all day. I had been carrying all day two rings and a pair of earrings in my pocket just waiting for the right moment to propose to her. My idea was to do it in Bruges but I couldn’t find the right moment so, when we were crossing the Grand Place heading again to the Delirium Café, I did it and it was a beautiful moment!

Just before having another Kriek beer in Bruges!

The next morning, we had a very tight agenda. I wanted to take Helena to the chocolaterie I had bought her gifts last February. I cannot remember the name (I remember the location perfectly, it’s all that matters). The chocolates were really expensive BUT, compared to Leonidas and other cheaper brands they totally worth it. Helena says they are the best chocolates she ever tasted!
Unfortunately, the place was still closed and so, we headed for the second place that I wanted to take: Le Pain Quotidien. I discovered this pastry with Victor when we were starving and started looking for a place to have breakfast near FOSDEM. Later, in London, I found also one of these pastries and realized it is a chain, but it’s a nice one. The idea is: you enter this warm place that smells like baking bread and you have long wood tables where you seat near the other costumer; you choose what pastry or bread you want, all organic, of course, and the best is that in the center of the table there are a lot of jelly pots, butter, etc. (In London it was different… you had to choose only one kind of jelly beforehand… not the same thing!)
Oh, and when we were leaving the place we noticed they were highlighting a new product: Pastel de Nata; we forgive them for not mentioning it’s a (very) Portuguese product.

Hmmm, Le Pain Quotidien, hmmm…

After this, we waved good bye to the lovely city of Brussels and went to the train station. Having a little time before the train arrived I remembered one thing, one scary thing… we had forgot to book the tickets from Paris to Irún for our return trip, and chances were the trains would still be full by then. Actually, we had remembered it but we hadn’t decided when we were getting back, so we just postponed that decision. Feeling a bit of panic, I asked the ticket salesman if we could book the tickets from Brussels, he said we could not but he could check the availability for the day we wanted to return; okay, the 15th? No? 14th? Also full? 13th? Not even the 13th!?
What the hell, we are young and adventurous so we put the panic feeling in a dark corner of our brains and headed to Amsterdam.

to be continued…

The first half of August I went on an InterRail trip with my girlfriend and I’ve been willing to write about it since we finished it.

First a disclaimer: the names of places and particularly the times I talk about in the text might not be accurate since I didn’t keep notes of them.

We had a 15-day pass, from August 2nd to 16th, to travel by train across Europe.
The original itinerary would be Paris, Brussels, Gent, Bruges, Amsterdam, Berlin and Prague. From Prague we hadn’t decided what to do from the beginning since we didn’t really know how much time we would need to return to Spain.

The departure

So, Sunday, August 1st, it was almost 02:00 AM when we finished organizing our back packs. Sandwiches: check; clothes: check; ID and respective copies: check; etc.
We left home at 07:00 AM to go to Coruña‘s train station and wait for the first of the many trains we’d catch.

We started heading south to Ourense and then north until the last stop, Hendaye, already in France. This is one of the reasons it takes so much to get there (around 11 hours of train), the train goes all the way down to the south of Galicia and only then starts heading to the border with France.

En France!

With 11 hours of train, 2 movies dubbed in Spanish (only in the trip back I discovered I could switch the sound channel to English), a drained PSP’s battery and some hours of studying French (what I learned in high-school was rusty), we still needed to buy the tickets from Hendaye to Paris. I went and asked the saleslady in French for two tickets to Paris and I must have done it so well that she answered me with so much information and in such a fast speech that I didn’t get much but it couldn’t be a simple answer of “Okay Sir, it’ll be N euros, please”. Plan B: “Anglais, S’il vous plaît?” and I got my requested translation:
“The train to Paris is full, the next train is at 7:50 in the morning…”
Oh, it sounded a lot better in French…
“Okay”, I said, “… but ain’t there other trains leaving to Paris?”
“No but there might be beds left. You’ll have to wait for the train’s assistant and ask him if there are still beds left.”

