Swedish people!

Tonight is the last night of our stay here in Barçelona. The teams have worked very hard with the planning of the BOBCATSSS 2014 conference but of course we've have also got time to get to know each other as well as the city of Barçelona and Catalan culture. Many new memories have been created during these few days.
There's one memory though that is especially etched into our minds and that's the phrase "swedish people!". It's our friend, the driving spirit Vicent who has taken care of us and guided us through the Catalan way of living.

It must not have been easy for him guiding us everywhere. For some reason some of us always managed to go in the wrong direction or get stuck in something obviously very distracting. "Swedish people!" Vicent called for us when that happened. And it happened a lot. A LOT. Alot even. Soon it became a standard expression and we even started to use it when calling for each other. "Swedish people!".

Here's a really nice picture of our personal guide (in the foreground) guiding us through the National library of Catalonia. Oh! Poor guy having to deal with us, the "swedish people"

/Sofia and the rest

The National library of Catalonia

Today we got a guided tour at the National library of Catalonia. It's an old, gothic hospital from the 15th century. Beautiful!

They showed us their collections and told us about the history of the library and how they work. Apart from ordinary library service they also have a museum. There were printers and old documents, from different periods, on display. It was amazing to see the books that were completely written by human hand. In ink. And hundreds of pages. Someone, for some hundreds of years ago, really put both time and effort into these artifacts.

They also had a display case where different kinds of media were presented. This in order to show that information can be stored in many different ways.

My favourite part though was their Cervantes collection. So many editions of Don Quijote! Don Quijote was one of the first novels I bought and I might have been around ten at that time. My inner girl was jumping of excitement!

The weather here is okay. It rained a little today but it's still warm. Like swedish summer. In Sweden there's apparently this huge storm making a lot of mess throughout the country so we're quite happy with the weather here.

/Sofia Lundgren

Planning for our trip to Barcelona next week

Yesterday we had a very important meeting regarding our trip to Barcelona next week. We discussed practical issues such as what to bring to Barcelona and how to travel in the city. Of course we also discussed how to work with planning of the conference such as the menu for the gala dinner, scheduling of the program and social events. In other words there's a lot of interesting decisions to make!

Right now I'm looking at googles weather forecast and it seems like the weather in Barcelona next week is equivalent to swedish summer. It's going to be nice to leave swedish freezy and dark autumn (the picture above I took yesterday on my way home) for some more daylight and warmth.

/Sofia Lundgren