Off to Valencia!

Day 1: Espe and I are off on our hols. We're staying in Valencia, Spain, for a fortnight.

Valencia is the capital of the district of Valencia in Eastern Spain. Like Catalonia, it has its own language similar to Spanish. Valenciana is no easier than Catalan, and street signs could be in either language, so Avenida del Puerto could be something like Via de Porto on a map.

We set off early, intending to relax for an hour or two at Heathrow before the flight was called. Our journey was uneventful, via WAGN into London, tube to Paddington and Heathrow Express to the airport. All the time the weird intelligences on the seventh moon of Neptune were making their final plans, but we were unaware of this.

The Heathrow Express train is quite fast, quiet, but has "entertainment" in all the carriages. The BBC supply a news service to the train, and also on-screen is a long list of things you are not allowed to do read in an almost patronizing manner. After twenty minutes of this, the train is about to arrive and we then discover there are carriages that are "entertainment-free" Aaargh!

I enjoyed looking at all the shops in the airport, not buying anything except a small food dictionary and then we had coffee and croissants.

Iberia flight 4151 was shared with BA, but was OK. One man was quite faint, and the stewards had to lay him down on the seats next to us. Alcohol was rubbed on and he survived the flight.

The heat hits you when coming out of the air-conditioned airport. We grabbed a taxi and arrived at the Hotel Puerta Valencia in half-an-hour. Taxis are cheap here. The first thing we did was upgrade our room to one of the 7th floor balcony apartments. Cost us an extra £13.21 a day.

We ate at La Sídreria (cider apple) around the corner. Espe asked for a simple salad and we got enough food to last me for two days: it contained fish, meat, eggs and cheese as well as vegetables. This restaurant is a bit pricy: for entertaining only.

Try out balcony. Seems to work. The Goons could have filmed their The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film here. As there is a mezzanine level here, we look down from nine storeys high at the Avenida Cardenal Benlloch below. This is a busy thoroughfare and even has traffic late at night, which you can hear as all the buildings along the avenue are several storeys high. Luckily our glass partition to the balcony has double glazing, a rubber blackout sheet, nets and heavy curtains.

Sleep. Good hard beds here. Good sleep.

Still here!

My fourth encounter with a terrorist bomb in London was yesterday morning at 08:49.

I wasn't sure whether it was a bomb at first, despite my experience of them. I realize now that the bomb in the tunnel near Aldgate tube station that shook our building was right under us, and the airborne shockwave that came out the station entrance hit our windows at the same time as the bang.

For a while I thought a Metropolitan Line train had hit the buffers. Reports came through of power surges causing explosions or a train collision, then that there had been an explosion.

We had to evacuate. As my company followed its disaster recovery plans and we walked across London, we could see the police invoking their emergency procedures. Roads were quickly taped off and traffic was being directed around affected areas; paramedics were driving along the pavements and other pedestrian areas where the road was clogged with traffic; police commandeered red double-decker busses to carry the walking wounded to various hospitals.

I'm in a DR site the other side of the Thames. I got to stay in a posh hotel last night. By next morning, everyone who works in my company was accounted for.

Click on the photo to see a set of pictures of Aldgate and people nearby, now expanded to include some of the tributes left at the scene.

Update: In September I visited an academic at the LSE who is researching bloggers for his PhD thesis. He asked me what I was trying to convey in this posting. I said I just wanted to show how Londoners are getting on with things and not killing other people in revenge. (However, I posted the above before the death of Jean Charles de Menezes.)

Meanwhile, 6700 years ago...

Oldest monumental structures discovered: By the time of the Norman conquest, the rural framework was complete in England. And in 4700 BC in Austria!

Read all about it

London has a new free newspaper, The London Line (beta) at tube stations on Thursdays. It's jolly good. Some of it reads as if it is made up, especially the real stories. I love it.

Apple Fiends

Apple's recent suits and resulting court case against Apple 'rumor' weblogs to get them to reveal the names of the Apple staffers who leaked trade secrets, has caused much concern among journalists who are worried about losing their rights to privacy of sources if a legal precedent is set.

Whether these Apple news webloggers are indeed journalists is unclear: they may be producing news articles but without any journalistic ethics or methods. Apple's methods in going after these one-man-bands with heavy lawyers reminds me of America's war against cocaine. It is not fought at home.

Unable to police its millions of coke addicts, the USA is defoliating coca crops — and any other crops in the vicinity — in Colombia and putting many innocent farming families on the breadline in the process. (If they do succeed, the coca will no doubt be grown in another country to satisfy the US market.)

Similarly, Apple is not questioning its staff about the leaks. Perhaps Apple does not want to demotivate its employees by investigating them too heavily internally(!?), or maybe they prefer their buyers to be deprived of advance information on their products, but Apple's image and fans are suffering as it switches from being the cool alternative to being The Man.