Things weren’t looking good. It was already night, the landscape wasn’t presenting Hendaye as anything interesting to spend the night and besides, leaving to Paris at 08 AM would kinda screw the plans we had: visit Paris in 1 day and leave the day after in the morning.

The hour until the “train man” arrived was a long wait. And as soon as I got the chance I approached him and asked about the beds, along with a lost puppy face to get the best of him. Is answer: “In 10 minutes…”
20 minutes passed and I asked him again, his answer: “In 10 minutes, please.”
After a while they put a little table on the side of the train and started reviewing the tickets — “First the people that have tickets!” — and we realized that there were a bunch of travelers in the same situation as us.
Finally it was our turn and, guess what, they had beds! Hooray! We paid the beds reservation and rushed to the train as if they could change their mind about the existence of free beds.

Bed Squatters

Helena had the tickets and was guiding us through the various cars until she found our beds. We pushed the backpacks under our beds (we got the bottom bunk beds), turned off the light, locked the door and prepared to sleep. We were really happy, we had been lucky and we were on our way to Paris, plus, no “room mates” so far! An then someone knocked on the door; they were two girls and two boys and the guys were telling us we were on their spots. “Poor mistaken guy, couldn’t read his ticket…” I thought and Helena showed them that those bed numbers were ours, he agreed but the car we were at wasn’t ours… We were 6 cars ahead of ours. Helena had misread the ticket . We apologized and headed to the right car and the right room. It was locked. We knocked, nothing. We knocked again and again, still nothing. It was locked from the outside and we spent almost 30 minutes until we found a train assistant and asked him to open it for us.
Finally we were on the right beds, set the alarm to 06:30 AM and went to sleep in a room without other people whole night.

Paris

We arrived at Gare d’Austerlitz at 07:15 AM, bought tickets to the subway and headed to the Auberge Internationale des Jeunes, 10 minutes to the Place de la Bastille. We left the backpacks in the baggage room (the room was available only after 04:00 PM) and entered the café in front of the hostel to have breakfast before start visiting Paris.

Arc de Triumph

Musée du Louvre

With only one day to be in Paris, we walked like hell but could cover a good part of the city. We could pass by Place de la Bastille, Catedral de Notre Dame, Place de la Concorde, the Louvre, Champ-Élysées, Arc de Triumph and finally to the Eiffel Tower.
This city surely has a magnificent set of monuments to show us.

Eiffel Tower

Break-dancers under Eiffel Tower

During this walking trip, we found a place just by the side of the river where people were playing table soccer but the tables there varied from 2 to 12 people. Being Portuguese, the possibility of playing table soccer in Paris was really appealing and we went there, it could only be really expensive, right? it was Paris after all: it was for free, some initiative by the city hall or something. Really nice.

Table soccer in Paris

After skipping our plan to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower due to the enormous queue and our already tired bodies, as we were leaving the place a few break dancers started putting up a show that we really enjoyed. It was a different visit to the Eiffel Tower as you see.

After this, we headed back to the hostel and finally entered the room with the plans of having a shower and rest a bit before dinner; that’s when we found out there were no bathroom in the room. I swear I had read the room had a bathroom and started reading the booking terms we had printed; it said something like:
“Rooms for 2, 3 or 4 people with bathroom.
Rooms for 4 people have bathroom en suite; the others have the facilities in the same floor.”
And for some reason, when I booked it I assumed our 2-people room for which we had paid 35 € per person would have bathroom; anyway, it was one night so we had a shower, had dinner and went to sleep.
Another detail, it had bunk beds. A double room with bunk beds!

At around 5 AM, a big, scaring noise woke me up and I heard Helena complaining to someone; you see, our room was just next to the showers and the pipes were as noisy as a Panzer tank (I suppose, of course) and even though every room had a sign in the door saying “Avoid showers after 10 PM”, people seemed to take that “avoid” as a mere suggestion.
So Helena and some Spanish girl who was also awaken went and told the 5-AM-showering-people to stop it.

Yup, at the age of 25, I already find it not funny to pay 35 €/night for an internetless, shared bathroom, noisy, bunk-bed room.
By the way, all the hotels (note, hotels, not hostels) we stayed after this one were cheaper and way better than this youth hostel. Why do people stay in these places?
We realized that if you go to Booking.com there seems to be always a last hour offer or something where you can get nice hotels cheaper than what you pay for a double room in a youth hostel. Also, sometimes the difference is 5-10 € and I prefer to have a bathroom and a silent, normal bed room for that extra fee.

Au revoir!

The next morning we decided to go and see the Sacré-Coeur. Since we had already checked-out, we had to go through the three large set of stairs while carrying our backpacks. Morning exercise, folks!
The view of Paris from the Sacré-Coeur compensated it in the end and that was it for Paris; next destination: Brussels, but not without another little adventure first.

Sacré-Coeur

To get to Brussels with the cheapest reservation fee (it was 3 € VS 60 € for the direct train) we needed to go from Paris to Lille to Tournai where we’d then go straight to Bruxelles Midi. It wasn’t complicated at all except that we didn’t know if we needed to pay the reservation from Lille to Tournai, so Helena went to the ticket sales queue while I went to the informations queue. It took the info assistant a while to understand what the problem was and we ended up missing the train to Tournai. No problem, we’ll get the next one; and we kept a eye on the departures board (in France and, as we laster found out, in Czech Republic, the train platforms only show up about 10 minutes before the departure) and when the time came, the board said: Destination: Tournai, Train: Autocar.
Funny name for a train I thought, given that the word for bus in Portuguese is “Autocarro”. So I bugged the assistant one more time and she told me that indeed, it was a bus, there had been an accident in the train line and the train company had reserved a bus for the passengers to go to Tournai. It was an interesting 40-minute bus ride through the country side in the border between France and Brussels.

And that was it, my first time to France and the beautiful and expensive city of Paris.
Finally in Tournai we took the train to Brussels.

to be continued…

I’ve spent last week in Den Haag, attending GUADEC 2010, with many other fellow Igalians.

Although last year I also attended GUADEC, this year was like a first time to me as last year’s GUADEC was co-located with aKademy forming Gran Canaria Desktop summit and it felt different.

What do I think of this year’s? Javascript, web, introspection and shell, that’s what I think.
This is GNOME’s new route, making desktop development more webbish and it is seems like a smart one too. Now, I don’t really fall for Javascript, I think it’s ugly and not really the best choice (imho) for large projects but anyway that’s the beauty of GObject Introspection, in the future it should be easy to use whatever language one prefers.

As for the talks, I really enjoyed Luis Villa’s keynote. Xan and Fernando did a great job getting the tragedy that some times the Foundation’s mailing list is and turning it into a comedy.
Iago gave a good talk about Grilo and Juan complemented it in a lightning talk about the plugins we did using Rygel-grilo.

This year I gave again a lightening talk, this time about the Predictor Input Method which you might one day use in a mobile device or on the desktop itself if you need assisted typing. There must be a GUADEC’s rule saying that the laptop where people present the lightening talks must be a crappy netbook that takes 2 seconds before it changes a slide…

For an overall feeling of GUADEC, you can check out Victor’s post covering GUADEC, I agree totally with him.

I could also meet and chat with nice people like Eitan Isaacson, Patricia and others.

So let’s see how the projects presented in GUADEC evolve and wait GUADEC 2011 in Berlin.

And what this week? This week I’m on vacation doing an InterRail across a bunch of European countries together with my girlfriend. I visited Paris already, where I found out my french is good enough for basic stuff. Today we’re in Brussels, it’s my third time here but the first one as a turist. I’m sure the beers will taste as marvellous as always.

I’m also doing a new thing: travelling without my laptop, the N900 seems to be a perfect replacement, I (still?) love this gadget and it surelly spares some space in my backpack.

See you in some European city, I’m likely to be wearing a GNOME/Linux/Metal t-shirt… what else is new…?